The New “Norm”

As we are all coming to terms with the new “Social Distancing” and working from home reality that could well be the new “Norm” for months to come, just how well are we managing to keep the wheels turning when it comes to executing even basic operations on a remote basis?

In today’s digital world, organizations from small operators to large global conglomerates are embarking on a journey to simplify and digitalize outdated, manual and inefficient processes. It has of late become a corporate imperative for growth and in many cases, survival. To meet this challenge, we have seen a proliferation of digital process solutions offering rapid setup and configuration but the challenge of back-end system integration is one that keeps CIOs awake at night.

Come March 2020, the new reality of virtually all staff working remotely has unceremoniously forced many operational changes across a wide spectrum of industries and job functions. The very basic business processes involving collaboration and approvals are now being seen in a new light and organizations are scrambling to deal with these new challenges.

On a call with a customer last week, the topic of workflow task approval came up and it was mentioned that in an organization of nearly 10,000 employees, leave requests were still managed using physical pieces of paper that were printed out, completed, and submitted for approval requiring the manager to physically sign the form before sending to HR to manually update SAP.

Social Distancing is Not Straight Forward

In addition to the obvious challenges of digitalizing business processes such as user management, user experience, security and system integration, there are some new difficulties organizations are struggling to deal with amidst social distancing such as:

Inconsistent working times, especially with employees who are now also assisting with home schooling. I know of some people who get a productive 3 or 4 hours in before waking the kids up, whilst others prefer to get a good 4 hours in after dinner.
Consistent and easy access to all enterprise applications is not always assured.
Lack of mobility-access for many applications means that unless a user is on their PC and in many cases connected to a corporate VPN they have no access or even notification of anything requiring attention.
System time-outs resulting in having to restart tasks when distracted resulting is lack of productivity and delayed responses.

When it comes to a complex collaborative process, individual delays can easily accumulate. This is resulting in processes taking several times longer to be completed, potentially compromising overall business success.

Options

The great news for organizations running SAP is that there are ways to quickly and cost-effectively digitalize even unique business process by leveraging SAP Fiori.

Innovative software and solutions organizations such as IQX provide certified low-code tooling to enable your existing SAP functional and technical teams to develop custom process-centric Fiori applications with relative ease. To further accelerate the pace at which digital solutions can be rolled out, IQX also boasts a growing portfolio of fast-start templates covering a range of common business processes.

Conclusion

Process digitalization, even in its simplest form is inevitable and in fact a corporate imperative now more than ever. SAP provides the baseline platform to provide a truly integrated digital core for your full scope of business operations. IQX AppBuilder for SAP Fiori empowers your internal team to leverage your existing SAP infrastructure to deliver engaging core business process Fiori solutions quickly and cost effectively. The opportunity exists right now to innovate and change in order to thrive in the new normal.

Employees are open to change right now – never before has there been an opportunity to build and benefit quickly where employees and customers are open to innovation and change. This is especially important where clear visibility of the processes that can make the business operate more efficiently and smoothly can make the difference.

Running SAP but still using Spreadsheets for CAPEX?