I was honored to participate in SAP’s Devtoberfest this year.
Below you see how I am busting the myth that SAP app development has to take a long time or that Cloud is making things more complicated.
Enjoy!
Obstacles in SAP S/4 Transitions & How to Navigate Them
Image sourced from https://www.synergisticit.com/how-can-jobseekers-navigate-the-challenges-of-the-job-market-during-recession/
As the recession looms, SAP customers will need to make some changes going into 2023. For current SAP customers, economic trends have made the transition from R/3 systems to S/4 HANA more challenging, while potential customers are now weighing their options to decide if itâs worth starting the transition at all. On the one hand, customers are becoming increasingly cost-conscious due to the economic downturn. They are eager to reduce spending, and less likely to want to pay for SAP technologies. On the flip side, companies in regulated industries will still be required to run a supported system, thus making ERPs like SAP necessary regardless of their cost. Additionally, enterprises using an SAP ERP will have to migrate to S/4HANA by 2027, meaning that many cannot afford to wait until the economy gets better.
Prior to recession concerns, many companies were struggling with their S/4 transition, either due to a lack of corporate buy-in or appropriate skills. Still, the challenges of the coming year will no doubt create new obstacles. The best option is to identify where SAP customers might struggle in their transition process and present solutions to make the process easier to navigate.
To undergo a successful migration, you must commit your best resources to the project. As Iâve discussed before, this can be quite involved. SAP customers must start the journey as early as possible, build a business case, estimate their implementation duration, and find the right implementation partner. However, the first step is determining the best possible path for transitioning from R/3 systems to SAP S/4 HANA. There are three main migration paths that customers can take:
- Technical Upgrade
With a technical upgrade, users update their existing systems without necessarily taking the time to build them into their larger business structure. This can be appealing because itâs almost always the cheapest option. However, it will still require some money and changes to system configuration and processes. While the short-term costs are lower, the long-term result is usually all-costs with minimal benefit, offering little in a business case.
2. Full Business Transformation
Some businesses aim for more extensive efforts, embedding the technical changes theyâre making into a much larger business transformation undertaking. Many businesses are hesitant to make this call since the costs are high and it requires a company-wide effort, meaning everyone needs to be on board for it to work. However, the benefits ultimately offset the costs with companies often seeing major gains in profit and operational efficiency. Additionally, a full business transformation doesnât require profound organizational change management, as users become part of the transformation.
3. Best Practice-Based Approach
A âbest practicesâ approach can be seen as a middle ground between a minor technical upgrade and a more in-depth full business transformation. Companies rely on industry best practices as their starting point rather than trying to determine a unique path for their company specifically. They go with standard processes and configurations, only being truly unique when it comes to competitive differentiators. This approach is generally more worthwhile than a simple technical upgrade, driving a substantial amount of operational efficiency improvements while keeping migration costs low. That said, it requires more of a leadership commitment and higher effort in organizational change management compared to a full business transformation.
Even with a clear migration path in mind, SAP customers will likely face some pushback as they look to migrate to S/4 HANA, especially as the recession takes hold. Still, there are options for SAP customers looking to âsellâ others on the migration process. There are two major options to explore: lowering costs and showcasing business value.
The first option is the most obvious one: one of the biggest reasons that top leadership resists tech initiatives is because itâs expensive. Finding ways to lower costs can help significantly in getting others on board. This starts by working with your trusted SI to work out new commercial models, along with efforts to try and lock in rates or capacity. Some simple optimization can go a long way toward reducing costs and driving value in the process.
The more difficult and rewarding path is to push the value of SAP services to encourage continued usage and migration. This involves finding pockets of high-value business processes to clean up to balance and improve oneâs business case. From there, simple AI additions can be implemented, which have the potential to unlock millions of dollars in annual benefits. SAP solutions can cut costs and boost efficiency, so highlighting those benefits prove that the expenses are worthwhile in the long run.
While thereâs no doubt that the recession will create challenges going forward, SAP is dedicated to helping customers unlock the full potential of their business and make their investments worthwhile.
Recommendations On the BTP Pillars – Artificial Intelligence
Excited to share the fifth and final installment of our deep-dive series â “Recommendations On the BTP Pillars.” Today, we’ll be unraveling the complexities of the fifth pillar of SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) – Artificial Intelligence (AI).
SAP’s AI solutions are empowering organizations to infuse intelligence into their operations and run with confidence on a trusted, enterprise-grade platform. Harnessing the capabilities of SAP AI Business Services (such as business entity recognition, data attribute recommendation, document information extraction and personalized recommendation), organizations can enhance their decision-making and operational efficiency.
Adding to this, SAP AI Core and SAP AI Launchpad provide a robust foundation for machine learning, integrating pre-built business AI models, MLOps, and responsible AI. The purpose-built services that come with pre-trained models offer a versatile foundation, while the AI Core enables a generic machine learning foundation, making the entire system customizable and adaptable.
At Rizing, we advise utilizing the existing, API wrapped models sold as SAP AI Business Services and AI Core for inference of custom built models. This enables your business to harness the power of AI effectively, augmenting human capabilities and improving operational efficiency.
As we often say, “SAP Business Technology Platform is the Business Operating System.” It’s designed to support enterprises in their digital transformation journey by providing a solid foundation that infuses intelligence across business operations. How is your organization leveraging the power of SAP’s AI capabilities to enhance its decision-making and operational efficiency?
Share your thoughts and experiences!
#SAP #AI #BTP #DigitalTransformation #Rizing
Recommendations On the BTP Pillars – Data and Analytics
As the fourth part of our deep-dive series – “Recommendations On the BTP Pillars,” we are delving into SAP’s Business Technology Platform’s (BTP) fourth pillar – Data and Analytics. This pillar is foundational to giving data purpose and building agility to meet change.
In the age of digital transformation, the ability to understand and leverage data has become critical for business success. SAP’s suite, including SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), SAP Datasphere, SAP Data Intelligence Cloud, SAP Master Data Governance, and SAP HANA Cloud, provide comprehensive data management solutions.
SAC combines business intelligence, augmented analytics, and enterprise planning to provide insights for better decision-making. SAP Datasphere facilitates data orchestration across the enterprise landscape, while SAP Data Intelligence Cloud simplifies data conversion and intelligence. SAP Master Data Governance ensures data consistency across various transactional and analytical systems, and SAP HANA Cloud acts as a high-performance in-memory database to handle both transactions and analytics.
In the face of evolving BI solutions and data services, our firm, Rizing, recommends real-time data federation and context creation for data lakes as these tools promote agility and real-time insights. The shift from traditional systems like BW to these innovative solutions forms the core of SAP’s Data and Analytics pillar.
Let us harness the power of SAP’s Data and Analytics tools to realize the full potential of your data and drive business agility. #SAP#DataAnalytics#BTP#Rizing
Recommendations on the BTP Pillars – Automation
In today’s digital age, companies are constantly looking for ways to streamline their operations and increase agility. As we venture into the third installment of “Recommendations on the BTP Pillars,” our deep dive series on SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP), we examine the vital role of automation and its transformational impact on businesses worldwide.
The cornerstone of this exploration is SAP Build Process Automation. This suite is a powerful aggregation of decisions and rules, RPA bots, and process visibility. Its application in businesses enhances efficiency, simplifies complex processes, and, most importantly, drives innovation. SAP’s automation capabilities promote an environment of continuous improvement and adaptive change, ultimately pushing companies to their strategic goals faster and more effectively.
Complementing this suite is the SAP Task Center, a robust platform enabling visual workflow management, robotic process automation, process monitoring & analytics, and automated document processing. This powerful fusion of workflow management, business rules engine, and robotics process automation sets the stage for businesses to develop intelligent workflow processes. It equips organizations with the tools they need to navigate complex business terrain with finesse and precision.
At Rizing, we understand the importance of automation in today’s business outlook. That’s why we recommend considering automation for future intelligent workflow processes. SAP BTP, with its automation capabilities, allows companies to meet change with agility, build faster, and infuse each task with business context.
We view the SAP Business Technology Platform as more than just a technical solution. It is a Business Operating System, ready to power your business with intelligence and agility. As we continue our exploration into SAP BTP, join us on this journey to discover how technology can revolutionize your business operations. Stay tuned for the next installment of this series. The world of SAP BTP still has a lot to offer.
Recommendations on the BTP Pillars – Integration
As we continue to unpack SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) in our series “Recommendations on the BTP Pillars,” let us delve into the second pillar – Integration. This facet of the platform embodies the integration of business partners or networks, business applications and public entities into a tight value chain .
At the heart of this pillar is SAP’s Integration Suite. Integration Suite itself is collection of applications that facilitate data, process and event integration. One application called Cloud Integration is at the center of the solution and provides connectivity and mapping functions. Other services such as API Management, Event Mesh and an Adapter Collection complete the offering and make it a leader in Gartner’s magic quadrant.
Three reason why you should start your SAP BTP Integration journey now:
1. API Management functionality can easily and securely make SAP Business Application API’s available to outside parties. In concert with the Cloud Connector it enables access to biz apps that took weeks and months to enable in the past.
2. SAP released an automatic PI/PO migration tool. This tool can dramatically reduce the manual effort involved in moving your existing integration logic to the Cloud.
3. A plethora of content packages and an AI supported mapping engine is in my humble opinion the real reason every SAP customer should evaluate the BTP Integration pillar. The possible savings in development effort can be substantial.
Through the Integration pillar, businesses can seamlessly manage their APIs, facilitating frictionless interactions with legacy applications and external services. In the dynamic digital landscape, this capacity for integration is an invaluable asset. It’s one more way SAP BTP helps businesses stay ahead of the curve and embrace the digital future’s potential.
And that’s just the beginning. There is more to learn about the Integration pillar and the rest of the SAP BTP. So, as we continue to dive deeper into the platform in this series, remember – “SAP Business Technology Platform is the Business Operating System.” Stay tuned for further insights in the coming weeks.
#SAP#BTP#Integration#APIManagement#SAPBTP#Rizing#MartinStenzigBTPRecs
Recommendations on the BTP Pillars – App Dev
Welcome to the first installment of my deep dive series, “Recommendations on the BTP Pillars.” Today, we’ll be exploring the first pillar of SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) – Application Development, and how it empowers businesses to create personalized and innovative applications.
SAP BTP Application Development enables businesses to build and innovate applications using a range of advanced tools and technologies. One of the core offerings of SAP BTP is the low-code/no-code approach, which allows users to build and deploy apps rapidly with minimal coding knowledge, using tools like Build Apps and Build Work Zone. This visual development approach uses pre-built templates, components, and services to accelerate development cycles while ensuring consistency and quality.
For more experienced developers, SAP BTP offers the Business Application Studio and the ABAP Environment, which provide extensive support for pro-code development. With these tools, developers can create microservices, APIs, and custom logic, integrating them seamlessly with existing SAP applications and external systems.
SAP BTP also embraces the concept of side-by-side extensibility, allowing businesses to enhance and extend their applications without modifying the core code. This approach reduces technical debt and maintenance overhead while enabling a flexible, modular architecture.
The platform’s support for developers allows them to leverage in-app extensions and integration services such as SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite to create a unified and cohesive user experience. At Rizing, efficiency gains of 10%-20% have been experienced in application development using SAP BTP. Thus, we recommend evaluating Cloud Native approaches and specifically the use of SAP’s CAP and RAP frameworks to maximize the platform’s benefits.
In summary, SAP BTP’s Application Development pillar offers a powerful combination of low-code, no-code, and pro-code tools that allow businesses to develop, extend, and maintain applications more efficiently. Stay tuned for the next installments in this deep dive series as we explore the remaining pillars of BTP and provide more technical insights into harnessing this versatile platform.
#BTP#SAP#ApplicationDevelopment#DeepDive#BTPPillars#TechStrategy#Rizing#CloudNative#LowCode#NoCode#ABAPEnvironment#SAPCAP#SAPRAP
SAP S/4 Transitionsâââacceleration of SAP Business Technology Platform activities
With the flood of SAP projects hitting the SAP system integrator community (see other article), S/4 transitions are facing risks beyond the standard list we encounter in any S/4 implementation. SAP resource shortages could lead to unanticipated project extensions. Project extensions in turn lead to deferred benefit realization and additional implementation cost, and in this case, additional maintenance cost for not hitting SAPâs 2027 deadline.
An environment such as this forces us to think about mechanisms to derisk projects by accelerating no-regrets activities and see resource availability as âaâ, if not âtheâ critical success factor.
One opportunity is the acceleration of technical content migration and creation.
Technical work is usual seen as supplemental to the functional work of an implementation, and therefore successive to a business blueprint. In contrast to a net new implementation, a substantial amount of the technical work of a transition from ECC to S/4 is the migration of existing logic into a new IT paradigm.
In analyzing past and present S/4 projects, we determined that each project contains approximately 35% of technical tasks. Further analysis determined that 65% of those technical tasks could be executed ahead of the S/4 transition. This number contains activities such as the migration of ABAP Add-onâs into a side-by-side model, moving integration scenarios to the Cloud and providing insights to decision makers by developing Analytics Cloud and Data Warehouse Cloud-based dashboards.
The activities must be triaged to determine a âno-regretsâ status.
- Technical objects supporting a static business process receive the status right away.
- Objects related to an improving business process are evaluated to determine if the technical objects stay consistent across envisioned business process changes or can be developed in a way that can accommodate the envisioned improvements
- All other objects should be evaluated to see what prerequisites exists to assign them a âno-regretsâ status.
If the S/4 transition is taking place soon, the simplest way to structure the segmentation is by pulling the movable BTP tasks forward into a âPhase zeroâââBTP workâ whose end coincides with the start of the S/4 transition program.
In case the S/4 transition is not scheduled for a few years, you can create a program to move the component as outlined above with one adjustment. The components you move out of ECC are replacing existing non-BTP component and reduce the necessary transition work that would occur during the S/4 transition timeline.
The benefits are plenty:
- SAPâs Business Technology Platform is gradually introduced into the organization to get developers and operators comfortable with it
- Technical challenges are less likely to impact the critical path of the overall implementation, thus derisking the project and with it the benefit realization timeline
- Higher likelihood of achieving the planned go live prevents paying incremental maintenance fee or worst-case working in an unsupported system
- Reducing the BTP resource demand in the high demand/high-cost phase we are expecting in the coming years