Digital Transformation in 2022 (and 5 Examples You Should Know)

Digital transformation is well underway on a global scale. For organizations running SAP, this means modernizing their ERP systems, which  may be technically working but no longer meet modern business demands.

The key to success for these organizations is aligning their digital transformation plan with their unique business objectives. To achieve this, it’s critical to find a partner that can help navigate the complexities of new infrastructure, balance competing priorities, and execute transformative projects without disrupting business operations. And in every organization, digital transformation comes down to optimizing people, processes, and technologies to achieve new levels of strategic success.

To start or accelerate your SAP digital transformation journey, ask yourself:

• Where are there opportunities for greater efficiency?
• What challenges exist that are hindering our success?
• Do we have existing technology tools that can be leveraged more effectively?
• What are our competitors and industry leaders doing that we are not?

These questions and more can set you on the right path to identify your digital transformation needs and create a plan to help you execute.

Let’s dive deeper into what you need to know about true digital transformation in today’s business environment, plus 5 examples that show how enterprises running SAP have achieved it.

Quick Takeaways

• Digital transformation today means optimizing people, processes, and technologies to achieve key business objectives.
• According to Gartner, more than 90% of businesses are currently engaged in some form of digital transformation.
• Digital transformation has become a competitive imperative for companies that want to remain at the top of their industries.

Digital Transformation: A Quick History

Digital transformation is nearly three-quarters of a century old. It began in the 1950s with the invention of the microchip and semiconductor transistor, making it possible for analog technology to go digital. For a long time after, digital transformation was typically viewed as the adoption of technology tools in the business environment.

For example: offices were considered transformed when every employee had a computer at their desk.

The emergence of the World Wide Web marked a new level of disruption and changed the way we not only do business but live our everyday lives. Technology is no longer just about tools. Instead, it is threaded into the way we find and share information, communicate with others, serve customers, and store historical data.

It created a whole new definition of what it means to be digitally transformed.

What does digital transformation mean in 2022?

Today, digital transformation goes beyond new tooling. Organizations that achieve true digital transformation put technology at the center of their business models, growth strategies, and operations. They harness people, processes, and resources to optimize technology capabilities.

Gartner reports that 91% of businesses are currently engaged in some form of digital transformation. By 2025, global investment in digital technology initiatives will have more than doubled from where it stood in the late 2010s.

In other words: digital transformation is not a nice-to-have for companies who want to be at the top of their industries. It’s a competitive necessity.

Let’s walk through five examples of companies that have digitally transformed their SAP systems to help you envision what it would look like at your own organization.

5 SAP Digital Transformations You Should Know About

K-Swiss Modernizes SAP on Cloud for Improved Security and Operations

Tennis shoe manufacturer K-Swiss was operating a data center in a location prone to earthquakes and brushfire. Even after migrating to the private cloud, they were experiencing unstable operating costs and provider services. K-Swiss’s IT leadership knew they needed to modernize their infrastructure.

Protera conducted an automated assessment of K-Swiss’s target environment on AWS and provided a list of remediation items as well as a timeline and cost projection for the project.

After go-live on AWS, K-SWISS was acquired by another company and needed to connect their global systems, which they did in partnership with Protera using AWS networking technologies.

The entire project was completed in 6 months and included the migration of 19+ applications to AWS. It has resulted in a more agile, growth-oriented platform and the ability to be proactive about monitoring and optimization.

Read more about K-Swiss’s transformation

Ingevity Achieves New Levels of Agility with SAP Migration to S/4HANA

Global manufacturing firm Ingevity inherited a 20+ year-old version of SAP from its former parent company. As they neared the end of their current agreement with an on-premises data center, they began planning a complex migration to Microsoft Azure.

In partnership with Protera, Ingevity met its goal of completing its SAP migration to S 4/HANA in six months and with no interruptions to its business or employees. They moved a total of 450 servers and 74 TB of data to the cloud.

Since the project was completed, Ingevity has experienced higher levels of agility, better visibility into its newly optimized infrastructure, and the flexibility to scale resources as needed.

Spartech Cuts Costs and Enhances Customer Service with SAP on Azure

Spartech is a leading plastics manufacturer and innovator. After being divested from a corporate entity and purchased by a private equity firm, they had more than two terabytes of SAP and non-SAP application data that needed to be strategically architected for maximum performance. The company’s small IT team also had to be able to stand up its SAP solutions in a new cloud environment.

Spartech partnered with Protera to complete a successful separation project while maintaining complete business continuity. The project met its six-month deadline while significantly cutting costs with SAP on Azure.

Their enhanced performance on Azure has allowed Spartech to provide more efficient and flexible service to customers, which is critical to their strategy of continued organic growth in a specialty market scenario.

Read more about Spartech’s transformation

Greenskies Increases Operations 6X on the Cloud

Greenskies develops, finances, constructs, owns and operates clean, renewable-energy projects in the United States. As part of their commitment to increasing efficiencies and reducing overhead costs, Greenskies chose to replace its legacy ERP software with SAP in 2014 with the support of Protera.

Their SAP migration delivered numerous benefits, but Greenskies soon realized that migrating to the cloud was also key to reducing costs, improving reliability, and increasing scalability and flexibility over the long term.

Since moving to SAP S/4HANA on AWS, Greenskies has grown its operating portfolio by 600 percent while only doubling its workforce. They have also experienced 60% time savings and 80% cost savings through their upgrade project.

Read more about Greenskies Transformation

Altra Motion Performs SAP S/4HANA Pilot on Microsoft Azure

Altra Motion manufactures mechanical power transmission products. They migrated their SAP ECC system to SAP Business Suite on HANA to Protera’s private cloud in 2015. After multiple acquisitions and adding new business units, Altra CIO Rick Klotz saw the potential of scaling with public cloud and implementing SAP S/4HANA across the organization.

The solution included a 12-week pilot of SAP S/4HANA in a sandbox environment on Azure, configured by Protera using SAP Activate. After seeing the full capabilities of running Altra’s SAP systems on a powerful cloud platform, Klotz was confident in the company’s ability to do it long-term.

Read more about Altra’s transformation

Over to You

Digital transformation is at its most powerful when it is leveraged to achieve business outcomes and enable innovative capabilities.

Protera’s SAP Cloud Migration and SAP Cloud Management services save you time and cost, improve your service levels, and enable a new standard of agility for your enterprise workloads on cloud.

Contact us today to start, or accelerate your digital transformation.