With smartphone and tablet ownership on the rise, the way people work, consume content, and experience technology is changing at a rapid pace. There is a growing expectation and demand in the workplace for a consumer-friendly way to accomplish tasks on multiple devices. Mobile productivity means that users can get more done in less time, often with greater accuracy. And by outfitting enterprise applications with more intuitive user interfaces, organizations can enhance user satisfaction, minimize training time, and increase solution adoption.

Unfortunately, today’s IT organizations are limited by enormous pressures from the business to do more with less. However, SAP provides a comprehensive IT infrastructure library (ITIL)-aligned service management framework as part of SAP Solution Manager that companies can use to improve their application lifecycle management (ALM) processes, freeing up the financial resources to deploy mobile technology.

Cutting Out Excessive ALM Costs

With SAP Solution Manager, companies can reduce maintenance efforts significantly while driving continually increasing value from SAP applications. IT organizations can leverage SAP Solution Manager to increase application support efficiency by creating central access to all required functions and information. They can also perform proactive monitoring to avoid incidents, minimize performance issues, and reduce complexity, as well as manage system and service request-related data to drive root cause analysis and problem management. And by automating the effort associated with upgrades, testing, and other changes, organizations can reduce the cost and risk associated with these activities.

Deloitte has combined these capabilities with a variety of other techniques, such as technical debt reduction, labor arbitrage, IT process optimization, and IT analytics, to find further cost savings around SAP maintenance.

Modernizing the User Experience

With this newly available funding, enterprises now have the opportunity to redeploy funding to modernize the user experience cost effectively and in a relatively non-disruptive manner. To provide customers access to these “application-enabling tools,” SAP is now including them as part of underlying licenses of SAP software. Organizations can leverage SAP Fiori, SAP Screen Personas, and the UI development toolkit for HTML5 (SAPUI5) to personalize SAP solutions for their specific user needs without worrying about license costs. They can then use a combination of off-the-shelf, mobile-enabled solutions, fast personalization, and in-house development to improve deployment time and cost.

These new tools enable IT organizations to more easily plan small projects that make possible a successful, consumer-friendly experience. Achieving this outcome requires three primary steps:

1. Improve your application management operation by using the right tools and processes to drive down cost while enhancing performance and reliability
2. Develop a plan for modernizing your SAP applications and enhancing user experience
3. Design, develop, and deploy the user experience by relying on SAP technology that you already own

Deloitte, an SAP global services partner and a member of the Run SAP partner program, assists clients with this journey through our application management services (AMS) practice, bringing an innovative and creative mobile user experience to life, and making users happier and more productive at no incremental cost to the enterprise. To get the conversation started, contact us via email at SAP@deloitte.com or visit www.deloitte.com/SAP.

As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.