Improving Business Process Performance for SAP Landscapes – Cisco Blogs

Co-Authored by Andy Fleck

We all know that experiences matter most to our customers. Perceived delays in completing an online store order or attaining value from a paid digital service can quickly result in business lost to the competition. This means organizations need to continuously and proactively take the pulse of the underlying end-to-end business processes that deliver those customer experiences. In that way, root causes can be quickly identified and remediated before customers are impacted.

This is often much easier said than done. First, most business processes today involve multiple vendor products. For example, an online store might deploy an e-commerce website, a warehouse managed through SAP, and a payments transaction provider. All of those products would need to communicate with each other over a network–like the Internet–not controlled by the organization. When such an organization is also migrating its entire business process to run on a third-party cloud provider’s infrastructure like AWS or Azure, the situation becomes even more complex, adding several points of potential failure that could impact customer experiences.

The approach taken to this challenge by most organizations today is the infamous reactive war room. When customers are experiencing a problem, the organization gets all vendors into a physical or virtual room and doesn’t let them leave until they each prove not to be the source of the problem. The last vendor standing must be the culprit.

This reactive approach cannot resolve all issues before some have already impacted customer experiences. Because it offers no holistic visibility into the entire end-to-end process, Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) and remediate issues is slowed. Finally, managing the overall monitoring of crucial business processes requires organizational overhead and expertise while companies are focusing their limited internal resources on strategically further differentiating their core competencies instead of tactically managing IT infrastructure.

Atos’ real-time Digital Performance Management for SAP service, powered by Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco Thousand Eyes, provides a better answer.

Atos has deep expertise in managing SAP environments acquired over its more than 35-year relationship with SAP. Expanding on that expertise, Atos provides full stack observability (FSO) into a customer’s end-to-end process, utilizing AppDynamics and ThousandEyes to map business process performance to the business context that directly impacts customer experiences. Atos also provides industry-specific dashboards so that customers can view the health of their business processes tailored to the needs of their industries. Finally, Atos has core competencies for migrating to and managing SAP environments on both AWS and Azure, providing customers with one contact for proactive management of business processes that include SAP run on-premises or in the public cloud.

Deep expertise in managing SAP-enabled business processes

As a global SAP Platinum Partner, SAP Partner Managed Cloud and global value-added reseller, Atos combines it’s deep industry and SAP expertise  with a focus on business driven innovation, broad cloud capabilities, and bringing together different systems to deliver an end-to-end modernized infrastructure, all combined with Atos’ managed services. To deliver this expertise, Atos has 13,500 dedicated SAP professionals and local presences in 42 countries.

Full Stack Observability (FSO) with AppDynamics and ThousandEyes

Delivering the digital experiences customers expect and demand requires end-to-end visibility into the applications and infrastructure that support the underlying business processes. For this capability, Atos turned to its 25-year-long Cisco partnership to leverage two of Cisco’s most innovative tools in the market today:

• AppDynamics provides visibility into application performance with a business lens through its Business iQ capability, correlating full-stack performance with key business metrics mapped to customer experiences and desired business outcomes. AppDynamics provides end-to-end visibility for both SAP and non-SAP applications along the business process journey and its linkage with the underlying application code, infrastructure, and network.
• ThousandEyes provides visibility into the networks the applications and infrastructure rely on to communicate with each other. So, whereas traditional network monitoring tools provide visibility into enterprises’ own networks, they can’t measure, monitor, or help remediate issues created by network traffic flowing over the Internet. This is where ThousandEyes uniquely comes to play.

Regardless of whether SAP is run on-premises or in the public cloud, Atos leverages AppDynamics and ThousandEyes to offer a fully managed service, monitoring and managing an organization’s business process built on SAP. This managed service provides customers the benefit of an end-to-end solution, enabling them to devote their limited resources on strategically furthering their core competencies versus tactically managing IT infrastructure.

For organizations that want to take on this ongoing management responsibility, Atos also offers consulting services that help customers create their own centers of excellence in managing business processes that rely on SAP.

Risk reduction in migrating SAP processes to the cloud

In addition, by combining its own expertise with the FSO capabilities of AppDynamics and ThousandEyes, Atos can help clients move their SAP instances to the cloud, easily comparing business process performance before and after cloud migration to reduce the risk of problems created by the migration.

Proof from Atos customers

One Atos client, a major utility company, struggled with a lack of visibility across its SAP enterprise when incidents caused severe disruption to business processes. By installing AppDynamics, Atos dramatically improved the company’s operational efficiency. For example, MTTR decreased by 45 percent, saving the company US$17 million in the first year alone. In addition, the client achieved a 250 percent return on investment payback in under two years with an overall business benefit to the project of US$21 million.

Another Atos client, a global manufacturer, had taken a manual approach to addressing application performance issues, leaving the customer with very limited visibility to help pinpoint performance bottlenecks. Worse, as the company grew and SAP performance became a bigger issue, the company realized they didn’t have the internal expertise to scale. With Atos Digital Performance Management for SAP leveraging AppDynamics, the customer received a single tool to monitor end-to-end performance of SAP applications across all platforms. The result was a 70 percent decrease in production interruptions.

Proof of value offer

Atos Digital Performance Management for SAP makes it possible to analyze end-to-end business process performance across SAP and related systems, identifying bottlenecks and issues occurring in the applications, infrastructure, and network. Service disruptions can be reduced through proactive monitoring and MTTI can be reduced through end-to-end visibility, ultimately improving business process performance and customer experiences.

Of course, the reality is it’s difficult to know how much proactive business process monitoring is worth to an organization until it’s been implemented. To help quantity this benefit, Atos offers a proof-of-value exercise, which helps to demonstrate how much proactive performance management could be worth to your organization. It can reveal the scale of the savings and benefits you could enjoy, enabling you to make a more accurate business case for implementing business process monitoring.

Sound interesting? Learn more about Atos Digital Performance Management services and AppDynamics SAP Monitoring.

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