How prepared are organizations for the challenges of the changing SAP landscape

The Tricentis, Capgemini and Sogeti report explores current SAP adoption and implementation trends, and organizations’ preparedness to deal with the challenges emerging from the changing SAP landscape.

“SAP’s ERP system acts as the backbone of business processes across departments for organizations globally. While businesses continue to benefit from it, the overall SAP environment has undergone rapid disruption in recent years,” said Wolfgang Platz, Chief Strategy Officer at Tricentis.

“These disruptions pose new business process risks, implementation challenges, cost impacts, and most importantly, an increased level of complexity for enterprises. In our latest report, we set out to explore how prepared businesses were to address these challenges and the steps they were taking to do so.”

More than 750 respondents from organizations with revenue over 1 billion USD in 17 countries from a multitude of verticals were surveyed for the report.

ECC is still the most common platform, ahead of S/4HANA

• ECC is the most popular SAP version, used by 43.2% of the surveyed organizations
• S/4HANA’s adoption rate is 33.1%
• 91.9% of those organizations that have not upgraded to S/4HANA have either already begun the migration or plan to do it in the next 24 months

SAP challenges when moving to advanced versions

Data migration (43.5%) and data security (42.8%) are the two most prominent challenges that organizations face while moving to advanced versions/updates.

• 91% of organizations realize the importance of engaging a specialized service provider to overcome the challenges faced in implementing advanced SAP versions/updates

There is a strong prevalence of specialist testing service providers

• 36.2% of respondents rely on them for SAP business assurance
• 27.4% use a hybrid model, which includes both an in-house team and a specialist testing service provider
• 45.1% of respondents use a specialist testing service provider for API testing/component testing
• 43.7% use one for performance testing

What’s influencing shifts towards the use of automation in SAP testing?

The need for faster implementation, growing complexity, and a lack of skilled resources have influenced organizations’ shifts towards the use of automation in SAP testing.

• Around a quarter of surveyed organizations have an automated SAP testing system in place
• 29.9% organizations still rely on a manual approach
• 43.5% organizations use a combination of manual and automated SAP testing

“The report reveals that many organizations are planning to increase the use of testing across all stages of project lifecycles in the coming months,” says Mark Buenen, Global Leader of Digital Assurance and Quality Engineering Services at Capgemini.

“They are also exploring the use of automation for SAP testing and agree that it can deliver more than 50% efficiency gains. Advanced technologies, such as AI and ML, are also likely to gain more traction in this space in the future.”

Platz commented on the report’s findings: “The changing times have created a pressing need for organizations to take a more focused and structured approach to run end-to-end SAP testing processes to reduce or eliminate any business risks that might emerge from the implementation of SAP updates.

“However, while most organizations now realize the importance of a robust business assurance process in ensuring the success and efficiency of SAP system, the study found that their level of maturity, approach, use of technology, and readiness for automation still seem to be evolving.”