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Grow with SAP

06 Feb 2024

Anurag Barua
Anurag Barua SAP

SAPinsider Expert since 2021

Key Takeaways

⇨ Most mid-market businesses require a comprehensive offering that helps them to overcome challenges seamlessly and also provides a robust foundation for future growth, profitability, and sustainability.

⇨ GROW with SAP is an offering tailored to net new mid-market customers and consists of solutions, capabilities, and services for speedy deployment and adoption, along with a support framework.

⇨ If you are a mid-market customer wanting to pivot to newer business models with agility, scalability, and the unstinting support of the world’s leading ERP and cloud applications vendor, GROW with SAP is for you.

The recent pandemic was an unforeseen global event unlike anything witnessed in the past century. But as the pandemic loosened its grip on the world, the global political climate deteriorated, disrupting companies worldwide. This disruption in the current global environment is felt by companies in multiple ways, most notably in spiraling energy and capital costs, unpredictable supply chains, recessionary pressures, political instability, and shortage of the right kind of talent. Such macro trends and challenges are significantly impacting medium or small business, especially on their top, bottom, and green lines, as they are constrained in their capabilities to address these, let alone stay a few steps ahead. Most of these constraints come from their inability to pivot to newer business models, lack of agility, fragmented, manual, and inefficient business processes, inability to leverage their own data, and obsolete and disintegrated technology applications and solutions that do not support their operational and strategic needs. What businesses require is a comprehensive offering that helps them to overcome current challenges seamlessly and provides a robust foundation for future growth, profitability, and sustainability. That is what GROW with SAP is all about.
Enter, GROW with SAP
We at SAP are fully invested in enabling customer success. In March 2023, we announced our ‘GROW with SAP’ offering to provide our customers with the solutions and services they need to overcome the above-mentioned challenges and remain innovative, agile, and competitive in the global marketplace. In a nutshell, GROW with SAP is an offering tailored to net new mid-market customers and consists of solutions, capabilities, and services for speedy deployment and adoption, along with a support framework. Below are some of the components of GROW with SAP.
GROW with SAP Components
  1. Solutions

  • Cloud ERP: The functional core of GROW with SAP is our 100% Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ERP offering, S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition. With coverage that includes over 900 business processes spanning all lines of businesses, support for 51 local versions, 32 languages, and localization-as-a-service coverage for over 150 countries (as of our latest release, 2302), this application/solution is optimal for mid-market companies seeking to run their business efficiently with a modern, intelligent, scalable, and ready-to-run solution. (Learn more about S/4HANA Cloud, public edition in my recent article.)
  • SAP Build with Business Technology Platform (BTP): BTP, by virtue of being a single unified platform for application development, integration, data and analytics, intelligence and automation serves as the central nervous system for any technology landscape. SAP Build is a set of capabilities that enables rapid development of (custom) applications and automation. With our GROW with SAP base edition, you will get the Build Process Automation package to help you realize your organization’s workflow and process automation needs in a low-code/no-code approach. With our premium edition, you will have access to both Build Process Automation and Build Apps (the component that will enable rapid application development). To learn about BTP, visit SAP’s product site.
  • Embedded Best Practices: Our Cloud ERP solution, S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, are embedded with industry and line-of-business Best Practices that companies can use out of the box to run their businesses optimally. These Best Practices are the culmination of over 50 years of experience that SAP has obtained in enabling hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide to solve their toughest business challenges. This comprehensive content drastically reduces solution deployment time and helps you achieve a speedy time-to-value.
The metadata and related assets for this content are all available in the Process Navigator area of our new customer support portal SAP for Me, at Process Navigator – SAP for Me. This link takes you to the landing page and will require a valid ID, such as an S-user or P-user id to access it. Note! The Process Navigator is the successor to the SAP Best Practices Explorer and was released in April 2023. From now on, all process and content updates will be made to the Process Navigator as SAP Best Practices Explorer will not be updated. (Process Navigator will be covered in detail in my forthcoming article.)
  1. Services

  • Cloud Application Lifecycle Management (Cloud ALM): Cloud ALM enables customers to deploy and operate landscapes and applications (including S/4HANA Cloud, public edition) in a standard, speedy, and intelligent manner. Learn about Cloud ALM here.
  • Digital Discovery: SAP utilizes this application to determine the scope of deployment at both strategic and tactical levels, and does this in collaboration with partners, systems integrators, and customers. Upon completing this exercise, you will have a holistic picture of which best practice business process you can utilize out of the box and what solution extensions and add-ons you will need.
  • Automated test tool: As part of the GROW with SAP subscription, you can use the automated test tool embedded in your S/4HANA Cloud, public edition application and will automate and therefore accelerate post upgrade testing (PUT). As of the current release (2302), there are 382 automated test scripts that customers can run out of the box. Learn more about this tool in here.
  • Data Migration Cockpit: We provide the Data Migration Cockpit (DMC) as an embedded subscription component to simplify and accelerate data migration to your S/4HANA Cloud, public edition system. You can take advantage of the large number of standard migration objects that SAP provides and the Migration Object Modeler to extend the standard objects to meet your company’s custom needs. Data migration is a critical ingredient for a successful go-live (with any application, not just SAP S/4HANA) but the challenges that it poses are often underestimated. DMC’s availability at your fingertips takes the heavy lifting out of your hands. Learn about the DMC here.
  • Packaged activation services: This service consists of a ready-to-run environment for value exploration, personalized to meet a customer’s needs. This customized landscape bundle contains core business processes with 75 pre-built processes/scope items and with the ability to augment these capabilities via configuration. The benefits that customers accrue include shortening and flattening of the learning curve and a solid foundation to extend the solution based on their business needs. Get a better understanding of activation services here.
  1. Support Framework

  2. Knowledge repository: Customers can leverage knowledge, experience, and assets at our community site for S/4HANA Cloud, public edition here. This site connects all components of our ecosystem and is a reliable and speedy way of getting answers, insights, and guidance.
  3. Learning: We provide material that will help you increase your understanding of various topics related to S/4HANA Cloud, public edition. The site is accessible here. These learning assets are available for multiple levels of expertise, durations, and formats. They are designed based on various business personas corresponding to organizational roles and responsibilities. For those interested in certifications, this is where you will start your journey. SAP keeps these assets updated guaranteeing that you will get the latest releases and versions.
  4. Trusted partner network: A key ingredient to success with GROW with SAP is collaboration with partner(s) or systems integrators (if that is the phrase you prefer), especially for your deployments. We invest heavily into partner success with the expectation that, as the customer, you maximize the value you realize from your GROW with SAP journey with minimum cost and effort.
GROW with SAP for Scaleups
If you are a start-up or a scaleup company, we have an enticing offering under the aegis of GROW with SAP called GROW with SAP for scaleups. This offering, a specialized case of GROW, is targeted to that most promising subset of the midmarket – startups. It will provide them will all the tools and capabilities they need to grow at a rapid pace. To be eligible for this program, you will need to satisfy SAP’s criteria for start-ups and scaleups. Learn about this offering and determine whether you meet the criteria by navigating to this site here.
Conclusion
If you are a mid-market customer wanting to pivot to newer business models with agility, scalability, and the unstinting support of the world’s leading ERP and cloud applications vendor, GROW with SAP is for you. Reach out to your SAP Account Executive or your partner(s) or anyone else in the SAP eco-system at the earliest to “GROW with SAP”. Link to article:  GROW with SAP: A Primer – SAPinsider
Grow with SAP

Santhosh Kumar

Chief Executive Officer