Modernizing to RISE with SAP is a significant opportunity for IT and business leaders to simplify landscapes, accelerate cloud adoption, improve processes, and build a clean digital core that can adapt to the future.
But even the most well-designed RISE strategy often overlooks a single element that influences every SAP workflow, every decision, and every compliance requirement: unstructured content. From invoices and contracts to employee files and customer communications, content sits at the heart of business operations. Without a plan to modernize how this ERP content is managed, governed, secured, and automated, RISE programs can slow down, become costly, or fail to deliver expected transformation outcomes.
This is where OpenText becomes essential.
Why content modernization matters for RISE with SAP
Every SAP process involves documents, data, and collaboration. Yet most organizations still manage this content in disconnected file shares, legacy repositories, or custom-built systems. This creates three major issues that directly affect RISE outcomes:
- Unstructured content increases the migration scope and storage footprint
- Manual document handling creates friction in key SAP processes
- Legacy repositories introduce compliance and security risks
Modernizing content is the fastest way to accelerate your transition to SAP S/4HANA, reduce operational cost, and support the RISE clean-core vision.
Offload content to achieve a clean SAP core
A clean core is the foundation of SAP’s cloud strategy. But content sitting inside SAP systems—email attachments, documents, images—drives up the data footprint and makes upgrades more complex. OpenText helps organizations separate unstructured content from SAP’s transactional database, storing it in a secure, cloud-native content platform while keeping it accessible directly inside SAP applications.
Benefits include:
- Lower S/4HANA memory costs like Capitec Bank
- Faster upgrades and easier lifecycle management
- Streamlined S/4HANA cloud migrations
- Governance applied consistently across structured and unstructured data
Accelerate RISE with SAP by reducing migration complexity
Every RISE journey includes tough questions: What legacy content needs to move? What can be archived? What must remain available for audit or compliance reasons?
OpenText provides certified cloud-first tools to:
- Archive legacy documents before migration
- Reduce the amount of data sent to SAP S/4HANA
- Migrate content from older systems, shared drives, or non-SAP repositories
- Maintain access to historical content—even during hybrid transitions
By shrinking the scope of what moves into S/4HANA, IT accelerates the RISE timeline, reduces business disruption, and controls scalable operations.
Build compliance by design into your RISE strategy
Regulatory compliance doesn’t pause during cloud migration. In fact, RISE amplifies the importance of:
- Data residency
- Privacy regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, SOX)
- Retention rules and audit trails
- Legal holds and defensible disposition
- Secure long-term archiving
OpenText ensures that content is managed with confidence at the highest levels of governance, using:
- SAP-endorsed archiving solutions
- Industry certifications (ISO, SOC2)
- Automated retention policies integrated with SAP ILM
- Secure, regional cloud data centers
Organizations reduce compliance risk, while ensuring 24/7 high-availability of critical documents for audits like ENERCON.
Automate content-driven processes to unlock SAP value faster
Every major SAP process—procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, hire-to-retire—relies on documents. OpenText makes these processes faster, more accurate, and more intelligent by embedding content automation directly into SAP workflows.
- Automate procure-to-pay: Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) brings AI and machine learning to invoice capture, validation, and approvals— accelerating invoice processing by 99% like SCHOTT, glass manufacturer.
- Streamline order-to-cash: Document Presentment automates creation and delivery of order confirmations, invoices, shipping docs, and payment reminders.
- Digitize hire-to-retire: A digital employee file integrated with SAP SuccessFactors centralizes contracts, certifications, and sensitive HR documents with full compliance.
With content and process automation connected to SAP systems, organizations act with clarity, speed up work, reduce errors, and improve customer and employee experiences.
Adopt AI to empower SAP transformation
OpenText adds AI, ML, and GenAI that help SAP organizations modernize even faster:
- AI-driven capture and classification of documents
- Intelligent recommendations and contextual knowledge retrieval
- Automated exception handling
- Natural language interfaces to find content quickly
- GenAI for HR, finance, service, and procurement
- AI-assisted governance for tagging, classification, and risk detection
These capabilities align with SAP’s own AI vision, enabling future-ready automation on SAP BTP and within S/4HANA Cloud.
Put content at the center of your RISE Roadmap
Every successful RISE with SAP program modernizes both processes and content. OpenText brings the content modernization layer needed to:
- Accelerate migrations
- Reduce operational costs
- Support a clean-core cloud strategy
- Improve compliance
- Power automation and AI
- Deliver better business outcomes from SAP investments
If you’re planning or executing a RISE modernization, now is the time to include content strategy as a foundational pillar.
Rely on OpenText and SAP 30-year partnership
Together, OpenText and SAP are the catalyst for high-performance, accelerating business outcomes by increasing operational efficiency, assuring regulatory compliance, and delivering an exceptional user experience. OpenText and SAP solutions help organizations run with control, confidence and clarity.
Explore how OpenText supports RISE with SAP modernization
