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By Haider Pasha, Sr. Director and Chief Security Officer for Emerging Markets at Palo Alto Networks

Cybersecurity has long been one of the most complex landscapes an organization must navigate; with each new threat or vulnerability, complexity continues to grow. This is especially true for organizations that have traditionally taken a point product approach to their security because implementing new security measures properly and reliably takes time and expertise. Today, as more businesses look to digitize their services, dealing with these cybersecurity challenges is no longer optional.

Every new tool must be installed, tested, and validated, and then people must be trained to leverage them well. On average, organizations are adopting dozens of different products, services, and tools for their cybersecurity. So, finding ways to make implementing cybersecurity smoother, faster, and more efficient has become a key goal for cybersecurity professionals. As businesses plan for a post-pandemic and digitally accelerated era, many CISOs across multiple industries strive for simplicity and focus on reducing their security vendor blueprint as part of their annual KPIs. Implementation, in particular, has always been an important consideration for successful cybersecurity programs because of the time, expense, personnel, and expertise often required not only to implement individual point products but to stitch them together in order to avoid security gaps while also eliminating redundancies. In the event of a serious incident, security operations center (SOC) analysts typically confess to switching between multiple vendor consoles and event types in order to decipher alerts. Organizations and teams need a better approach, so they’re not either continually exposed or overworked from the alerts created by overlap.

Implementation Benefits of Cybersecurity Platforms

Research conducted by Palo Alto Networks with a wide range of its customers, supplemented by additional first-person, one-on-one interviews, highlighted a range of implementation benefits that result from taking a platform approach to cybersecurity architecture. By definition, a platform is the culmination of integrated points, such as integrated threat intelligence using automation and orchestration across a variety of security tools to take action against incidents in real time and as one system. This approach helps ease the procurement, management, and operations of the cybersecurity stack while reducing cyber risk. Deploying multiple products from different vendors typically requires a level of expertise beyond the capabilities of many in-house teams. Rather than “buying” implementation resources from consultants or cybersecurity services companies, organizations are looking for a more integrated approach to solutions implementation. Platforms, such as those provided by Palo Alto Networks, smooth and facilitate implementation while reducing the risk often associated with integrating different products in a seamless manner

Identifying the Top Areas of Value

Respondents surveyed on the implementation benefits pinpointed five specific areas where a platform approach delivers tangible value:

Reducing solutions complexity and the number of integration pointsDecreasing deployment timeCutting the risk of time and budget overrunsTrimming deployment effort and personnel “touches”Reducing the amount of practitioner and user training

On average, respondents said that our platforms helped them reduce solution complexity and the number of integration points by 29%, while each of the other four benefits resulted in savings of approximately 23.3%. As organizations evolve their cloud infrastructure, for example, taking a platform approach helps reduce the number of vendors required to secure multiple instances on the cloud, such as containers, serverless systems, and traditional virtual machines. By binding the cloud security tools under one management system, the complexity of deployment as well as the procurement process means that customers are able to scale their cloud infrastructure much faster than before.

This generally translates to cost savings in the form of faster security policy updates, incident management lifecycles, and reduction of alerts. In fact, according to calculations made by Palo Alto Networks related to customers’ actual implementation costs, a typical organization can achieve an annual economic benefit of more than $500,000 by utilizing a cybersecurity platform model for solutions implementation. In customer interviews, those operational and financial benefits of implementation were brought into greater focus.

“Earlier on, we had at least four to six different integration points just for firewalls and endpoint security before we went with Palo Alto,” said one customer. Using Palo Alto Networks platforms, customers are able to standardize and unify security policies and reduce their risk exposure due to the likelihood of reduced human errors.

As a platform-based approach encourages an open consortium of cybersecurity vendors, customers see the value of this ecosystem: “Having one ecosystem really does get a lot of efficiencies with integrations being so seamless.” Yet another client put it succinctly: “People already know how to do troubleshooting.”

Another tangential yet very important implementation benefit to platforms is the ability to overcome the much-discussed cybersecurity skills gap. By consolidating all cybersecurity tools under the same architecture with easy integration and common connectors, organizations alleviate the need for armies of technical staff—each with different certifications and experiences—to integrate new tools as the need occurs.

As organizations look for comprehensive solutions and services to secure the network, cloud, and endpoint and optimize their SOC, our Palo Alto Networks portfolio of platforms allows them best-in-class capabilities along with leading third-party evaluations and efficacy tests, and together, deliver coordinated security enforcement across our customers.

Read the full research study here.

About Haider Pasha:

Haider Pasha is Sr. Director and Chief Security Officer for Emerging Markets at Palo Alto Networks. Over the course of his 20 year IT career, Mr. Pasha has held various certifications, including CCNP, CCSP, CISSP, CCIE (Security) and CEH.

Cyberattacks, IT Leadership

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As transformational IT has increasingly become a business imperative, implementation partners have been looking to strengthen their value proposition for their customers. To differentiate themselves from transactional service providers, the more proactive partners are evolving their offerings and approaches, thereby becoming more strategic than they had been in the past.

While IT leaders can maximize the opportunity arising out of this shift by leveraging the partners’ strategies and advanced capabilities, it’s important for them to maintain focus on the risks. Here’s a look at how implementation providers are evolving and how CIOs should approach partnering with them for mutual success.

Shifting to a transformation approach

There is a perceptible change in the way implementation partners are now approaching their clients as compared to earlier, and it is all about becoming a strategic partner for transformational change.

“A partner now enters an account with a broader area of engagement in mind. The discussions may be around a specific project with a CIO, such as implementing a typical solution like Oracle or SAP ERP, but the partner’s core agenda is to bring about an extensive and comprehensive transformation of the client’s IT infrastructure,” says Harnath Babu, CIO at KPMG.

“As the project progresses, the partner discusses the CIO’s pain points and what could alleviate them. This could invariably lead to the partner’s scope getting expanded into, but not limited to, managing emerging technologies, enhancing cost and operational efficiencies, bringing about automation, application development, or improving the system of records,” he says. “Implementation partners are clearly moving from the earlier point approach to a transformation approach.”

Sharing an example of this as it unfolded at KPMG, Babu says, “We engaged with a system integrator to help us with L1/L2 support. In a short time, we scaled it to L3. We found that we could also leverage the partner for managing our infrastructure. Next, we asked the partner to help us with POD development as it was a big challenge to find skilled resources,” says Babu. “So, what started as an L1/L2 service engagement, eventually led to infrastructure management and resource augmentation.”

The POD, or product oriented delivery, is a software development model that entails building small, self-sufficient cross-functional teams that take care of specific requirements or tasks for a project.

Takeaways for CIOs from this trend: Leveraging one partner instead of many frees up CIOs and their teams from more boilerplate deployments, allowing them to focus on what is core to the business. “An implementation partner looks at the total value generated from an account. Therefore, if a CIO gives value to the partner, the latter will reciprocate. This will give CIOs the confidence of having a strong partner behind them. There can then be a project director to manage the project on a day-to-day basis and the CIO can intervene only when there is budget or strategy involved,” says Babu.

 

Building Centers of Excellence 

With the aim of adding value to their customers, implementation partners are increasingly realizing the importance of building technological expertise.

“To keep pace with the market and stay relevant, implementation partners are building on human capital and expertise. For instance, most partners lacked competency in cloud as there wasn’t much requirement related to it in the past. However, as cloud is gaining a strong traction, they have also upped the ante,” says Subramanya C, global CTO at business process management company Sagility (formerly HGS Healthcare). 

So, when Subramanya decided to move the company’s SAP, SharePoint portal, intranet, and other applications to the cloud, he roped in a partner who had a Center of Excellence on cloud and 12 to 15 subject matter experts (SME) on the technology.

“Partners with such capabilities were not seen in the past,” he says. “More than 100 servers had to be migrated in a few weeks. Immense planning, resources, and mitigation of risk were involved in the project. However, the partner’s strong technical expertise, which formed the basis of the center of excellence, made sure that the project got completed smoothly and as per the scheduled plan,” says Subramanya.

Takeaways for CIOs from this trend: Although implementation partners can provide deeper expertise than they could in the past, IT leaders should not be complacent when enlisting it. “For complex projects, like ours, strong governance is required from the enterprise technology leader’s end,” Subramanya says. “IT leaders can outsource a task or an activity to a partner and their SME, but they can’t outsource their responsibilities. Therefore, we ensured a strong governance framework was in place while implementing this project. We also had our own SME working in close collaboration with the partner’s experts.”

 

Collaborating with other partners

The evolution of technology, driven by modernization of applications and services, is catalyzing collaboration among system integrators.

As Archie Jackson, head of special initiatives, IT, and security at digital transformation company Incedo says, “I have seen system integrators coming together to offer solutions, a trend that wasn’t visible in the past. Today, products don’t work in silos. One product has multiple linkages with other products, and it orchestrates and expands into other areas. For instance, a security solution today is not limited only to the network. It is connected to end point and applications, too. Therefore, one project could spill over to another. A partner, however, may not have the expertise or the bandwidth to execute everything, which leads to collaboration with other partners.”

Incedo was in talks with a partner some time back for implementing managed links for connectivity. The end-to-end managed service would have offered remote connectivity to access corporate network from anywhere in the world.

“During the conversations, the partner suggested he could bring another implementation partner to enhance the cybersecurity of the links. It came across as a logical fit because the links had to be secure, but I had not seen a partner collaborating with another one like this in the past,” says Jackson. Takeaways for CIOs from this trend: One implementation partner bringing another partner may help a CIO, but it could also increase the cost of the project. “This is a good option only if a CIO wants to build capability. The primary partner will build his margin into the project for which he is getting the second partner, thereby increasing the cost for the CIO.  If CIOs have the capacity to architect a solution more efficiently, they should do so in-house,” says Jackson.

IT Strategy

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Not every IT project can be completed end-to-end with in-house talent. For CIOs who lack the full-time technical resources needed for deploying a solution, such as an ERP or a CRM system, often for the first time in their organizations, an implementation partner can play a key role in the project’s success.

Implementation partners offer CIOs broad experience and expertise in deploying solutions at a range of companies. The learnings thus accrued for partners can be leveraged by CIOs for their own implementations to avoid common mistakes and save a lot of time and effort.

Moreover, implementation partners provide the all-important bandwidth needed for a successful deployment of standard applications, allowing IT leaders to focus on more critical areas of the business.

As Naresh Pathak, CIO at Gurgaon, India-based civil construction company GR Infraprojects Limited, says, “I have 15 members in my SAP team but majority of them have functional rather than technical roles. Therefore, the in-house team can make only small tweaks in the workflow. For any major change, we must seek external help from a partner. Also, it is increasingly becoming tough to retain technical talent, more so after the pandemic. If crucial resources leave in the middle of a project, filling up the position takes time as the recruitment process is long. An implementation partner provides us dedicated resources to ensure our projects continue seamlessly.”

Implementation partners strive to deliver on time as their payments are linked to the delivery of the project. Also, the partners help in documentation of the project and in retaining and transferring the knowledge within the organization — attributes that are crucial for the overall long-term success of any technology project.

But not all implementation partnerships go smoothly or end up being successful. Several issues can crop up while engaging with a partner, and it is important to identify these pitfalls lest the projects fall short on expectations or even fail miserably. Here are some strategies recommended by senior IT leaders that could help prevent you from getting burned by your implementation partners.

Complement your partner with a purpose-built team

San Francisco-based Ashish Agarwal, senior director of product management, CX, and strategic programs at ATM manufacturer Diebold Nixdorf, is well-versed in the shortcomings of implementation partnerships.

“One of the most significant challenges that companies face with implementation partners is their lack of understanding of client’s business and strategic objectives,” he says.

“I have experienced similar situations across industries that I have worked with, whether it was implementing enterprise-wide analytics at a health insurance company or automation of end-to-end onboard catering process at an airline. The technology implementation partners usually talk about technologies and toolsets but depend deeply on the customer for knowledge around their business operations,” says Agarwal, who previously worked as head of technology at IndiGo Airlines and Apollo Munich Health Insurance.

Sudip Mazumder, head-digital at Larsen & Toubro, an Indian multinational engaged in manufacturing and engineering procurement construction (EPC) projects, says due to the partners’ lack of understanding “the business processes, nuances, exceptions, mandatory items, workflow, and state models, they are unable to provide a robust business function blueprint. Instead of customizing a solution based on an organization’s specific business and technology environment, the partner implements it in a straightjacketed manner. The approach is bolt-on when it should be built-in.”

In such cases, implementation partners can be prone to poor design practices, he says, especially when it comes to modular, scalable, and extensible systems.

“In many cases I see that designers are not even starting with an ERD [entity relationship diagram], which clearly demonstrate what kinds of relationship or data structure, or usage of global variables are required. As a result, design becomes inflexible, resulting in cost and time overrun,” he says.

Agarwal says the key then is to complement your implementation partner.

“We realized this nuance ahead of our implementation and designed an internal team to complement the partner with business knowledge, solution design, and change management,” he says. “It’s important to design a team that leverages the strengths of the implementation partner and complements it with other internal or external team members to set up transformational programs for success.”

This process, Agarwal says, begins as early as the partner evaluation phase. “We must realize that to maximize the outcome, heavy lifting is on the client side as well as the implementation partner,” he says.

In assembling their team, CIOs should “employ key business analysts of adequate functional knowledge and communication skills,” Mazumder says. “IT leaders should also use good solution architects with experience of enterprise applications skills with adequate overseeing by senior designers.”

Build a foolproof contract

CIOs should also be aware that implementation partners can sometimes find loopholes in contracts and use them to their advantage.

Ashok Jade, group CIO of auto component manufacturer Spark Minda, points out that bigger partners often outsource the work to smaller players, “which leads to a CIO eventually

working with unskilled vendors. This happens when the agreement between the partner and the enterprise is not well thought through,” he says.

Pathak encountered this problem when he joined GR Infraprojects. “Before I joined, the company had decided to move from Google Cloud Platform to Azure and had engaged with an implementation partner about a year back. The project scope involved migration, capacity planning, and support,” he says.

“Migrating O365’s email and collaboration was easy but migrating the complete instance of SAP to Azure was complex. Therefore, when the project went live in April, our SAP deployment in Azure encountered a lot of performance problems. We also noticed that the support ticket was going to a third party, which is when we realized it was outsourced to it by our implementation partner,” Pathak says.

GR Infraprojects’ contract with its implementation partner didn’t prohibit the use of third parties. “The partner didn’t have the requisite technical capability to handle the project. It was good with selling licenses but not adept at handling projects of this level,” he says. To this day, the company’s Azure environment still isn’t stable, and the company is considering repatriating the workloads.

“From this experience, we learnt that it’s extremely important to draft the agreement carefully to make it foolproof,” Pathak says. “Also, a CIO should do background research in the market about the partner’s capabilities before signing up.”

When there is ambiguity in contracts, especially around goals and metrics, both parties will often have their own interpretation of the expectations, Agarwal says. “Avoid ambiguity on expectations and potential measures of success as much as possible. Also, be clear about how the two teams will handle situations that fall outside expectations.”

Avoid big bang approach

The rise of next-generation technologies such as IoT and low-code no-code has given rise to a new breed of implementation partners that focus on projects involving such technologies.

“There’s always a tradeoff between working with an established implementation partner versus a startup,” Spark Minda’s Jade says. “As compared to the credible and entrenched Tier I partners, startup partners are agile, but their processes aren’t well established. Therefore, a lot of time is spent in signing agreements and doing the paperwork.”

CIOs should be prepared to spend a lot of time hand-holding less experienced partners, he says, adding that startup partners can also end up shuttering due to management issues or financial problems, leaving CIOs in the lurch. “To take advantage of a startup implementation partner, one should ideally go ahead in a phased manner,” he says.

For example, when partnering with a stratup to integrate 100 CNC machines with IoT, Spark Minda chose to first integrate just 10 machines. “In the second phase, we covered 20 machines. The subsequent phases saw 30 and 40 machines being taken up respectively,” says Jade.

Design for change

It’s also important to plan for change. For large transformational projects, not every detail is known at the onset of the project. Plus, when deploying an agile implementation approach, programs are progressively elaborated.

“It’s important to plan for absorbing these changes from a financial, implementation, and business process perspective,” Agarwal says. “Do not lock yourself into relationships that tend to forecast outcomes over long periods of time. Change is the only constant and it’s important to ensure that you’ve set up your relationship with your implementation partner to be able to support changes that come along the way.”

Leverage standardized templates

Working with top implementation partners who have well-established processes comes with its own set of challenges.

“Established processes have their dark side,” says Jade. “It could take days and even weeks to sign an NDA as the partner’s team spends too much time on the legal language and clauses. Even a small change in the project could take two to three days as partner would follow the laid-out rules that would include referring to the card rate and having discussions at various levels, including with the project manager and the top management.”

To expedite the process, Jade says, “NDAs are fairly standardized these days. Rather than drafting one from scratch, a CIO should pick a standard template. After all, it’s the intention that matters and not the language.”

For removing the bottlenecks in the approval process from his end, Jade has delegated signing authority to the project manager. “All approvals need not come to my desk. Delegating authority helps speed up things,” he says.

Forge direct relationships with your partner’s management team

Having a strong rapport with the implementation partner’s C-suite can help a CIO wriggle out of a sticky situation.

Pathak describes one such commitment failure on the part of one of GR Infraprojects’ partners. “The company has 20,000 to 25,000 trucks, dumpers, and JCB machines. To meet the fueling needs of these vehicles, we have a tie up with Indian Oil Corp. Ltd. As we wanted to update the refueling date, quantity supplied and payment details directly into our systems, an implementation partner was roped in to bring about integration of SAP and IoT,” he says. “However, even after more than a year and a half, the project still hasn’t gone

live. This was because the implementation partner shifted its focus from the corporate sector to government, leaving the former’s projects in limbo.”

The project, which was started before Pathak joined the company, could have benefitted by a stronger relationship with the partner, he says.

“A good rapport also helps in resolving conflicts that are too common in promoter-led companies where the project scope changes often, leading to disputes,” Pathak says. “Leveraging his bonds with the partner company’s leadership, a CIO can get both sides to engage and resolve the dispute. There should not be any ego in the partner ecosystem and a CIO should have a great personal and professional relationship.”

Establish a shared vision

It’s important to share your strategic vision and business goals with your implementation partners so there can be shared clarity around the project and its measures of success.

“The implementation partner is a key contributor to business objectives and should have absolute transparency on the progress towards the program goals,” Agarwal says. “Many a times, companies do not establish a trust relationship with implementation partners and think of it as a zero-sum game. This approach leads to a relationship that is transactional and does not deliver full potential of a partnership.”

To be strategic, CIOs must ensure true partnerships with their implementation providers. Anything less can jeopardize the likelihood of delivering successful results.

Project Management

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Ease of implementation and return on investment (ROI), combined with ease of use, continue to dominate the business to business (B2B) software buying process, according to a report from software marketplace G2.

The report, which is based on a survey of 1,002 global decision-makers with responsibility for, or influence over, purchase decisions for departments, multiple departments, operating units, or entire businesses, showed that at least 93% of respondents indicate the quality of the implementation process is very important when deciding whether to renew a software product.

The respondents said they are looking for the least amount of friction while adding a new solution or software to their technology stack and that ease of implementation can add to the frictionless experience, according to the report.

In fact, 77% of respondents indicated they have either worked with a vendor’s implementation team or have worked with a third-party vendor for implementation, as opposed to 34% of respondents indicating that they handle implementation with their internal teams.

These implementation teams play a pivotal role as they shape an opinion about vendors and can help make contract renewals easier, the report noted.

Pricing no longer an effective sales tool

Pricing, according to the respondents, was the second-least favored factor in the buying process. The survey showed that sticker price is no longer a sales tool and has been replaced by proof of return in investment.

The decision makers ranked ease of implementation as the top important factor while ROI within six months and ease of use were the second and third most important factors among 12 other considerations, including price, as part of the buying process.

The survey data showed that these decision makers want to achieve ROI quickly and believe that an easy implementation process combined with an easy-to-use product may help them generate returns faster.

Lower switching costs affect renewal rates

At least 53% of respondents surveyed said they conduct research and consider alternatives when a product is up for renewal as opposed to 45% claiming they renew the software they already use without considering other options. This phenomenon can be attributed to increasing options and lower switching costs, the report showed.

However, the group of decision makers that renews a product without considering options is growing slowly. There has been a 3% increase year-on-year for the same category, according to the report.

Vendors must make information such as proof of ROI available in early stages of adoption in places where these decision makers frequent for researching new products, as a majority of decision makers are still looking for alternative products, the report said.

At least 76% of respondents said product and service review websites are trustworthy and transparency in the validation of the reviews is key. More than 33% of decision-makers surveyed said transparent validation of reviews is the most helpful feature when using online software or service review sites.

The report also shows that most enterprises have a six-month contract period, which leaves limited time for vendors to make an impression on the buyer. At least 57% of respondents said they have a six-month period compared to just 11% stating that they have two-year or multiyear contracts in place.

Buying directly from vendors is slowing down

Buyers are slowly shying away from buying directly from vendors, the report highlighted. Only 60% of respondents said they bought directly from vendors, a 9% decrease from the previous year.

Alternatively, buyers are increasingly purchasing software from third-party marketplaces and value-added resellers (VARs), according to the report.

At least 28% of respondents said they were buying software from third-party marketplaces, an increase of 6% from the previous year’s survey. Further, 11% of respondents said they were buying software from VARs, a 4% increase year-on-year.

Buying committee changes complicate purchase process

The B2B buying journey, according to the report, is becoming increasingly complex due to changes in buying committees. At least 80% of respondents said their enterprises or organizations have such committees in place.

More than 67% of respondents said buying-decision makers are changed frequently or nearly always during the software buying process, up by 15% from previous year’s survey.

Another challenge is that the buying committee is more likely to have changed at the time of renewal from when the product was originally purchased, the report showed.

IT Strategy, Software Licensing

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Competition in the entertainment industry has never been as intense as it is today. For decades, the movie business in the U.S. was dominated by a handful of entertainment conglomerates, known as “The Big Five”: Disney, Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros, and Sony Pictures. But these days, an ever-blossoming field of cable networks and streaming services – from Apple to Hulu to YouTubeTV – have gotten into the act and are not only featuring work created by the established Hollywood titans but producing high-quality content of their own.

What all this adds up to is a huge amount of content. Which means a huge amount of choice. Which means a huge amount of competition.

This is a brutal environment for content producers whose business depends on catching and holding the attention of viewers who have choices – so many choices. It’s never been more critical to an entertainment company’s success to function with maximum efficiency, especially when it comes to handling its data.

Sony Pictures Entertainment needed to up their game

Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) had a problem. Their enormous volume of data was split between two separate SAP ERP systems, causing delays in data access and loading, creating gaps in historical reporting, and preventing them from using the latest accounting principles to manage their lead ledger. These inefficiencies affected everything from accounting to production planning.

SPE wanted to combine their rich reservoirs of data into a single, readily accessible, insights-driven platform that would provide a single source of truth, improving efficiency while reducing cost of ownership and removing redundancies.

Doubling down on risky business

When a large organization depends on a highly customized ERP system, any change invites a host of potential perils from go-live failures to endless testing cycles. The process is risky enough when upgrading a single legacy ERP – with two, the risks more than double. And when you’re proposing to implement change while the vehicle is already in motion, there’s no room for error.

In technical terms, SPE’s mission was to re-implement SAP S/4HANA from a combination of legacy SAP S/4HANA and SAP ERP Central Component systems, while making numerous value-added process improvements including standardizing document types, eliminating retired accounts, and improving overall data quality.

As with any perilous mission, success would depend on a combination of the right strategy and the right team.

The Strategy – ESOAR lets Sony roar

SPE adopted a five-phase strategy known as ESOAR, which stands for Eliminate, Standardize, Optimize, Automate, Robotize.

Phase one, “Eliminate”, identifies and eliminates wasteful, inefficient and redundant business activities.Phase two, “Standardize”, seeks to implement business processes that are standardized in strict alignment with business priorities and goals – the key here is guidance and approval from key stakeholders to ensure that standards serve their needs, rather than standardization for its own stake.Phase three, “Optimize”, introduces technological solutions wherever machines can perform more effectively and efficiently than their human counterparts, freeing up people to devote their skills and energy to areas where the human factor is critical.Phase four, “Automate”, introduces new technologies, such as machine learning and AI, to increase intelligence or add new functionalities to existing solutions.Phase five, “Robotize”, builds on the previous phase by deploying robots to handle repetitive or simple tasks, further liberating people to focus on activities only human beings can perform.

All for one – one for all

A strategy is only as good as the people who carry it out. To ensure that they would accomplish their mission with maximal success and minimal disruption to the enterprise, Sony Pictures engaged SAP’s ActiveAttention services, which leverage not only SAP’s technology but its people. It is a program that establishes a Front Office, a Mission Control Center, and a Transformation Hub, bringing SAP experts into the organization to assist with all aspects of implementing SAP solutions in a complex system landscape.

SPE and SAP worked together as one change management team. Thanks to this partnership, the mission was a success, yielding a 60% reduction in finance systems operating costs, 80% data load improvement leading to continuous accounting optimization, and cutting the project timeline due to SAP enterprise services methodology by six months.

Bill Stellman, SPE’s Executive Vice President – Global Finance Operations, hailed the partnership approach: “The level of commitment, project management and collaboration across all teams was not just unprecedented but has raised the bar for all projects to come.”

To learn more about SPE’s amazing accomplishment that earned them an SAP Innovation Award for 2022, check out their award pitch deck.

Data Management