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SAP

Value Proposition

Achieve Business Process Harmonization

How often have we seen large global organizations end up with complex, non-standard and inflexible business processes that are limited by underlying IT systems? This situation is the result of catering to diverse needs of regional or local businesses spread across multiple lines of business and spanning time zones and cultures. It becomes more complex when mergers and acquisitions are an integral part of the business strategy. CEOs try to create organizations capable of adapting to changing markets. They aim for increased speed of innovation for customer acquisition/ retention. CEOs want to be closer to their business partners and leverage their global assets and talent pool in a seamless manner. Businesses are demanding a flexible and agile IT landscape aligned with the rapid and continuous changes brought about by globalization. Increasingly, having the "right information" at the "right time" across the extended value chain is helping organizations be more competitive, innovate faster and increase operational efficiency.

Achieve Business Process HarmonizationThe challenge, therefore, is for organizations to define business processes that represent an appropriate level of commonality across business units, product lines and regions. Subsequently, the SAP application landscape should be designed to manage an optimal balance of standardization and regional innovations with flexibility to accommodate both internal and external organizational changes. Since process commonality is a function of the business process and the organizational construct (e.g. Asset Management may have a high degree of commonality possible at the enterprise level whereas Planning and Scheduling has a low degree of commonality at the enterprise level, but a high degree is possible at the Business Unit level), a "one-solution-fits-all" strategy will not work.

A reasonable degree of commonality can be attained as illustrated in the chart below. It is based on Infosys' experience in multiple large scale global transformation and business process harmonization programs. Achieve Business Process Harmonization During business process definition, it is critical to prioritize and focus on common process design on a relatively smaller number of processes that provide the greatest improvement and impact. Tangible business benefits should be highlighted at the beginning of the definition process and agreed upon by all key stakeholders to facilitate relatively seamless adoption. Some factors that need be looked into are optimal leverage of the organization's global workforce across the value chain, future strategy of process management/shared services, possible M&A, supplier rationalization and client experience strategies.

Infosys' approach for global process harmonization leverages its deep domain expertise of pre-defined industry process maps, SAP process best practices, and alignment with industry and cross-industry solutions for robust and template-based solutions. We focus on designing a flexible foundation on which existing and new business requirements can be rapidly deployed. By leveraging our tools, accelerators and process repositories, we provide end-to-end global process harmonization solution, with assured business benefits. In addition, our robust program and change management capabilities deliver a predictable, high quality, shorter time-to-benefit and reduced TCO solution.

Read how a global automotive OEM successfully achieved process harmonization across 25 countries in Europe and APAC with a reduced TCO of 40%