How Can Process Mining Accelerate S/4HANA Transformation?

A company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is the backbone of its operations, and any migration glitch could be disastrous. When considering the move to S/4HANA how can you ensure success? And what does it take to get there?

Digital is Driving Today’s Market Challenges

Digital transformation may seem like the latest tech trend, but its impact is widespread and shows no signs of fading. An IDC Futurescape report indicates that by 2020, 60 percent of businesses will be in the process of implementing fully articulated organization-wide digital platform strategies.

There are several factors feeding the drive to digitize, including:

● Highly specialized business silos that can’t keep pace with the lean, collaborative structure of digital natives.

● Increased scrutiny which has led to more stringent regulatory demands.

● A multigenerational, tech-savvy customer base that is pressuring businesses into ever-increasing speed, accuracy and convenience.

● Legacy systems that are consuming business resources accommodating breakdowns, instituting workarounds and trying to integrate with new technology.

How Process Mining Can Ensure S/4HANA Success

Process mining technology uses the data from your IT systems to create a real-time visual representation of how your processes run. So how does that relate to an S/4HANA migration?

The most obvious benefit is the insight process mining provides—an instant view into the end-to-end functioning of your business processes. And because it’s extracted directly from your system, it eliminates the need for subjective discussions in the planning phase. This facilitates a common understanding that is important not only for building a business case, but for promoting stakeholder buy-in and adoption post migration.

In other words, the flexibility and power of process mining technology means it adds value at every stage of an S/4HANA migration initiative, from planning to template design to rollout to monitoring.

As today’s businesses strive to meet the challenges of the modern marketplace, they’re finding that even the smallest inefficiencies are leaving them outpaced. The time is now for companies to redefine how they operate in order to exceed those expectations and not just keep up, but gain the competitive edge.

This post includes excerpts from a recent whitepaper by Celonis and PwC. For more information and specific use cases of how process mining technology can be applied in each stage of S/4HANA migration, read the full whitepaper here.