Executive Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in every organization’s back-office system. The inability to easily access data, enable self-service capabilities, and intelligently automate processes has created demand for self-driving and autonomous enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. Add the shift to the cloud, the pressure of digital transformation, and replacement-cycle dynamics, and customers are seeing the greatest level of innovation in a decade as vendors compete for a five-year refresh cycle. Moreover, new cloud deployments provide a catalyst for improving and automating back-office processes like never before. In addition, companies are becoming more dependent on the strength of their partners to work in a deeply synchronized way with their back-office systems. This has driven a need for greater seamless connection to global supplier, logistics, and asset networks.
Although the number of vendors in the market has diminished due to mergers and acquisitions, the consolidation of ERP and the move to the cloud have led to concentrated platform investments, pointing to an estimated $44.6 billion market by 2026. Successful deployments will achieve the elusive goal of improving efficiencies and preparing for exponential growth. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the back office will power the next wave of postdigital ERP advancements.
This Offering Overview examines SAP’s S/4HANA offering. It identifies key differentiators, examines functional capabilities, considers the offering’s strengths and weaknesses, and provides use cases. Technology buyers should use this report to evaluate SAP in their vendor-selection process for cloud ERP solutions.
