The alpha level analysis of alltheresearch.com states that 53% of user stories fail while selecting the right tech partner who can help in achieving digital transformation in an agile and scientific manner. Systems Applications and Products (SAP) has played a critical role in giving dimensions to digital transformation for the energy and power sector over the last 10-12 years.
We have seen the disruption SAP made on legacy business applications of the energy and power sector. In a way, it has empowered existing leading businesses by offering a platform and environment that can enhance critical systems. Naturally owing to the dependency of critical system energy and power, users are very careful while attempting to change existing production SAP environments due to possible outages. If we look at the evolution curve, SAP has evolved from the original ERP R3 to ECC to S4 HANA. S4 HANA is an in-memory, columnar database architecture that is optimized for SAP users/systems. According to alltheresearch.com, in the next three years, 88% of U.S. energy and power companies will embrace the SAP S4 HANA for the following reasons.
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Speed — The customized, high-performance architecture of S4 HANA uses SAP-optimized in-memory database models to deliver powerful speed improvements in addition to maximizing memory usage to minimize the amount required.
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Integration of next-gen technologies — Although this pointer depends on the strategic outlook of companies, broadly speaking, utilization of deployed IoT infrastructure with AI is a strategic road map of 75% of responding companies. Processes like asset monitoring, meter to cash, RPA-enabled machine-human engagement, and advanced metering will be either redesigned or upgraded by considering customer/user as a nucleus.
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Optimized user experience — There is a clear gap in the user-friendly interface between a resource who is a master of SAP script and a user who is using SAP for business-critical processes. This gap increases the number of support calls between SAP master and SAP user, which, of course, is not the ideal scenario considering the fast-paced business environment. Now, for this point, SAP Fiori delivers HTML5-centric GUI for users, making the SAP interface less complex and much better for the overall customer experience.
- To embrace the trend of cloud first-mobile first and intelligent technologies — As per a public document of SAP named as -Upgrading SAP S/4HANA: Why, How, and Best Practices; “SAP S/4HANA was first introduced to the market in 2015 as SAP’s strategic Digital Core solution for the Intelligent Enterprise. It was a bold vision to make a major shift from the very successful SAP Business Suite to a new future-focused solution that took a cloud-first, mobile-first, and intelligent technologies approach to SAP’s comprehensive ERP solutions”.
Believe it or not, the cyberrisks associated with storing sensitive datasets on the cloud are expected to decrease by 45% in the next three years. This will impact the integration of cloud by energy and power players, most of which store data on-premises today.
So, here’s the million-dollar question: When is this expected to happen and what is expected to happen? Well, migrating to the new platform will take some time, effort, and money — on the back of automated database clones. According to allthereaserch.com, the transition will take three years to cross 90% penetration and the $7 billion mark.
