The digitization of business is gaining steam: By 2020, companies will reinvent, digitize, or eliminate 80% of business processes and products that they have developed and used in the last decade.¹ To prepare for this change, SAP has built a digital business framework with SAP S/4HANA as its digital core, structured to aid customers in developing and executing their digital business strategy. By leveraging this framework, companies can optimize and automate business processes, taking one step further on their digital-first journey. That journey will not, however, be without challenges.

With the guidance of the digital business framework and the tools available in SAP Solution Extensions for content management, the entire value chain can be digitized. Now, any company can develop a digital strategy across the five pillars of digital business.

1. Use the Digital Core

With SAP S/4HANA, you can perform transactions and analytics on a single, in-memory platform. You can connect people, devices, and business networks in real time, delivering unprecedented value and revealing new opportunities. And, optimized for the digital core, next-generation content management solutions such as SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management by OpenText help you run simple by digitizing end-to-end business processes across deployment models. This will help you drive mission-critical processes across all operations, embed content for access to 360 degrees of information, and extend core processes across on-premise and hybrid models.

2. Collaborate with Suppliers

SAP solutions can help manage and optimize the supply chain, enabling organizations to connect with their suppliers on business networks with SAP Ariba and Concur. You can leverage the broadest business network for end-to-end, source-to-procure processes to manage incoming content with suppliers, including invoices, delivery notes, and more. It will also empower you to drive solution adoption and purchasing compliance globally with easy-to-use applications and mobile apps.

3. Deliver New Experiences to Customers

SAP applications can digitize the front office, allowing businesses to seamlessly serve their customers and offer them the omnichannel experience they expect with SAP Hybris and SAP Cloud for Customer. With these applications, you can digitize business processes across marketing, commerce, sales, and service, and deliver personalized experiences and real-time communications in context for each interaction. You can also build a customer profile with an enriched view of the customer from multiple sources, including unstructured content such as emails, Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, and images.

4. Engage the Workforce

SAP SuccessFactors solutions can help engage the entire workforce across employees, contractors, and partners to offer engaging experiences that give you a competitive advantage. They enable you to enhance employee engagement and increase productivity while also creating new opportunities through the digital representation of content, information, relationships, and decision making. Most importantly, you can run your simplified digital enterprise and increase employee satisfaction and loyalty.

5. Manage Assets More Effectively

Customers can optimize their assets and innovate with SAP HANA Cloud Platform for the Internet of Things to see increased maintenance productivity, improved operational control, enhanced asset reliability, and reduced outages. The SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management application (SAP Extended ECM) by OpenText helps to maintain complete digital representation of all assets as part of plant maintenance processes and to deliver better collaboration for asset management activities, reduced compliance risks, lower total cost of ownership, and reduced IT operating costs.

No matter what your company does, every business has customers it needs to serve, employees it needs to engage, suppliers with whom to collaborate, and assets to manage and optimize. SAP Solution Extensions for content management enable end-to-end innovation across the five pillars of digital business and help customers with every aspect of their digital-first journey.

^{1 Forbes, “Gartner Predicts Three Big Data Trends for Business Intelligence” (February 2015; onforb.es/1UfGwFc). [back]}