Boost your Business with SAP Professional Services

The professional services firms that have always been at the cutting edge of Digital Transformation for their clientele worldwide are on the cusp of a tectonic shift. The industry has emphasized on a leveraged talent model for orchestrating the desired outcomes for long. However, the new economic realities, characterized by the automation of basic chores, the emergence of knowledge-based products, and the mainstreaming of a non-employee workforce, compel professional services leaders to reimagine the business modalities. Perhaps never before has the incentive been higher on evolving digitally and delivering enabling customer experience.

An enabler for professional services businesses

Today, 70% of the domain players consider it critical to defend the scalability of the offerings for claiming unflinching brand loyalty and sustaining a healthy margin. As a mid-market professional services business, you might also have perceived the strategic imperative to customize deliveries, allocate resources with agility, and modernize business processes, all while rationalizing project costs. Does it sound too daunting to cope and thrive amidst such challenges? Fortunately, SAP simplifies the task with SAP Business ByDesign (SAP ByD), a product purpose-built to put decades of industry knowledge, innovation, and next-gen Best Practices at the helm of your professional services business story.

Launched in 2007, SAP ByD is the global ERP leader's response to the changing needs of SMEs in the Digital Economy. SAP ByD is a cloud ERP suite-in-a-box built on service-oriented architecture (SOA) and running on multi-tenancy enabled SAP NetWeaver stack, using SAP's in-memory HANA database technology. SAP ByD is aimed to unify core business operations around a cloud-native core, using pre-built processes and competing without the cost and complexities of managing on-premise infrastructure. Delivered through a SaaS model, SAP ByD integrates all enterprise functions with proven Best Practices and advanced analytics, making it possible for professional services institutions to streamline operational outcomes, gain in-depth visibility and adapt to evolving business realities effortlessly.

If you are planning to invest in enterprise transformation to boost your business, there are more than enough reasons for SAP ByD to be your solution of choice. Significant SAP ByDesign benefits include:

Optimum visibility: As a professional services business, it is essential to have a comprehensive view of your operations for reporting and informed decision-making. It will help if you have a nimble enterprise management solution that can meet diverse mission requirements, from expense management, project tracking, employee collaboration to information access monitoring. For this, SAP ByD brings powerful capabilities, including automated project lifecycle management for tracking end-to-end quote to cash scenarios, tracing performance, project milestones, and cost for accurate billing and on-demand reporting. Further, enhanced resource orchestration, integrated job scheduling and dispatch, enhanced material and workforce allocation for projects, and field service tracking in SAP ByD deliver the insights and control that your decision-makers need to do what they do best.

Reduced OpEx: Cloud is the next frontier of service innovation, and SAP ByD is built for a cloud-first world. While most ERPs are deployed on-premises requiring large dedicated IT outfits and regular infrastructure maintenance expenses, SAP ByD is hosted in SAP's servers, with its unmatched capabilities available at a simple per-user subscription. Besides assured business continuity and resilience, having your enterprise operations in the cloud eliminates several potential growth bottlenecks. For instance, with SAP ByD, you can seamlessly run inter-group business transactions, bypassing the need for costly system integrations to access in-depth reporting in real-time. Further, while cybersecurity concerns pose an existential threat to businesses, irrespective of their size, your SAP ByD landscape remains shielded by the Best Practices, data security constructs, and disaster recovery plans implemented directly by SAP.

Growth orientation: SAP ByD is a modular cloud enterprise management product designed to complement the journey of professional services companies that aspire to serve their customers with invisible, intelligent, and highly secured technologies. It lets you start small and adapt to your current business needs supporting a user base as little as 20 to over a thousand. Further, with SAP ByD, it is possible to modify configurations, personalize functionalities, and plugin different legal entities at local and international levels. Currently, SAP ByD is localized with out-of-the-box compliance features across 20 SAP delivered countries and is available in 12 languages. The product is supported by an ecosystem of 250 value-added partners and 125+ software ISV partners worldwide, with 2,600+ add-on solutions.

Seamless mobility: SAP ByD features in-built mobility capabilities that can be leveraged across devices without incurring additional complexities. With a comprehensive series of SAP ByD mobile apps, you can access several ERP capabilities that have been customized for your professional services firm in run-time. It unlocks the productivity for your workforce, allowing even employees deployed on the field to access the SAP ByD landscape remotely, view and execute transactions without lags. SAP ByD mobility supports a range of functions, including contact and activity management, KPI analytics, lead management, self-services, approvals, and much more. For instance, with SAP ByD Apps, your service architects and engineers can receive and confirm service orders, view service orders, contact details, and item details, and view the list of live and closed service confirmations.     

Quick implementation: As a professional services firm, your performance is entangled with your customer's success. Hence, it is critical to keep unplanned downtime of your enterprise management system and service outages to a minimum. However, while a typical on-premise ERP crossover may take months, as a deploy-ready solution, SAP ByD can be implemented within merely 4-16 weeks. Further, the state-of-the-art product is covered by round-the-clock maintenance runs by SAP with no commercial add-ons and readily integrates with EDI, eCommerce, CRM, service portals, bespoke business applications, and other SAP products like SAP Concur for enhanced functionalities. 

Final notes

The realities of the New Normal have unquestionably disrupted the professional services space, compelling its players to rethink business models and deliver services digitally to inspire stakeholder delight. While SAP ByD is imbibed with the capabilities to make Digitalization work to your advantage, much still depends on having an experienced process innovator on board to guide you through the transition. Here approaching an SAP-certified subject matter expert like Percipere can be the potential differentiator, setting you in a league apart from your industry peers.

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