Uncovering the value of analytics for S/4HANA

How PwC can help you find the best integration strategy for analytics in your business transformation

Seeking to transform your business with analytics?

Market leaders make comprehensive use of analytics comprehensively to harness its power to surpass their competitors. That’s why analytics is such an important function and should be considered in any S/4HANA transformation.

That said, in the course of your S/4HANA programme you might find yourself struggling to include analytics in your business transformation – in general or in terms of the way your programme’s organised.

If you’re to make the right choices along your path to building analytics into your transformation, it’s important to understand what S/4HANA can do and what this could mean for your business.

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Why analytics is so important – and how we can help you harness the benefits

While implementing analytics is a complex and wide-ranging process, we at PwC have developed a straightforward but powerful approach to reduce the complexity for you and enable you to harness the power of analytics in your transformation. Let’s take a look at the steps involved and how we can support you with them.

Clarify the starting point for analytics

Scoping analytics isn’t a one-size-fits-all exercise. Depending on the nature of your organisation, the scope of analytics within your S/4HANA transformation may vary from narrow to broad. We take account of your organisation’s unique background, experiences and preferences to find the right scope for you.

Work top-down to determine the scope and framework of your analytics

We take a top-down approach to determine scope. We help you make sure there’s strong support from programme sponsors and programme management and carry out this phase early on in the process. The scope of analytics can range from enabling the new S/4HANA Embedded Analytics functionality to taking a more holistic approach. We develop an analytics framework at an early stage to guide analytics activities throughout the transformation.

Choose the right approach to integrate analytics in the programme

Analytics can be integrated on a centralised or decentralised basis. Centralised integration is recommended for a lean set-up or to drive specific innovations. A decentralised integration approach is recommended for analytics transformations. Whichever option is best for you, however, some analytics functions should always remain centralised.

Key topics for analytics to focus on

Your S/4HANA transformation should pay special attention to the following topics, which often go underappreciated:

Steering model review and KPIs
Target analytics architecture and roadmap
Future analytics governance

We help you consider all the relevant building blocks and prioritise analytics so that you reap the benefits.

Embarking on an analytics journey is a major undertaking with huge implications for your business. It’s not a decision to be taken lightly. If you need support with any aspect of implementing analytics, please reach out to us. It’s our job to reduce the complexity for you to a minimum and maximise the impact of your investment.

Alexander Etkin, Senior Manager, Advisory, PwC Switzerland