Digitate , a leading provider of SaaS-based enterprise software for IT and business operations, announced a study conducted in partnership with ASUG , America’s largest network of SAP customers, partners and professionals, which explores the issues that are at the top of the list for SAP users. The results revealed that 90% of SAP users experienced SAP application downtime issues. In addition, two-thirds of respondents said they had to spend 25% of their time every day solving these unpredictable problems.
SAP dominates the ERP (enterprise resource planning) market and its ability to automate, optimize and analyze a wide range of business functions makes it their first choice for many organizations. Yet SAP solutions can be complex and challenging to manage, especially as users are encouraged to migrate to SAP’s new cloud-based S/4HANA platform.
The survey, Evaluating Automation and SAP Transformations , was conducted with key SAP users and administrators from more than 150 different organizations in North America across industries ranging from manufacturing to retail and utilities. The aim of the survey was to better identify how they experience SAP operational transformations, business process redesign and automation of their organizations.
While internal impacts from an outage were reported as being much more experienced than external impacts, business user impacts due to an SAP outage were unsurprisingly the top concern of respondents, with 39% reporting a direct impact on customers. Integration challenges were identified as the biggest culprit for unplanned outages. In fact, almost all respondents (95%) reported experiencing integration challenges, with data inconsistency being the most common challenge.
“Users across the SAP landscape are looking for technology optimizations to reduce their scale, speed and performance challenges. This is confirmed by the survey findings,” says Ugo Orsi, Chief Customer Officer at Digitate. “We applied AI/ML and automation to SAP operations across the IT and business landscape, helping to enable digital transformation in many major global enterprises.”
Also Read: Daruma Tech Launches Three Projects to Help Museums Enhance Visitor Engagement with Digital Tools
- Impacts of failure
- For the majority of respondents (66%), up to a quarter of their time is spent on unpredictable problems related to an SAP application failure.
- Overwhelmingly, business-user impacts are cited as the top concern/impact due to outages. Internal impacts due to an outage are experienced much more than external impacts, although 39% still indicated a direct impact for customers.
- Integration of SAP automation solutions
- Integration of SAP automation solutions means uncertainty as almost half of respondents were unable to assess this at their organization.
- That said, when confident, the majority (42%) felt that their organizations are not integrating as many solutions as possible. In general, more openness and efforts are needed to adapt new technology, back-end support and automation across systems to deliver benefits.
- Transformation of SAP operations
- Given the anticipation for automation to reduce time spent on manual patch upgrades, reducing manual processes is the key initiative needed to improve SAP operations.
- Data analytics/dashboard insights and supply chain optimization are other leading technologies/initiatives needed. More than half also selected automation.
- Use of AI/ML and surveillance tools
- While only 15% currently use AI/ML, 33% are considering doing so in the future.
- The majority of respondents use up to 20 tools to monitor various elements of their SAP systems.
- Operational KPIs and ticket resolution
- Solving the KPI of tickets without human intervention is still a distant goal for many; only 41% indicated that they often met this requirement. The majority of respondents said 10% of tickets or less were resolved automatically. 29% had not resolved any ticket automatically.
It is clear from the survey that automation and SAP S/4HANA are priorities for customers. While some respondents are eager to move from their legacy systems to S/4 to leverage new capabilities/features, many others are required to migrate their legacy systems to S/4HANA.
SOURCE: Businesswire