With each quarterly earnings announcement showing dramatic increases in cloud ERP revenue, SAP’s strategic shift to S/4HANA cloud services is clearly now in full swing. In Q1 2024, revenue from the Cloud ERP Suite was up 32% and reached $3.48 billion US, marking nine straight quarters of 30%-plus growth. 

Recent posts in this series have provided updates on SAP RISE and GROW, with a focus on how they can help streamline the path for companies migrating to SAP public and private cloud editions.  This new episode drills down into the concept of maintaining a "clean core" in your ERP system to assure a solid foundation that minimizes unnecessary customization, which could impede organizational agility going forward.

In too many instances, as CIOs and CFOs implement new software to improve finance processes, the expediency of getting systems up and running quickly can create isolated silos of inefficiency across the enterprise-wide technology landscape.  

The resulting build up of patchwork software systems is sometimes referred to as "Digital Debt".  As with real world debt, Digital Debt must be serviced with high on-going costs; primarily in the form of low productivity, time-consuming data reconciliation,  lack of end-to-end visibility and continuous maintenance updates.

John Froelich, VP of Strategy and Marketing at Bramasol discusses the concept of Digital Debt, which tends to build up within companies as they make incremental and expedient changes to various disparate processes.