“SAP and Accenture extend partnership for SAP S/4HANA”

1. What is the SAP-Accenture partnership about?

To begin with, this new agreement stands on the successful and long-lasting four decades of relationship between Accenture and SAP. Accenture is the number one SAP collaborative revenue partner globally for eight years running now, and we have 30+ SAP Pinnacle awards. Globally, we have 17 Accenture Innovation Centers for SAP and importantly, supported by over 42,000 SAP Practitioners in the company with a strong focus on continuous learning and capability expansion.

Rajan Sachdeva, Managing Director & Lead – Accenture Technology, India

Now, SAP and Accenture have announced a significant and groundbreaking extension to our longstanding, strategic alliance partnership that will further our ability to add value to our clients. SAP and Accenture are joining forces in the platform development and go-to-market for SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA), the next-generation business suite from SAP built on the industry’s most advanced in-memory platform. This is an unprecedented collaboration and will accelerate development of SAP S/4HANA as well as industry and lines of business solutions, with a view to simplifying and fast-tracking customers’ journeys to digital businesses.

There are four key components here. This collaboration will:

• Accelerate the development of the SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management solution, including SAP S/4HANA Finance with the active collaboration with joint clients.
• Drive industry innovation by delivering SAP S/4HANA industry cloud solutions, providing additional flexibility for customers. Accenture and SAP will integrate our industry and customer knowledge to transform current SAP industry solutions on SAP S/4HANA and deliver complete business solutions on SAP HANA® Enterprise Cloud.
• Scale SAP cloud services delivery globally, with Accenture providing additional cloud capacity on an as-needed basis by region or industry expertise.
• Transform customer businesses with consulting and implementation services that leverage comprehensive industry digital roadmaps, build actionable business cases, accelerate solution delivery and unlock the digital potential of our customers.

2. How will this collaboration accelerate development of SAP S/4HANA?

Through this collaboration, developers from Accenture and industry experts will work alongside SAP, feeding us unique insight and development opportunities with SAP S/4HANA. Our teams are already working with SAP on design and the build of the SAP S/4HANA Finance solution. We plan to include clients in this co-development and co-innovation strategy, which will help ensure the development efforts meet industry needs early on, and clients benefit in their respective industries with their competitive offerings.

3. Who are the customers that will benefit most?

Today, nearly every business is a digital business. And in the digital age, businesses in every industry sector are faced with increasing customer demands for personalized and holistic experiences, and agile competitors. As a result, there is immense focus on innovating for user experience and digital interactions which are revenue streams. Such a focus can lead to ERP systems being ignored or underappreciated. While this is happening on one side, the landscape on the ERP side is underdoing transformation as well, impacted by cloud-based software-as-a-service solutions which are replacing traditional in-house applications. Business leaders hence are tasked to re-examine the role of ERP systems in the digital era and need to achieve the best to align with the demands of this age.

Accenture’s approach to SAP S/4HANA builds on the foundation of an organisation’s enterprise solution and integrates disruptive technology like digital accelerators (social, mobile, cloud, analytics) as well as in-memory, and this creates a faster, more agile, smarter and better connected enterprise.

Traditionally, companies having professional services, finance and logistics in the core of their business stand to benefit most from SAP S/4HANA. Companies that are building a framework for digital transformation, or who are on this path already will also be benefited the most as the SAP S/4HANA provides a platform that is well-suited to the demands of the high velocity enterprise in an always-on, digitally-connected and Big Data-driven world. In other words, the time taken by companies to attain digital value and generate better business outcomes in the digital world is shortened.

4. What are the business opportunities which Accenture will be able to explore post this collaboration?

Our collaboration with SAP enables us to accelerate and increase predictability of S/4HANA migrations and new implementations. With ease of access to the development/ product team, Accenture can consult clients on the best architecture to adopt and the right approach to deploy for migration. In addition, we can leverage the comprehensive industry digital roadmaps, process architecture and business cases to drive business process re-engineering led implementations, upgrades and migrations.

For clients looking to either refresh their infrastructure or those facing big data challenges, this collaboration will help in planning/ executing the road ahead. Accenture can become the one-stop shop for addressing evolving needs for a digital enterprise.