The insideEdge

Anand Eswaran Executive Vice President and COO SAP Global Services

Transformation is sweeping the services industry as customers demand innovation. In response, service providers are shifting focus from labor arbitrage to an outcomes-based model. Success lies in creating superior business value by catering to customers’ goals rather than offering a one-size-fits-all approach. At SAP, we are putting ourselves at the leading edge of this evolution. How? SAP is transforming the way we engage with customers, making it a more collaborative process. We have defined four pillars for success:

1. Make it easier and faster for customers to identify, access, and adopt solutions. How are we doing this? By leveraging advanced methodologies like design thinking across multiple organizations. For example, the Business Transformation Services group from SAP Global Services uses such advanced methodologies to better understand complicated transformational challenges at customer sites. This ensures that SAP has strategies and solutions in place to help these customers transform. And if an SAP solution set does not completely meet a customer’s need, our custom development organization can fill the gap with a custom-built solution.
2. Reduce customers’ TCO at all levels. SAP Global Services is abstracting best practices and using intellectual property to reduce the ratio of services to software in our implementations. We want to engineer as much as 60% of the services that customers need and leverage prebuilt IT. This reduces the time frame, implementation cost, and overall TCO of a solution.
3. Provide cutting-edge technology while mitigating risk. Customers do not want to be the sacrificial lambs. On one hand, they want the latest technology to drive innovation, but on the other, they only want what is tried and true. How do we balance these demands? By providing guidance and best practices when our customers are adopting cutting-edge technology and advanced functionality. SAP Global Services has a renewed focus on mitigating risks around adopting new solutions and maximizing ROI.
4. Deliver services with the highest quality. We are focusing on partner certification and customer education programs. Educated customers and partners always result in more successful engagements. Proper execution means that SAP Global Services has operationalized its strategy through work streams and KPIs to align with other organizations across SAP. Our aim is to provide our customers with a singular experience.

The SAP Global Services team is committed to leveraging this strategy. We look forward to bringing even more value to our customers.