The Silicon Partners
Broadening the Scope of ERP

Given their pillar-like role in streamlining business processes, it is imperative that ERP systems remain well integrated to emerging technologies such as cloud, RPA, and AI/ML that businesses are increasingly adopting. “Bits-and-pieces” integration of solutions based on these technologies undermines the very purpose of ERP.

Enter The Silicon Partners (TSP)— An IT company focusing on SAP services, including SAP S/4HANA implementation, migration and support, Robotic Process Automation (SAP, UiPath), and AI/ML. “We take the benefits from all of these technologies and help customers by developing a well-integrated cutting-edge solution,” says Ravi Chowdhury, Founder, and CEO of the company.

Being at the forefront of enabling enterprise transformations, TSP's dedicated team holds rich SAP and IT services expertise. Today, the company is growing at a fast pace, with revenue and headcount witnessing double growth in a matter of three years.

In an interview with CIOApplications, Chowdhury, along with Sandeep Mathur, Partner and Head of Delivery at TSP, talks about the evolving ERP landscape, the major pain points that their customers are facing, and how TSP has positioned itself to help them.

What are some of the challenges your clients come up to you with, and how is TSP helping them to mitigate them?

One of the biggest challenges that our customers face revolves around utilizing SAP to its highest potential to drive maximum value and bridge the gap that a typical transaction-oriented ERP provides. They have also been keen to know how we can cater to their internal business users in terms of providing them with additional features, functionalities, automation and empowering them with the consumerization of the existing enterprise application space.

We help our customers by mapping the prowess of RPA, AI,ML, and cloud on to one ERP solution to maximize the value of their investment. We also provide TSP Kelvin, a simple yet powerful assessment tool that helps expedite the powerful features of SAP S/4HANA. It works exclusively on the extracts from a customer's SAP ERP system and does not require any installation or code deployment on the customer's landscape.

In addition to this, TSP has also launched S/4HANA HANAtizer RPA bots. These bots are included as part of our SAP services for automating S/4HANA migration process.

What is TSP’s unique methodology that has helped its clients in seamlessly adapting to SAP S/4 HANA?

We align ourselves with the roadmap and methodologies of our clients.

We begin with a proof of concepts from the sandbox and then move on to the methodology recommended by the product companies. We've become very agile and flexible in taking feedback from our clients, approaching system design, adapting to changes, and delivering and supporting. Based on our customers' bespoke needs, we can have a center of excellence (CoE) based support, where we provide the organization with best practices and hyper support.

Apart from this, we also offer a seamless migration from ECC to S/4 HANA. We give clients an option to test S/4HANA on a sandbox that will condition their scenarios, infrastructure, and database on S/4 HANA and allow them to play around with it. This helps our customers to get proof of concept on how S/4 HANA would work for them.

Could you tell us about a particular customer success instance where TSP came in and helped its client? Also, please give us a brief overview of the before and after scenario.

One of our clients had a strong footprint in core ECC and SAP products of IBP and Ariba. They were pondering over whether to choose S/4 HANA or not. We tried to comprehensively understand their requirements during our discussion and know whether they want to implement Brownfield or Greenfield. We did a lot of whiteboarding brainstorming and evaluated their objectives, gain, and loss.

We started with a sandbox activity through which we could use a copy of their production system and migrated them into an S/4 HANA system within six weeks and gave it to their team for internal evaluation. We also helped them define new scenarios, innovations, transactions, and new Fiori apps. This enabled them to identify what works best for them.
For a cost-effective S/4 HANA migration, we used our in-house assessment tool, TSP Kelvin, to expedite the powerful features of SAP S/4HANA. Once the extracts from a customer’s SAP ERP system are uploaded to the tool, TSP Kelvin runs algorithms to analyze key parameters contributing to the migration effort. By using our tool, customers were able to identify the top 50 to70 important transactions and processes that made a big impact on their ROI.

Similarly, on the RPA side, a big life sciences company was facing a dilemma in choosing RPA. We came in and did a workshop to discuss their top pain points. After thorough analysis, we came up with five use cases which were impactful for them. To the end customers, we did a quick POC on our system that was demonstrated live to over 140 users worldwide. It was well received from a presentation point of view, and we were also able to show them how the Bots can resolve their problem. Although there were many competitors, including the big fours, we won the deal, as I believe our approach was closer to reality.

I believe having the ability to understand the challenges, help customers visualize the solution, and being close to reality is what helped us make a winning proposition.

What does the future hold for the company?

Being in the SAP landscape for over 20 years, going through major migrations, implementations, and upgrades for our customers, we have realized that more than 40 percent of the time is consumed by testing in every project. To make the testing process more efficient, we have developed RPA test bots for S/4 HANA 2020 on all the major practices and scenarios. This means that while project deployment, implementation, or migration, we can automate the testing portion of our customer’s business process. This end-to-end testing process will reduce over 70 to 80 percent of the time and reduce risk, timeline, and project cost. This major offering will also be available as an independent service to customers who may have a different partner for a project, but they can use us for their integration testing.

We have taken up another initiative from a tools standpoint to help our customers with their projects. We plan to add more capabilities to our in-build tool TSP Kelvin and include our process mining capabilities, heat map analysis, and complexity mapper. We are also developing a tool to help migration activities much smoother and efficiently.

In the near future, we are also aiming to solidify and expand our SAP footprint while developing some solutions in partnership with the Google Cloud Platform for SAP customers.