Leading American multinational technology company IBM is embarking on a landmark business transformation journey in partnership with German software company SAP to further propel its growth and deliver excellent products and services to its customers worldwide. IBM will be carrying out one of the world’s largest corporate transformation projects centred on enhancing business processes across its global operations by tapping on its own IBM Consulting, which boasts of over 38,000 SAP consultants to provide expert advisory, implementation, and technical critical in migrating the firm’s complex systems to the cloud.

Commenting on the IBM landmark transformation project, SAP CEO Christian Klein said:

“This expanded partnership will enable IBM to accelerate its business transformation in the cloud and fuel its future growth. As a result, IBM will be positioned to provide the highest value of support and flexibility to its clients, allowing them to simplify and accelerate their business transformations while benefiting from the full value of RISE with SAP.”

IBM and SAP Advancing Business Transformation 

Under the latest expanded partnership, IBM will be migrating to cutting-edge ERP SAP S/4HANA leveraging RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, premium supplier option with IBM Consulting– shifting over 375 terabytes of data to IBM Power systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud. RISE with SAP is the German tech giant’s subscription-based, concierge Business Transformation as a Service designed to accelerate customers’ journey to the cloud and become sustainable, intelligent enterprises. 

In October 2021, the long-standing tech allies collaborated for the launch of BREAKTHROUGH with IBM, IBM’s complemental solution to SAP’s BTaaS offering comprised of a collection of existing consulting services designed to help customers accelerate and amplify their journeys to S/4HANA Cloud with RISE with SAP at its foundation. Today, IBM is once again collaborating with SAP for its milestone corporate transformation that would modernise its corporate business operations as well as centralise and standardise its global data, ultimately helping its customers with their cloud journey harnessing the capabilities of the RISE offering.

Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer explained: 

“Enterprise clients are seeking increased choice and control as they modernize their mission-critical workloads. Enabled by RISE with SAP, this is a milestone business transformation initiative for both companies due to its complexity and scale. With this move, and IBM’s experience using RISE with SAP internally, we will be even better prepared to support our clients on their hybrid cloud and business transformation journeys.”

Apart from having access to the SAP HANA database, which will streamline data management within IBM, the American tech company can also take advantage of SAP’s automated workflows and AI to enhance decision-making. The transformation project sees an estimate of US$58 billion in IBM revenue flowing through SAP software after completion.

IBM also announced that clients implementing RISE with SAP on IBM Cloud can also choose to run workloads on IBM Power on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Cloud with the expansion of the premium supplier option.

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Driving a fast-paced growth, ANTA Group’s revenue in 2020 climbed 4.7{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} year-on-year to 35.51 billion yuan ($5.43 billion), while operating profits increased 5.3{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} to 9.15 billion yuan. The company’s efforts to focus on digital strategy and direct-to-consumer (DTC) initiatives, according to Group President Zheng Jie, contributed significantly to last year’s strong fiscal report.

To stay ahead of the trend, the company launched a massive digital transformation program that spanned all of its operations in China. Additionally, to support the new way of working, ANTA Group first looked for a company-wide enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.

ANTA Group chose SAP S/4HANA to establish its integrated operations after a thorough evaluation of a variety of leading ERP systems. SAP S/4HANA, which is powered by cutting-edge in-memory technology, aims to enable businesses to quickly produce highly complex forecasts and easily disseminate insights across the value chain.

SAP has a strong presence in the fashion retail market, giving customers the platform and solutions that will help meet their industry-specific workflow requirements. Just last month, Descente, one of ANTA Group’s high-profile global brands, also deployed several SAP cloud offerings to strengthen its DTC business, driving a renewal of core systems by leveraging SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

With the help of implementation partner IBM, SAP assisted ANTA Group in migrating from its legacy applications to SAP S/4HANA. Chen Dong Hai, Senior Director of IT at ANTA Group, said:

“SAP S/4HANA is truly a next-generation digital platform, and offered all the advanced analytics capabilities we were looking for to support our fast-growing business.”

ANTA Group Implements SAP S/4HANA Through IBM and SAP’s Collaboration

ANTA Group and IBM analysed existing workflows and planned out improvements required to achieve the company’s goal through a series of IBM Design Thinking sessions. The IBM team worked with ANTA Group in accelerating the migration process by combining on-site consultations with pre-packaged implementation templates.

Moreover, the SAP Integrated Delivery Framework greatly contributed to the successful collaboration throughout the project by connecting delivery roles, processes, and services — resulting in a low-risk, cost-effective and on-time deployment.

According to SAP, the adoption of SAP Integrated Delivery Framework has seen a huge increase since 2019. With over 70{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} growth and hundreds of projects in the first year since its launch, the framework will soon supply close to half of SAP’s premium engagement services, making it key to SAP’s partner collaboration mode.

“SAP Integrated Delivery Framework as part of SAP Value Assurance provided clearly defined roles and responsibilities that allowed our company, IBM, and SAP to efficiently collaborate and ensure a successful go-live of SAP S/4HANA.” Chen Dong Hai emphasised.

Enabling Growth and Improving Business Processes

Since the implementation of SAP S/4HANA, ANTA Group reaped the benefits of a secure move to a new ERP solution that could enable growth and improve business processes. The key results of the project are as follows:

• Gained a single, accurate view of the performance of all its brands, channels, suppliers, and profit centers.
• Obtained insights into emerging retail trends more quickly by consolidating the monitoring and management of group-wide key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Performed more frequent and granular analytics along dimensions such as inventory consumption and product category by accelerating its merchandising process.
• Transformed its ability to detect and interpret changes in consumer demands. 
• Automatically schedule and optimise its financial, manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain processes by improving the flow of information across the value chain.
•  Enhanced some critical functionalities in the material requirements planning (MRP) calculation mechanism to fully meet new business requirements.

“By using our SAP S/4HANA deployment as a template, we are confident that we will accelerate our growth in international markets, and we plan to continue our close collaboration with IBM Services as we continue on that journey,” Chen Dong Hai concluded.

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