SAP Sapphire
Chapter 4: Accelerating Innovation with No-Code and Low-Code App Development, Process Automation, Data, and AI
To compete today, companies must be able to innovate new offerings, new ways of doing business, and new ways to give data purpose rapidly. The following announcements showcase SAP’s commitment to helping customers accelerate their innovation efforts and drive business value.
The SAP AppGyver tool enables faster application development and deeper integration with SAP applications
SAP AppGyver is a no-code tool and development environment that lets developers of all skill levels build enterprise-ready applications using drag-and-drop capabilities. New Q2 2022 capabilities further simplify the development of enterprise-grade applications:
- SAP AppGyver is now embedded directly into the SAP Service Cloud solution, so all users can build custom user interfaces that extend SAP Service Cloud solution functionalities.
- SAP AppGyver can now more easily consume data from SAP applications and will offer an extended library of components, including the SAP Fiori design language for building rich user interfaces.
- In coming months, SAP AppGyver will provide new cloud-powered capabilities so customers can visually build cloud-hosted data models and application logic – giving users a complete no-code development experience to build complex, end-to-end, enterprise-ready applications.
Learn more about SAP AppGyver in this blog post and here.
New SAP Process Automation capabilities simplify collaboration between IT and business users
The SAP Process Automation solution is an intuitive, no-code solution for workflow management and robotic process automation (RPA). It lets organizations simplify business process automation, improve process efficiency, and enhance business agility.
New capabilities make it even easier for business users to collaborate with developers to build and customize process automations:
- A simplified business user experience makes automating SAP and non-SAP software processes easier using drag-and-drop modules.
- Deeper integration with SAP Business Application Studio lets IT and professional developers build complex workflows for business users in SAP Process Automation. This gives customers more control and flexibility than relying only on no-code tooling.
- Automation projects can be shared between users with new import and export functionality, simplifying secure collaboration between stakeholders.
- SAP Process Automation is now available through the free tier of SAP BTP. Customers can access free SAP Learning Journey guides to help prepare for certifications as well as hands-on partner workshops help them get started quickly with SAP Process Automation.
Learn more about SAP Process Automation in this blog post and here.
New One Process Acceleration Layer package helps enterprises speed up innovation
SAP is launching a pilot program for its new One Process Acceleration Layer package to enable better and faster business transformations. One Process Acceleration Layer, along with other SAP Signavio® solutions, is part of the business process intelligence (BPI) portfolio. The package leverages thousands of successful transformation projects from the SAP Signavio portfolio to provide organizations with a collection of world-class business process accelerators, benchmarks, and thought leadership expertise that speed up time to ROI. One Process Acceleration Layer will support organizations on their migration journeys with the RISE with SAP solution to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Companies participating in the pilot program for One Process Acceleration Layer are expected to have access to the following capabilities through the SAP Signavio Process Explorer solution:
- A complete library of business process, industry, and service accelerators that leverage SAP’s 50+ years of business process knowledge across industries
- Predefined content and solutions to plan, design, and scope business innovation projects with efficiency and speed
- Preconfigured scenarios and models for the most common use cases, shortening deployment times, lowering costs, and reducing errors
- Tailored thought leadership, including white papers and excellence guides to help business leaders make the right decisions with personalized insight
- An engaged peer-to-peer learning community that continuously shares, updates, and improves knowledge and methodologies
Learn more about One Process Accelerator Layer in this blog post.
New capabilities in SAP AI solutions accelerate business process transformation
New AI-powered innovations from SAP help customers optimize end-to-end business processes and realize their full business potential. Customers benefit from ready-to-use intelligence to transform core business processes, including lead-to-cash, design-to-operate, recruit-to-retire, and source-to-pay.
Lead-to-cash
- Users of SAP’s industry cloud in the consumer products industry can take advantage of the AI-powered SAP Revenue Growth Optimization solution to optimize promotional plans holistically and analyze plan performance before and after execution. The added intelligence enhances the lead-to-cash process, helping our consumer packaged goods (CPG) clients grow their revenue and margins.
Design-to-operate
- SAP S/4HANA customers can use new AI capabilities to forecast the number of containers their customers and suppliers will need based on past delivery patterns. Companies can use these capabilities to optimize circular logistics flows for returnable and reusable packaging material in the design-to-operate process.
- The SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain solution now includes AI capabilities for demand planning and lead-time calculations. These include variable impact analysis and additional algorithms for time-series forecasting, which can optimize the design-to-operate process.
Recruit-to-Retire
- SAP SuccessFactors solutions include a new digital assistant, currently in the early adopter phase, to simplify how employees perform tasks and find pertinent information. The digital assistant acts as an intelligent companion for guided self-service throughout SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management Suite, helping employees complete common HR processes to boost productivity and employee experience.
Learn more about SAP AI solutions in this blog post.
SAP data and analytics solutions give data purpose
SAP data and analytics solutions enable customers to transform their data strategy. With the extended planning and analysis capabilities of SAP Business Technology Platform, customers can generate reliable insights and action plans to unleash the full business value of enterprise data. Q2 2022 enhancements include:
- The replication-based integration between the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud solutions allows ready transfer of actual and planned data. This establishes SAP Data Warehouse Cloud as a single source of truth for analytics and planning across the organization.
- Flexible time provides enhanced time modelling capabilities, supporting key performance indicator definitions in industries – such as retail, hospitality, and consumer packaged goods - where fiscal periods are not based on traditional calendars. This supports time dimensions enriched with custom members, hierarchies, and attributes, which means planning and analytics processes can be perfectly aligned with operational data.
Learn more about SAP data and analytics solutions.
SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain now has greater performance, flexibility, and scalability, underpinned by SAP HANA Cloud
The SAP HANA Cloud database, the data foundation of SAP Business Technology Platform, offers several new features regarding elastic scalability. Currently in beta, the new SAP HANA elastic compute node handles workload peaks by increasing and decreasing available CPU and memory as needed. This enables smaller initial reserved data processing footprints and gives customers improved performance and the ability to scale with evolving data processing demands. SAP plans to move initial customers of SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain to this new infrastructure starting in August 2022.
This update removes hardware bottlenecks so customers can benefit from faster decision-making across scenarios, planning options, and supply chain networks. The update supports more agile planning, resilient growth, and business continuity.
Learn more about SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain.
SAP Data Intelligence enhancements automate data replication and improve metadata management
The SAP Data Intelligence solution is the data orchestration layer of SAP Business Technology Platform. As a comprehensive data management solution, it discovers, connects, and enriches disjointed data assets, transforming them into actionable business insights at enterprise scale. The latest enhancements include:
- Simplified replication of SAP data: SAP Data Intelligence will automatically create and replicate data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA (on-premise software), SAP ERP Central Component, SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server, and Microsoft Azure SQL Database to SAP HANA Cloud, Azure Data Lake, and AWS S3. Replication jobs are automatically created from a visual interface and all pipelines are resilient and can auto-restart and handle initial and delta replication. No-code large-scale data replication minimizes the burden faced by IT organizations as they make SAP ERP software data available in the data lakes and warehouses of their choice, including SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
- Expanded metadata management and data lineage: SAP Data Intelligence will include support for Snowflake metadata extraction and object-level lineage; lineage for SQL Views for SAP IQ software, SAP HANA Cloud, data lake, Redshift, and AzureSQL; and object-level data lineage for all structured data operators. Enhanced lineage for SAP and non-SAP software sources increases customer understanding of how and where data is used and where it originated. Additional metadata management capabilities include support of Snowflake for validation rules as well as the ability to mass-update custom attribute values and view dependencies and rule usage.
Learn more about SAP Data Intelligence.
Enhancements for SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management by OpenText include new business solutions by OpenText
New prebuilt process accelerators from the SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management (SAP Extended ECM) application by OpenText are now available for enterprise asset management, finance, and procurement. These accelerators let customers adopt and consume the solution’s services faster by taking advantage of predefined structures, integrations, and workflows aligned to business processes. The enterprise asset management accelerator, for example, provides a complete information management solution with associated team spaces, templates, reporting, and workflows, plus integration with SAP S/4HANA.
Another new feature is that all Microsoft Teams collaboration can now be stored compliantly in SAP Extended ECM. The application now also supports bidirectional creation, so creating a group in Microsoft Teams creates an associated workspace in SAP Extended ECM. This enhanced support for Microsoft teams drives compliance. As more companies turn to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to support remote workforces, controlling Teams data becomes essential to reduce corporate risk and improve information flow.
Learn more about SAP Extended ECM.
Enhancements make SAP Master Data Governance even more powerful
The SAP Master Data Governance application lets customers pull together master data and manage it centrally using a master data management layer on SAP Business Technology Platform. The latest enhancements include:
- Access to external master data content and rules: SAP Master Data Governance now connects to Europe’s largest data-sharing community through an integration with collaborative data management provider CDQ AG. SAP plans to automate master data management further and reduce the cost of high-quality master data by eliminating error-prone manual tasks through access to master data and master data quality rules from external business networks.
- Improved location-data quality: SAP Master Data Governance now includes ready integration with SAP Data Quality Management, microservices for location data, for accurate and complete contact location data. This helps increase the rate of on-time deliveries, eliminate returned mail, and increase customer satisfaction for businesses.
- Enhanced master data management processes: New features respond to customer requests to improve the overall effectiveness of master data consolidation and mass processing.
Learn more about SAP Master Data Governance.
Updates to SAP Integration Suite help customers modernize integrations and accelerate connectivity
As part of SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Integration Suite helps customers achieve end-to-end support for business processes, accelerate connectivity in IT landscapes, and modernize integration environments. New enhancements let customers:
- Manage electronic data interchange (EDI) relationships with trading partners in the cloud: SAP Integration Suite now includes trading partner management capabilities to support B2B requirements.
- Assess and create their organization-specific integration strategy: SAP Integration Suite now includes integration assessment capabilities based on the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology. Customers can configure and maintain guidelines that inform their organizations’ integration decisions.
- Accelerate integration with new industry content and APIs: Prebuilt integration content and APIs simplify integration between applications. APIs, content, and community for SAP’s industry cloud are now available on SAP API Business Hub.
- Modernize their integration environment to power their transformation journey: SAP introduces additional programs and content to drive transformation, including a new Web page dedicated to the topic of modernizing integration by migrating from SAP Process Integration or SAP Process Orchestration software to SAP Integration Suite. SAP continues to invest in this area, offering:
- Free assessment and migration plans with the SAP Migration Factory program for SAP BTP
- Tools and documentation to accelerate the assessment, planning, and migration process
- Paid services to help with planning, setup, and migration to SAP Integration Suite
- Strong partners that deliver automated testing and migration tooling and services
Learn more about SAP Integration Suite.
New innovations delivered as part of SAP’s integration strategy for business connectivity and intelligence
SAP’s integration road map for 2022 is fully loaded, building off the many integration-related innovations we released in 2021. Our ongoing efforts help customers accelerate their business by integrating processes across their value chain. New innovations include updates to our end-to-end process integration as well as progress on our suite qualities to provide a consistent experience across our solution portfolio. New enhanced capabilities include the ability for users on SAP Task Center to process approval items from multiple SAP solutions in one click. A new integrated assessment feature is also available as part of SAP Integration Suite to give customers a tool-based approach for key parts of SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology, helping them define and execute the integration strategy tailored to their specific needs.
Learn more about SAP’s integration strategy and road map.
Customer evolution program helps existing customers evolve to what’s next
The customer evolution program is designed to help existing SAP customers define and realize the next steps in their business and IT evolution. With this new program, SAP and its partners take customers on a guided innovation journey, starting from where they are today and moving forward to review what’s next with SAP business applications and technologies. Customers get personalized insights throughout the program, automated tools for deployment, and outcome-driven services to create lasting value – all with the speed and agility of the cloud.
Learn more about the customer evolution program.