Delivering customer value at its best, the SAP Transformation Navigator team has won the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award, SAP’s prestigious annual award for entrepreneurial achievement by employees.
It’s hard to think of a tool that has enjoyed quite such an enthusiastic reception from SAP customers as SAP Transformation Navigator, which helps customers chart their transition to an SAP S/4HANA-centric environment.
As well as extolling its value and intuitive design, CIOs are excited about SAP Transformation Navigator’s ability to accelerate the decision-making process. “This will save me ten weeks of discussions at my company,” says one. What’s more: SAP Transformation Navigator takes planning reliability to a new level. “This tool gives us a much broader planning horizon,” says Erwin Tien, a manager at Dow Chemical.
The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP,
awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.
Even the notoriously critical SAP user groups have been quick to recognize the tool’s benefits. In an email to Bill McDermott and Rob Enslin, Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG) CEO Geoff Scott wrote, “I can report that our testers are very enthusiastic about the tool. We are highly confident that it will help customers gain a better understanding of road maps.”
SAP Transformation Navigator helps customers chart their transition to an SAP S/4HANA-centric environment
Analysts also acknowledge the value of SAP Transformation Navigator, with IDC commenting, “SAP is the only company providing a tool of this kind that offers its customers so much transparency.”
The SAP Executive Board’s reason for its choice of this year’s award-winner sums up the tool’s value in a nutshell: “Through SAP Transformation Navigator, SAP is giving its customers clear guidance on achieving an S/4HANA-centric landscape. In a short amount of time, the team transformed customer criticism into a tool valued by SAP users and viewed by analysts as a competitive advantage for the company.”
The Road to SAP S/4HANA
In essence, SAP Transformation Navigator provides a detailed guide for the journey to the digital world. Based on the customer’s current implementation, this free, self-service tool delivers proposals for assembling the best possible solution portfolio for a future SAP S/4HANA-centric environment, while factoring in all the products, industries, and lines of business at hand. The result is a tailored product selection – based on the current SAP road maps – that serves as the starting point for further steps and discussions about the customer’s digital future.
The motivation to develop the tool came from customers, who wanted more guidance from SAP.
“The feedback from our customers was clear: They liked the idea of digital transformation and a digital framework, but they wanted us to tell them exactly what they should do, as well as why and how,” recalls project lead Cornelius Clauser from Digital Business Services, who led the interdisciplinary project team.
Central to the project’s success was the feedback gathered from key SAP users, which was channeled into development work as the project progressed. The project team also held numerous design thinking workshops with companies, which in turn triggered more in-depth discussions.
To date, more than 18,000 users have worked with SAP Transformation Navigator. Speaking at the SAP Global Service & Support Kick-Off Meeting in Frankfurt, Michael Kleinemeier, member of the Exectuive Board and head of the SAP Digital Business Services organization, pointed to the growing importance of the tool for project work. He reported that, to date, more than 9,000 tailored customer road maps have been created.
With demand for SAP S/4HANA implementations remaining strong, SAP Transformation Navigator looks set to keep on writing its already impressive success story.
In the words of project team member Tilman Goettke, “This tool is revolutionizing the way we talk to customers about their digital transformations.”