Around the globe, over 400,000 businesses use SAP for their enterprise resource planning (ERP), including 92% of the Forbes Global 2000 companies. A recent study found, however, that 90% of the SAP users experienced SAP application downtime. The study also found that two-thirds of respondents report have spent up to 25% of their daily time resolving these issues.
The survey, "Evaluating Automation and SAP Transformations," polled SAP power users and administrators from more than 150 different organizations in North America; industries ranging from manufacturing to retail to utilities. The goal of the study was to better identify how they experience SAP operational transformations, business process redesign, and automation at their organizations. The research was carried out by Digitate, a provider of SaaS-based enterprise software for IT and business operations, and ASUG, a network of SAP customers, partners and professionals.
SAP dominates the ERP market and its ability to automate, optimize and analyze a vast range of business functions makes it the first choice for many organizations. Yet SAP solutions can be complex and challenging to administer, particularly as users are being encouraged to migrate to SAP’s latest cloud-based S/4HANA platform, noted the authors of the research.
While internal downtime impacts were said to be experienced much more than external impacts, business user impacts due to SAP downtime were, unsurprisingly, the overriding concern for respondents, with 39% noting a direct impact on customers. Integration challenges were identified as the top contributor to unplanned downtime. In fact, almost all respondents (95%) reported facing integration issues, with data inconsistency representing the most widely experienced challenge.
“Users across the SAP landscape are looking for technology optimizations to reduce their challenges of scale, speed, and performance – and this is confirmed by the findings of the survey,” said Ugo Orsi, Chief Customer Officer at Digitate. “We have applied AI/ML and automation to SAP operations across the IT and business landscape and helped enable digital transformation across many of the major global enterprises.”
Edited by
Alex Passett
