30% increase in sales due to product design improvements based on customer feedback
Top transformative business outcomes to date
Intelligent Enterprises Are Integrated Enterprises
SAP’s Cloud Integration 2021 Highlights
Delivering on the promise of the Intelligent Enterprise
Speaking with our customers, partners, and SAP user groups, one topic is always front and centre — integrated business processes.
SAP is in the unique position to reinvent the way business is run — your success is our mission. To take the guesswork out of when, what, and how to transform your business for your ever-changing business needs, SAP is here to guide you through your transformation and support you along the way.
In 2021, we delivered over 280 integration innovations to date, including additional suite qualities such as SAP Task Center. And there is still more to come. Our team is fully committed to deliver on our promise to help every customer become an intelligent enterprise.
Juergen Mueller
CTO and Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE Technology & Innovation
Thomas Saueressig
Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE SAP Product Engineering
Our holistic integration approach has already yielded measurable outcomes, proving that we are on the right path forward.
Aramco Europe
Aramco Europe's new IT backbone running SAP S/4HANA Cloud and additional solutions from SAP is helping improve operations, tighten portfolio oversight and governance, and inform agile decision-making:
Orica
With Orica's 4S program "Simple, Standard, Single SAP" covering eight end-to-end business processes, the company is going all-in on its transformation journey. Orica's entire busienss is running on SAP S/4HANA complemented with cloud solutions from SAP.
The potential value generation projected for this bold move to an integrated suite speaks for itself:
Intelligent enterprises are integrated enterprises
Intelligent enterprises apply advanced technologies and best practices within agile, integrated business processes. That’s why a key part of SAP’s strategy is integrating end-to-end processes – whether these span SAP, partner, or third-party solutions.
25
%
of enterprises would describe themselves as completely integrated.
88
%
of integration leaders increased transparency into their operations.
Source: Oxford Economics Study, August 2020
94
%
of integration leaders improved profit margins.
Business process transformation
SAP has developed four core end-to-end processes that run every enterprise in any industry. These offer significant value, from accelerated innovation and lower integration risk to reduced complexity of operations, supported by prebuilt integration on SAP Business Technology Platform.
Lead to cash
Integrated sales experiences help ensure you are driving revenue opportunities and optimising the experience along the entire customer journey.
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Design to operate
An integrated supply chain enables you to integrate ethical and environmentally responsible business practices
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Source to pay
Integrated spend management facilitates the transition from digital to autonomous procurement with lower TCO.
Learn more
Recruit to retire
Integrated workforce management enables you to understand, manage, and optimise all aspects of the workforce in line with business objectives and with a clear financial impact.
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Lead to cash
Cover the entire business process, from initial contact with a prospective customer to order fulfilment and service delivery, driving revenue opportunity and optimising the experience along the entire customer journey.
Design to operate
Encompass the entire lifecycle ranging from design to planning, manufacturing, delivery, and operations. Leverage the interoperable and modular framework of SAP Digital Supply Chain solutions to run a resilient and sustainable supply chain.
Optimising shipments from 50 global locations to serve more than 10,000 customers
+15% in revenue and 98% in on-time deliveries
Top transformative business outcomes to date
Source to pay
Optimise, simplify, and effectively manage all spend processes and spend categories to drive business outcomes – facilitating the transition from digital to autonomous procurement with lower TCO and leveraging the collective intelligence and network effect of the marketplace.
20% e-auction savings on packaging materials during a three month proof-of-concept exercise
IDP Education: Cost-savings of A$5 million in the first year alone, which equates to 5% of the company's addressable spend
100% automation of the ordering process
Top transformative business outcomes to date
Recruit to retire
Understand, manage, and optimise all aspects of your workforce (employees and external workers) in line with business objectives and with clear financial impact –facilitating an exceptional workforce experience and business transformation.
30% reduction in recruit time
90% increase in operational excellence, with a significant reduction of administrative tasks
85% of users no longer need any back-end transaction codes
Top transformative business outcomes to date
Underpinning technology
SAP takes a holistic integration approach by integrating data, technology, and business processes to deliver significant value to your business. SAP supports you at every step of your journey by taking the complexity out of your integrations.
Integrated across all landscapes
SAP’s integration approach goes far beyond technical integration of applications: holistic integration of data, technology, and business processes delivers significant value to your business. It accelerates the speed of innovation, lowers the efforts for integration, shortens time to value, reduces the complexity of operations, and allows for real-time insight. Our integrated intelligent suite connects your supply and demand chain to deliver an integrated, intelligent process experience.
Suite qualities
Intelligent, integrated enterprises offer a consistent experience along end-to-end key processes. In 2020, SAP introduced distinct suite qualities that characterize our intelligent suite of seamlessly integrated applications.
Smooth user experiences
Improve the daily work experience of end users and avoid interruptions with a common look for all SAP solutions across your intelligent enterprise. A harmonised look for end-to-end business processes is now available.
One workflow inbox
Complete business tasks proactively through a unified view of pending tasks across SAP solutions in both mobile and desktop environments. Improve the approval time, quality, and consistency for critical items that impact business operations if not approved on time. The “One Workflow Inbox” capability is now available as part of SAP Task Center.
End-to-end process blueprints
Reduce planning effort for implementation projects and support architecture decisions by leveraging process blueprints following the Industry Reference Architecture standard. End-to-end business process documentation intuitively linked to detailed API information is now available in SAP API Business Hub.
Aligned domain models
Simplify the exchange of business objects and improve data consistency by using one semantically aligned domain model across all SAP solutions and end-to-end business processes. SAP One Domain Model is available and documented in SAP API Business Hub. The SAP Master Data Integration service helps orchestrate commonly used business objects across end-to-end business processes.
Consistent security and identity management
Reduce manual administration efforts for user management and identity provisioning and enable a smooth login process to avoid work disruption. The single sign-on capability is now available across select end-to-end processes.
Coordinated lifecycle management
Accelerate implementation projects and reduce manual integration configuration effort with harmonised provisioning, setup and operations, and monitoring solutions. Automated provisioning and integration setup are now available for source-to-pay, design-to-operate, and select lead-to-cash scenarios.
Embedded analytics across solutions
Make quick and confident decisions by relying on comprehensive analytical insights across various SAP solutions. Embedded analytics from SAP Analytics Cloud is now available in SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors solutions, SAP Fieldglass solutions, and SAP Concur solutions (beta phase concluded).
SAP Business Technology Platform
As the underlying technology for the suite qualities, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) integrates your processes and data, as well as SAP, partner, and third-party applications. You can build new applications or extend your SAP applications, transform your data into value, and drive desired business outcomes. SAP Integration Suite is part of SAP BTP and the technology connecting end-to-end processes for an intelligent enterprise, while enabling you to harmonise on-premise, cloud, and third-party application landscapes.
Many of the SAP BTP services that are now available with the SAP BTP free tier model allow customers to test and explore platform services for integration, extension, data, and analytics use cases, with an easy path to productive use.
Mobile experience
SAP’s new mobile experience powerfully integrates and extends user experiences and workflows. Mobile-based interactions are the single most influential factor in customer adoption and satisfaction and industry projections (25% CAGR).* This means that the amount of information available to improve processes will triple by 2025.
* Source: Ericsson Mobility Report, June 2021
In a world where mobile app proliferation consumes our always-connected lives, SAP Mobile Start provides you with an intuitive, personalised platform from which you can launch your business-relevant experiences.
SAP Mobile Start will support us in our mission to become a digital champion by offering our employees the best possible user experience. It will help us access software like SAP S/4HANA and SAP SuccessFactors solutions using a smartphone from anywhere in the world.
Integration services from SAP
Integration is an integral part of the journey to a cloud-centric architecture. Services from SAP support this journey, helping you move from an on-premise landscape
to a hybrid and cloud-centric architecture.
Strategy and plan
Resources
- North Star architecture: SAP Advisory Services
- Target and transition architecture development
- Transition planning with SAP Road Map Explorer
Benefits
- Reference architecture
- Transition or cloud integration architecture
Implement
Resources
- Transform hybrid integration architecture (ISA-M) Integration Methodology | Services and Support
- Digital architecture for hybrid Integration Service | APIs | SAP API Business Hub
- Content Workflow Management | SAP API Business Hub
- Platform security Essential Business | Service and Support
- Outcome-based and embedded SAP API Business Hub
Benefits
- Built and tested integration
Operate and optimise
Resources
- Integration advisor
- Tool-based SAP Activate road map viewer
- SAP Solution Manager on-premise integration: SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA
- Applications, such as workflows and platforming
- SAP Best Practices Explorer
Benefits
- Automated processes
- Hybrid integration
- Low-code integration
Integration methodology
Define and execute your enterprise integration strategy and increase the integration maturity level in your organisation. Benefit from a proven methodology that includes integration patterns, architecture blueprints, and additional best practices for cloud and hybrid landscapes.
CIO Guide: SAP’s Hybrid Integration Platform for the Intelligent Enterprise
Learn how SAP pursues the goal of making integration in the cloud and hybrid landscapes easy and simple. See how SAP is taking steps toward realising that vision and get a snapshot of where process and data integration in hybrid environments is now.
The RISE with SAP offering brings together what you need to transform your business in the way that works best for you – regardless of where you’re starting from or how fast you want to go. RISE with SAP is your guided journey offering a holistic on-your-terms and on-your-timeline transformation to an intelligent enterprise.
Key 2021 deliverables
In 2021, we made tremendous progress in delivering integration scenarios to
help our customers move closer to becoming an intelligent enterprise.
2022 outlook: Business process outlook highlights
Building on the strong foundation for an integrated intelligent suite laid out to date, we are extending our integration scope for 2022, focusing on flexible and composable processes, hybrid integrations, extensibility, identity management, eventing, data access, and more.
- By integrating SAP CPQ flexible quoting with the solution order management capability in SAP S/4HANA in the cloud environment, we can help our customers fully transform their businesses with bundling capabilities, configurable pricing, quoting, and a fully automated order-to-cash process.
- Based on an aligned data model, a central data distribution point that supports the lead-to-cash process helps ensure data consistency and reduced manual data maintenance. With one source of truth for product data, customers gain agility as well as improved data quality using out-of-the-box master data services.
- By connecting demand (SAP Customer Experience solutions) and service fulfilment (SAP S/4HANA Service), we enable service agents to efficiently guide customers along their service planning and execution journey, as SAP S/4HANA Service makes it easy for customers to adapt to business changes and helps achieve rapid time to value, thereby providing more holistic customer experiences.
- Real-time integration between SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, and SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain enables holistic synchronised planning processes. Value stream planners gain full transparency in real time and become empowered to plan, use, and simulate supply chain and production processes in one single user interface.
- Maintenance management in SAP S/4HANA is now integrated with SAP Asset Strategy and Performance Management, closing the loop between maintenance strategy and maintenance execution (define, implement, and monitor), resulting in optimised asset maintenance. With aligned domain models, customers also benefit from a single authoring system that helps improve data integrity and increase efficiency.
- Embedding analytics and the ability to access live data helps ensure technical and process integration between SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain. This leads to more collaborative enterprise planning due to real-time data access as well as improved system performance due to less data replications.
- Closer integration of SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fieldglass and SAP Ariba solutions enables streamlined order creation, real-time monitoring, service provider onboarding, and financial approvals, thereby capturing the true value of the services spend.
- Enhancements to the order-to-invoice collaboration process using Ariba Network, which enables broader collaboration with trading partners, provides more visibility and transparency in the flow of materials across the value chain, resulting in better prioritization as well as reduction of delays in the flow of goods.
- Multiple domain models for master data objects across various solutions lead to greater effort in integration. Master data related to supplier and product, accounting data such as cost centre, exchange rate, and Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) elements, and organisational data such as company code and purchasing organisation are replicated across SAP applications using SAP Master Data Integration. This helps reduce inconsistency, manual integration effort, and TCO.
- User provisioning with SAP Master Data Integration provides the ability to provision users in SAP Concur solutions from a core HR source system. By creating consistent master data services across the SAP landscapes, customers can reduce manual integration effort and ownership costs across their SAP applications.
- SAP Task Center provides a central inbox for workflow-approval tasks for Concur Expense, Concur Request, and other SAP applications through a centralised approval solution. Customers with both the Identity Authentication and Identity Provisioning services configured as their identity management system benefit from the ability to reduce administrative burden, improve operational processes, and provide better insight within the approval processes, notifications, tasks, and action items.
- By integrating SAP Fieldglass solutions with SAP S/4HANA, customers can stay compliant with GAAP through automatic accounting accruals for external workforce payables and receivables, eliminating the need for manual or custom integrations.