My top priorities as PwC Global SAP Alliance and Competence Leader

I’m proud to be the new PwC SAP Global SAP Alliance and Competence Leader. It’s a huge honour for me to take on this role alongside my client commitments within the UK. Here are my top four priorities as I embark on my new role and aim to take our strong PwC Global SAP Alliance to even greater heights.

1. Translating SAP’s announcements into meaningful takeaways for clients 

We won’t just repeat SAP’s announcements – we’ll interpret them and explain what they mean for our clients. This is a good way for us to provide greater business value to our customers.

For example, we’ll outline SAP’s strategy, future architecture and focus areas, and explain how this is likely to affect clients in the short, medium and long term.

2. Helping clients navigate SAP’s evolution into a cloud-focused tech company with a much broader remit 

You might have noticed that SAP S/4HANA was barely mentioned at this year’s SAP Sapphire. That’s because SAP is no longer focused on selling best-of-breed solutions. It’s taking a much more holistic view and transforming three layers of the enterprise tech stack: data, applications and AI. As a client, you’ll say what you want to do and get the technology you need to make it happen. This approach requires broad expertise beyond what most systems integrators can offer.

SAP’s new approach is a natural evolution of the company’s journey over last few years. For example, SAP shifted from selling SAP S/4HANA to RISE and GROW. It then launched Business Data Cloud, a partnership with Databricks, Joule and its integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot, among other innovations. This transition shows that SAP has big aspirations to compete with other major B2B tech players.

As my colleague Nico Reichen, SAP Data and Analytics Leader, PwC Germany, says:

Just like other large B2B tech companies, SAP is encouraging clients to move to cloud. This changes SAP’s business model, as clients will pay based on consumption, not licences. We’ll help clients navigate this new pricing structure to ensure that revenue growth isn’t swallowed up by increasing IT costs. In particular, we’ll work with clients to boost business performance through embedding AI-enabled services. We’re uniquely positioned to do this, since we offer deep expertise in technology, industries, compliance, tax, legal risks and more.

Furthermore, we’ll work hard to help clients retain their identities and USPs in a world where they’re encouraged to embrace public cloud and run the same business processes as every other company in their industry.

3. Continuing to be a strong partner to SAP

We’re excited to continue partnering with SAP to develop powerful co-innovations – especially around SAP Business Suite, SAP Business Data Cloud and Business Technology Platform. We’ve already won multiple awards – including SAP Innovation Awards for our CSRD.AI Manager, Check Your Value Chain, and ESG Reporting Manager – CSRD solutions, plus an SAP Pinnacle Award for SAP BTP – Data and AI Growth. We want to build on this success.

In addition, we’re aligning our delivery methodology with SAP’s AI-first, suite-first strategy. Plus, we’re developing offerings like PwC’s Cloud ERP Express to help smaller companies take advantage of SAP technology.

4. Better connecting our PwC global network 

In my new role, I’m keen to encourage greater consistency and collaboration across PwC territories. I want to make sure that everyone is empowered by the immense knowledge and experience we have across our network. In particular, I’m excited to showcase success stories and share them across our member firms. I firmly believe that excellent knowledge sharing can help us deliver greater value to our firms and our clients.

Closing thoughts

Looking at SAP’s journey over the past few years, it’s clear that the company is taking a more holistic approach to addressing clients’ business needs. We’re the right partner to help, because we have the broad expertise required to support clients end-to-end across all aspects of SAP implementations. It’s heartening to see how SAP’s vision dovetails beautifully with PwC’s new brand ethos – delivering transformation to help clients reach the leading edge of their industries.

As I embark on the first weeks and months in my new role, I look forward to meeting even more of our clients and SAP experts. Our global team is here to guide you – please get in touch.