Insights

RISE with SAP and Ascend with UST: Accelerating cloud transformation, operations and ROI for manufacturers

Ramya Kannan, Industry Leader – Manufacturing at UST

Enterprise manufacturers face even tougher challenges in the post-pandemic world. They must manage customer demand and supply planning with unexpected, sometimes unyielding, shortages and constraints. Overcorrections have often resulted in excess inventory. Striking the delicate balance with the right supply to match demand is even more challenging when you add in other business considerations like production yield, quality control, and global labor issues. Then there are security, analytics, data insights, and compliance issues to consider, making the process even more complex. Making the right technology investments for digital, cloud- and SaaS-based solutions can be daunting. Manufacturers must ensure they choose scalable and innovative solutions to achieve business goals and generate a tangible ROI.

MAKING A CASE FOR CLOUD-BASED ERP

When manufacturers invest in digital, cloud technologies, they need their IT solutions to:

• Create value for the IT spend.
• Ensure business continuity.
• Increase visibility across the enterprise.
• Provide an agile response to shortened disruption cycles.
• Uncover intelligent insights to drive better decisions.
• Improve productivity and efficiency, especially across manufacturing processes.
• Increase agility to respond quickly to business disruptions.
• Provide personalization and positive user experiences.

A flexible ERP package with specific capabilities and cloud services aligned with consumption is the need of the hour. It will allow manufacturers to transition to the cloud in a less costly, measured way that drives value while creating resilience and scalability. Since an ERP system is critical to manufacturing operations, transforming your ERP system with modern cloud technologies is imperative for all -not a luxury reserved for only the largest manufacturing enterprises.

When manufacturers standardize or de-customize their core ERP systems, and innovate on the edges with digital applications, they can generate ROI and achieve the many benefits listed above.

RISE WITH SAP-DESIGNED TO DRIVE TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE

RISE with SAP is a bundled technology and services offering to help enterprises across all industries modernize their infrastructure and operations with ERP-as-a-service cloud technologies. It's also designed to help companies become more sustainable, intelligent, and innovative.

The comprehensive RISE with SAP program offers cloud transformation on your terms, on your timeline, and it includes these cloud infrastructure and managed services from SAP:

• S/4HANA software licenses on any cloud platform.
• Business Technology Platform (BTP) consumption credits.
• Business network starter pack.
• Business Process Intelligence.
• Infrastructure as a Service (customer choice).
• Outcome-driven services and tools.

Enterprises can take advantage of platform-as-a-service solutions to connect with trading partners and integrate analytics, application development, intelligent automation, and other non-SAP solutions.

To boil it down, SAP is responsible for managing the platform, cloud operations, technical support and SLAs. Trusted partners, like UST, provide outcome-driven services.

UST’S RISE WITH SAP CLOUD TRANSFORMATION PROGRAMS

SAP has long been the technology vendor of choice for manufacturing enterprises because of its deep domain expertise with both industry-specific challenges and business process optimizations. That's why UST and SAP joined forces to deliver holistic RISE with SAP offerings to help manufacturers fast-track their transformational journey to the cloud.

UST offers three accelerator programs specifically designed to complement RISE with SAP so you can quickly achieve transformational change. Our offerings bundle technical solutions and expert services to help you gain the most value from your ERP system, address manufacturing cloud challenges, optimize business processes, drive innovation and achieve growth.

UST Fast Start

This program is designed for highly risk-averse organizations or companies that want a test run to ensure their cloud migration will go smoothly. Our SAP cloud experts execute a trial migration to the UST cloud to pinpoint and resolve issues before the actual SAP migration to S/4HANA. The key learnings from this pilot exercise pave the way for an accelerated, well-planned implementation at scale.

UST Rapid Readiness

We designed this framework to enhance and build upon the SAP activate methodology. The goal is to put the building blocks in place so your company is ready for a cloud transformation effort. It’s an 8-stage program that maps your business drivers and pain points to S/4HANA capabilities. We begin with a business value workshop that provides the scaffolding to align your business landscape with a clearly defined cloud migration strategy. We also leverage our Design for Happiness methodology that uses human-centric digital development to weave the hearts, minds, and motivations of your consumers into your cloud strategy. The net result is a clear roadmap for standardization and innovation along with a well-articulated transformational business case.

UST Ascend

In addition to these services, UST helps existing SAP ECC customers who want to migrate to S/4HANA. It’s a hybrid migration framework that leverages UST tools, accelerators, and intellectual property to speed your SAP digital manufacturing journey. Get the best of both worlds with your transformation. We start by making a shell copy on the cloud, then upgrading, transforming, and finally migrating data to the new environment. We also offer integrations to other non-SAP applications that may be a part of your IT landscape.

UST’S MANUFACTURING-SPECIFIC S/4HANA EXTENSIONS

To ensure your cloud journey delivers as much value as possible, we also offer digital extensions specifically designed to drive critical ERP improvements for manufacturers, such as:

• Increasing profitability - With our Flex, intelligent order management solution, manufacturers can manage order allocation in the context of many different supply constraints to reduce order cancellations and revenue loss via a digital allocation cockpit.
• Reducing waste and revenue leakage - With UST Sentry, our vision-based AI solution, we help manufacturers build predictable patterns to increase operational efficiencies, monitor performance and automate complex business processes. Manufacturers can embrace SAP Industry 4.0 solutions to increase productivity across inventory tracking, quality control, compliance, yield management, safety and other adherences.
• Improving visibility to make more informed decisions - UST's Omni supply chain visibility & orchestration platform uses predictive analytics to identify issues and uncover optimization opportunities in real time. You can perform what-if analysis by adjusting inventory and supply, and running simulations based on business rules.

UST’S SAP S/4HANA FOR MANUFACTURING CLOUD TRANSFORMATION CUSTOMER SUCCESSES

Our SAP practice has been helping more than 65 multi-national customers with their cloud transformation journeys. The RISE with SAP program is the next evolution to help companies-including smaller enterprises-move to the cloud faster, more efficiently and cost-effectively, with less risk and established ROI outcomes. Here's a snapshot of some recent UST S/4HANA cloud transformation customer successes:

• Increased forecast accuracy, reduced product rework by 5X - UST helped a global leader in data memory and storage solutions leverage its existing SAP S/4HANA-based ERP system to design, develop and deploy a new finish-to-order solution that compared upcoming orders to stock-on-hand in real time to ensure the company had the correct inventory to fulfill orders accurately and on time. The new SAP HANA solution decreased delivery delays and increased the efficiency of manufacturing processes.
• Reduced manual processes by 40%, improved customer experience - A global wholesale electronics distributor was struggling to manage its supply chain because of demand planning issues and manual processes that couldn’t scale. UST designed and developed an integrated SAP solution that leveraged UST Flex iOM and custom algorithms to increase supply and demand visibility, improve allocation planning and better align sales and fulfillment.

If you’re considering or ready to embark on a S/4HANA cloud transformation journey to improve your SAP manufacturing processes, UST can help you. Contact us today to learn more about our SAP experience, expertise and RISE with SAP accelerators.