How the RISE with SAP Validated Partner recognition enables partners to unlock the power of SAP Business Suite

Businesses today rightly expect faster value realization, streamlined implementations, and solutions that are flexible, scalable, and embedded with intelligent technologies, such as AI.

With the launch earlier this year of SAP Business Suite, a unified system integrating applications, data, and AI to seamlessly connect and optimize every business function, customers can benefit from a continuous cycle of value and unlock innovation faster and easier than ever before.

By embarking on the RISE with SAP journey, existing SAP ERP customers can modernize with a cloud ERP landscape and realize the full potential of SAP Business Suite. To ensure businesses have the foundation needed to fully leverage the suite’s capabilities, a successful implementation is crucial.

Our RISE with SAP project delivery is undergoing a profound shift, empowering our service partner ecosystem to meet these heightened expectations with innovative methodologies, comprehensive tools, and validation programs.

The new paradigm: customer priorities in SAP projects

Today’s organizations grapple with complex legacy processes, siloed data, and highly customized systems. They seek:

• Speed to value: Building a resilient digital backbone that delivers measurable benefits within weeks or months
• Industry-standard solutions: Minimizing costly customizations to enable faster deployment, simplified upgrades, and easier maintenance
• Reusable intellectual property: Configurations over modifications ensure portability and scalability
• Operational modernization: Leveraging automation and standardized processes to reduce redundancies and risks and improve data access
• Embedded AI and automation: Accelerating decision cycles, reducing manual efforts, and enhancing accuracy

SAP’s response: enabling partners to drive customer success

SAP recognizes that delivering on these expectations requires a strategic partnership approach, combining the future-proof cloud and AI innovations with disciplined governance, clear ownership and accountability, and best practices. Our approach centers on the RISE with SAP Methodology, complemented by an integrated toolchain and a dedicated focus on partner capability enhancement.

RISE with SAP Methodology: framework for agile transformation

The RISE with SAP Methodology provides a comprehensive pathway that emphasizes a clean core architecture, standardized best practices, and collaborative implementation strategies. Included are:

• Standardized framework: Building scalable, repeatable project road maps that cater to diverse industry requirements, from streamlined deployments to complex, multinational programs
• Integrated toolchain: Enabling seamless collaboration with SAP tools, such as SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and SAP Build — powered by AI — to ensure data consistency and process automation
• Expert guidance: From discovery to deployment, SAP and qualified partners guide projects, focusing on value creation and risk mitigation

The results speak for themselves. Customer outcomes include:

• Up to 30 percent reduction in transformation costs
• Up to 35 percent faster realization of benefits
• Up to 70 percent increase in business agility
• Up to 40 percent acceleration in innovation cycles

RISE with SAP Validated Partner recognition: elevating our service partner ecosystem

SAP is committed to ensuring our partners have the necessary skills and certifications to stay aligned with this evolving landscape. To that end, we’ve introduced the RISE with SAP Validated Partner recognition. Launched in 2024, this program recognizes partners that demonstrate excellence in delivering SAP large and complex cloud ERP projects with consistency and quality.

Qualified partners that accept SAP’s invitation must adhere to clear guidelines, including:

• Global adoption of RISE with SAP Methodology: Ensuring consistency across all delivery teams and regions
• Focus on clean core quality gates: Partner projects must document the respective clean core quality gates in SAP Cloud ALM
• Enhanced toolchain utilization: A strong emphasis on automation, collaboration, and project governance through SAP’s integrated platform suite
• Professional certifications: Equipping key roles — project managers, developers, architects, consultants — with updated, in-demand skills aligned with SAP’s cloud and AI innovations

Ensuring partner success: tools, training, and innovation

The RISE with SAP Validated Partner recognition is underpinned by a close alignment between qualified partners and SAP teams throughout all engagements, from sales to delivery, ensuring early identification of any potential barriers, to success.

Additionally, SAP invests heavily in supporting partners with resources such as funding and incentives, learning journeys and certification programs, certification academies and live sessions, and a vibrant Partner learning manager community where partners can share best practices, access the latest updates, and collaborate with SAP experts (log-in required).

To help customers harness the full potential of AI to drive value, partners must apply tools like Joule to effectively automate and optimize processes for superior outcomes. SAP Joule for Consultants empowers consultants to work smarter, automate routine tasks, and focus on strategic activities. Given its grounding in terabytes of both public and proprietary data, SAP Joule for Consultants can accelerate customer project delivery by up to 14 percent.  

Looking ahead

By aligning with SAP’s proven methodologies, leveraging our integrated toolchain, and maintaining high standards of certification and expertise, our RISE with SAP Validated partners are uniquely positioned to deliver solutions that truly meet customer expectations in today’s fast-paced, digitally driven environment.

Together, SAP and its service partners are committed to driving innovation, accelerating time-to-value, and enabling sustainable transformation — ensuring our customers remain competitive in a rapidly changing world.

Karl Fahrbach is chief partner officer at SAP.

In a significant move to bolster the study and research of business transformation management, SAP and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have announced a strengthening of their partnership aimed at enhancing industry collaboration and academic excellence. This alliance is set to pave the way for innovative educational and research opportunities, with a focus on equipping students and researchers with the skills needed to navigate disruption and build business transformation as a capability.

The decision to further strengthen this long-standing partnership was unveiled during a guest lecture at QUT’s Gardens Point campus, where Julian Lebherz, SAP Strategic Advisor, addressed Master’s students enrolled in the QUT Business Process Analytics course. The lecture emphasized the importance of integrating business transformation into standard operations, highlighting real-world applications as well as why some companies are more successful than others at realizing tangible and sustainable value when it comes to deploying business process intelligence solutions.

A key highlight of this collaboration is the nomination of Lebherz as QUT Industry Fellow, underscoring the ambition and momentum of the connection between SAP and QUT. With over a decade of highly specialized experience deploying process intelligence solutions and establishing associated delivery organizations in various industries, he is globally recognized as one of the leading experts in the field. Having served in the steering committee of the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and co-organizing several international conferences on the subject, Lebherz will contribute significantly to the university’s academic and research endeavors, fostering a deeper integration of industry insights into the curriculum.

“SAP is committed to equipping QUT and its students with the expertise and technology required to turn business disruption into competitive advantage,” Lebherz said. “Business transformation must become a ubiquitous capability, and hence we [SAP] are doubling down by strengthening partnerships with leading organizations.”

The partnership aims to explore various avenues for collaboration, including internship and research project opportunities, executive education programs, and hackathons. These initiatives are designed to provide students and researchers with hands-on experience and exposure to real-world challenges, aligning academic pursuits with industry needs.

Professor Alistair Barros, head of the School for Information Systems at QUT, expressed enthusiasm for the partnership, stating, “QUT’s School of Information Systems is intensifying both research and education of holistic business transformation and enterprise computing, encompassing the continuous flywheel of process execution, intelligence, improvement, and change deployment.”

Professor Moe Thandar Wynn, leader of QUT’s process science group and co-director of QUT’s Centre for Data Science, highlighted the benefits of strong industry ties, noting, “Our researchers and students benefit tremendously from strong industry collaboration. Partnerships like this one enable us to align curricula and research projects closely with real industry needs.”

The announcement marks a significant step forward in QUT’s position as a global leader in business process management and process intelligence. By integrating end-to-end business transformation into the academic curriculum across multiple courses, as well as deepening the connection to real-world outcomes, QUT and SAP are set to redefine the landscape of business transformation education, preparing students to thrive in an era of constant disruption.

Lucas de Boer, Global Marketing Program Lead, SAP Signavio

MADRID — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that BASF, the world’s leading chemical company, has begun its transformation based on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.

A longtime SAP customer, BASF adopted a hybrid system landscape to integrate SAP S/4HANA Cloud into BASF’s vast system and reduce the complexity of on-premises management. With a clean core strategy in place, any new customizations and functional extensions will be cloud ready, allowing simplified system maintenance and operations in the long run.

BASF turned to SAP S/4HANA Cloud to leverage the latest innovations in artificial intelligence and sustainability solutions. The first of its new systems on SAP S/4HANA Cloud is already live. Once the rest are fully implemented, BASF will benefit from streamlined operations, real-time data insights, improved decision-making capabilities and the flexibility to adapt quickly to evolving market demands. Having recently activated the Joule copilot for first use cases in SAP SuccessFactors solutions, BASF is evaluating other use cases for its core processes.

“We are proud to partner with BASF on this transformative journey,” said Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Customer Services & Delivery. “By choosing SAP S/4HANA Cloud, BASF is laying a strong foundation for future growth and innovation. The ability to leverage a clean core and standardized processes will provide BASF with the agility and resilience needed to thrive in today’s dynamic business environment.”

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Media Contact:
Lesa Plingen, +49 622 776 9000, lesa.plingen@sap.com, CET
SAP Press Room; press@sap.com

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