In early 2025, SAP unveiled the new SAP Business Suite, marking a transformative era in modern enterprise management.
By combining artificial intelligence, data, and applications, SAP Business Suite empowers organizations to unlock innovation, drive operational excellence, and create differentiated business value.
Whether you’re an existing SAP ERP customer or new to SAP solutions, transitioning to the SAP Business Suite is a significant step. At SAP, we’ve had the privilege of guiding many customers through their transformation journeys—experience that led to the creation of a structured, repeatable framework: the RISE with SAP Methodology.
This Methodology contains three main elements:
- The Standardized framework: A structured path based on best practices roadmaps with recommendations, guidelines, and checkpoints for each step of your journey.
- The Integrated toolchain: Tools to enhance your productivity, accelerate your project timelines, improve quality, and promote seamless, cross-team collaboration.
- Expert guidance: SAP and qualified partners who get you up and running with a predictable scope and implementation timeline during your entire transformation journey.
In this blog we focus on the integrated toolchain, providing the right integrated tools to support the entire migration process with greater ease and efficiency. And we’re continuously enhancing these tools—adding new capabilities and embedding AI to further accelerate and simplify your transformation.
Consistent data. Extended by partners. Enabled by AI.
We learned that transformation success depends on more than just a single tool to support individual steps in the journey. Furthermore, it requires:
- Consistent data throughout the transformation project to align decisions, processes, and outcomes –
- A rich set of integrated tools extended by partners who bring specific expertise and tools to support our customers on their transformation journey
- AI-enabled intelligence will be omnipresent along the integrated toolchain to support customers, consultants and architects to be more productive during the transformation
All of this combines the Integrated Toolchain
Together, these principles set the foundation for a successful and effective transformation.
SAPs integrated toolchain is designed to help our customers along the transformation journey with fully connected and integrated tools.
1. Consistent data flow throughout your journey
The RISE with SAP Methodology provides a clear, structured approach to transformation utilizing the standardized framework. The Integrated Toolchain enables and accelerates this journey from end to end — combining tools that support each critical stage with sharing data along the process.
Let’s have a look on the journey, the individual tasks and how the toolchain will help these processes. In the overview graphics you can see that the different solutions in the Toolchain are not assigned to the different phases, but they support the transformation trough the full project and exchanging data to avoid double entry or inconsistencies. But let’s start along those phases to go through the transformation project and touch every solution
1.1 Discover & onboard
While new customers would directly start with the Digital Discovery Assessment to match their processes and priorities with needed capabilities – existing SAP ERP customers can first start to analyze their current processes based on real data with the help of SAP Signavio. This data is then handed over to SAP LeanIX to analyze and visualize your current architecture including dependencies, identifying risks and outdated systems. This is the basis for designing the target architecture in the next phase.
As a next step, the Digital Discovery Assessment (DDA) helps define your business strategy and design the scope of the future solution by gathering customers’ requirements. Matching these requirements against Business Suite solutions proposes a list of solutions to fulfill all customers’ needs and additionally creates a customer project roadmap based on the customer’s needs. This is the basis for the customer’s individual project roadmap.
1.2 Modernize & run
Based on the data of the Discover phase, SAP Lean IX helps to plan a future-ready architecture aligned with your business goals.
SAP Signavio supports designing and publishing new business process models which are then used by Cloud ALM to support implementations designing, testing and deploying the solutions. Additionally, Cloud ALM executes your roadmap using SAP Activate and best-practice content while tracking progress and managing quality with built-in checkpoints. It monitors and resolves issues proactively with analytics. This includes managing solution configuration, developing and integrating required extensions in adherence to the clean core compatible principals, based on the Business Technology Platform using no-code, low-code or pro-code as well as AI capabilities built in SAP Build. Partner solutions like SAP Test Automation by Tricentis help to design and run automated end-top-end tests to validate changes faster, increase process quality and reduce business risks. The SAP Business transformation center helps to clean and transform your business data of the former system into a AI ready data structures of the new landscape.
To maximize the adoption of new business processes, WalkMe in-app guidance and end-user training can assist to onboard and support users during a successful go-live, helping them use the new system efficiently.
1.3 Continuously innovate
After the successful go live SAP Cloud solution subscriptions include ongoing enhancements delivered through regular updates to enable continuous innovations delivering sustained business value to customers and their end-users.
The tools in the Integrated toolchain will help you shaping this process of continuous innovations:
SAP LeanIX identifies the latest architecture improvements and continuously mirrors the system architecture.
SAP Signavio updates its data to mirror the newest business processes based on the latest enhancements.
SAP Cloud ALM track progress and manage quality with built-in checkpoints and monitor and resolve issues proactively with analytics
WalkMe updates its guidance data to best enable and support users based on the latest enhancements.
SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Build enable additional process enhancements needed to differentiate your business from the competition – based on continuously enhanced or new extensions, built in a clean core compatible way to maintain and secure an upgradable core.
Want to see the integrated toolchain in action – just watch our video:
2. Scale with partners to augment the toolchain
The integrated toolchain is open and extensible to partners who bring specific expertise and tools to support our customers on their transformation journey. Partners can build and integrate their own specialized tools, leveraging deep expertise or industry best practices to complement the core toolset. This openness ensures that every customer transformation project can benefit from proven methodologies, tailored accelerators, and innovative partner solutions—creating a flexible ecosystem that adapts to diverse business needs.
3. Integrated Toolchain enabled by AI
We are adding AI capabilities into our integrated toolchain to boost your transformation efficiency and reduce duration, effort, and cost of transformation significantly.
As an example, SAP Lean IX gets new capabilities based on AI:
- Analyze as-is: Leverage the inventory builder to quickly build your inventory based on the AI analysis of unstructured data and the generation of LeanIX fact sheets
- Identify improvements: Leverage AI-assisted architecture guidance for continuous recommendations on where and how to optimize your enterprise architecture, with streamlined and actionable insights
On top we are working on the new Transition Guidance – SAP’s AI enabled application which acts as your pro-active encyclopedia deployed on Cloud ALM to
- Connect the dots across tools, services and content to further increase usability and efficiency during all three phases (Discover & onboard, Modernize & Run, and Continuous innovations).
- Provide personalized, system-based recommendations to accelerate fact-based decisions during transformation
- Add a dialog driven conversational expert guidance based on Joule, giving advice along many advisory categories.
Clear business value
In a nutshell, the SAP Integrated Toolchain is built to deliver clear business value in 4 key dimensions:
30% cost reduction for the transformation project.
35% faster execution of the transformation leading to faster time to value.
70% increased business agility enabling customers to react faster to new market conditions to stay ahead of the competition.
40% Faster continuous innovation to benefit from newest capabilities supporting your business earlier.
