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Scalability stopped being a business buzzword sometime around a month ago. Now scalability – the ability to meet surging demand and growth – is unfolding to desperately fulfill the needs for ventilators and hospital beds on ships and in parks. COVID-19 just ripped ‘scalable’ from the pages of an MBA textbook and turned it into life-or-death. Sadly, one of the most developed nations cannot even keep up with the demand of a $.07 cent mask. Even unrelated, supply chains cannot keep pace with the simplest of needs – toilet paper, paper towels, Purell. . . .
If TIME had a word of the year, 2020’s might be Scalability. COVID-19 is the essence of scalability. Able to use unvaccinated, unwitting hosts, it spreads silently and quickly. Global interconnectedness is usually the engine that runs our economy – but now it is leading to our demise – and we have new words like ‘social distancing’ to create an opposite, isolating existence to fight this plaque. Meanwhile medical teams are scrambling unprepared and under-resourced. Ironically, the U.S. is depending on a carmaker to keep us breathing. So how did we get here?
Simply put – the world was unprepared. That’s what happens when you try to scale without a plan in place. Having a plan to execute is key to scalability.
There is another macro-prudential shift happening in the world (much, much less serious though) that will also require massive amounts of planning to scale. It is the great migration of SAP. Yes, the world’s ubiquitous software has decided to upgrade and we are along for the ride.
SAP is the world’s largest ERP software, considering that 77% of all global financial transactions touch an SAP system. In fact, more than 400,000 businesses across 180 countries use SAP.
SAP is requiring its clients to upgrade their software from the current ECC to S/4HANA making this is the largest and most complicated software migration in SAP’s history.
Companies and governments now find themselves in uncharted territory; these SAP migrations are massive and complex. Since most companies customize their SAP systems, standard migrations are unrealistic. ERP transformations require a significant dedication of time, expertise and cost.
The ECC to S/4HANA migration began in 2015 and SAP will no longer support the current ECC version after 2027. Organizations are delaying this migration because of complexity, disruption, cost and fear. Notably we are at the midpoint of this 10-year timeline and approximately 10% of organizations have upgraded to S/4HANA. Further complicating the migration is the lack of talent. There aren’t enough human consultants either trained or available to help enterprises even meet the needs of migration.
Enterprises have limited and costly options with a looming deadline. They will either elect to pay a higher price to continue using ECC or will travel down the road of an expensive and painful migration to S/4HANA.
This trillion-dollar problem made Blue Prism’s Innovation Centre ask, “How can we scale with Digital Workers to make this much more efficient”?
The answer is Blue Prism Accelerators for use with SAP® ERP which is a Digital Workforce pre-built with SAP transaction knowledge. This workforce was created to accelerate operations and migrations for both ECC and S/4HANA - significantly reducing costs and increasing efficiencies. This accelerator solution is applicable before, during and after a migration.
Please join us for a Live Webinar on Thursday, April 16 at 10am CT to learn more about how to enhance your SAP operations and/or SAP migration and bring your enterprise the scalability it needs to face the great migration of SAP. Save your spot today