Future-proofing with SAP Business Technology Platform
Enterprises need to see across all their applications, processes, and data so they can innovate and automate to boost productivity. SAP Business Technology Platform gives customers direct access to their entire end-to-end processes, data, and relevant context. We're launching a host of innovations to future-proof our customers today, including new integration capabilities, features to uncover critical process insights faster, and new low-code enterprise automation capabilities. We're also diving into our expanded partnership with Google to introduce a comprehensive open data offering that will simplify data landscapes and unleash the power of business data.
1. SAP Integration Suite reimagined to support enterprise workloads for any landscape and enterprise automation challenges
New capabilities in SAP Integration Suite make it easier to manage complex landscapes, including through deeper integration with SAP's low-code offering, SAP Build. Customers using on-premise solutions who want to preserve their existing investments also benefit from real-time business processing.
The new capabilities include:
- Edge integration cell gives customers the option to use SAP Integration Suite in the cloud as a software service or in a customer-managed environment, including on-premise data centers and private clouds. This means customers have greater flexibility and control over integrations in heterogeneous and distributed environments. It also enables them to comply with even the strictest enterprise architecture requirements.
- Advanced event mesh enables disparate systems to alert one another in real time about status changes, such as point-of-sale retail transactions, connected factory output notifications, and distributed supply chain updates.
- Graph, an addition to the core capabilities of SAP Integration Suite, provides streamlined navigation between related data across multiple back-end systems as well as provides tight control over which data is exposed. Developers benefit from the simplicity of a single application programming interface connected to a data graph, which abstracts the complexities of the landscape and is accessible in the management portal.
- SAP Business Accelerator Hub, formerly SAP API Business Hub, is a growing curated resource hub that supports business users and citizen developers as they pursue accelerated integration, innovation, and enterprise automation initiatives. Originally a catalog of proven integrations and APIs for SAP and non-SAP applications, SAP Business Accelerator Hub now hosts a wide range of tools and content categories, including prepackaged integrations, non-SAP connectors, data objects, integration artifacts, reference architectures for business processes, business events, and process automation.
- Enhanced assessment and migration tools are now available to make it easier to migrate from SAP Process Orchestration software and the SAP Process Integration offering to SAP Integration Suite. An expanded support program also includes new regional partners and local solution advisors to address customers' pressing questions about migrating to SAP Integration Suite.
Learn more here.
2. Unlock value with new integrations across SAP applications
Building a future-proofed business takes integrated processes running seamlessly end to end, connecting solutions, and embedding intelligence every step of the way. SAP is continuously enhancing the integration footprint across its solution portfolio. New innovations include updates to end-to-end process integration as well as enhancements that provide a consistent experience across SAP applications.
End-to-end process and cross-process integrations streamline the following areas:
Plan to fulfill: Integrated workforce, workforce availability, and certification information between SAP SuccessFactors solutions and the SAP Digital Manufacturing solution is planned to be available in May 2023 to enable a production supervisor to plan shifts efficiently.
Quote to cash: Integrating the SAP CPQ solution and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition supports customers' transitions from selling products to selling solutions. It provides an end-to-end process for managing all aspects of a solution offering. Solution order management, which allows flexible bundling in one integrated order, is a cornerstone of this sales scenario in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Recurring and consumption revenue management: Recent updates to the SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management solution integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition help companies build customer loyalty and stickiness by offering greater flexibility. Renewal programs can be backed by customer-specific promotions with flexible contract renewal options. When customers cancel contracts in midcycle, subscriber refunds and accounting entries are automatically processed. The updates also enable prepayment options to be offered with automatic customer invoicing and revenue recognition based on service activation and usage.
Lean service procurement: The SAP Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management package will support lean service procurement in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition starting in the first quarter of 2024. The redesigned capability for project-driven service procurements provides a completely new buying experience and a harmonized product master as well as a total spend management analytics and reporting tool. Supporting lean service procurement from project networks helps project managers and purchasers plan, initiate, and track project-related service procurements and facilitates supplier collaboration managed through SAP Business Network for Procurement and SAP Fieldglass solutions.
Additional updates include:
Seamless user experience: The SAP Start Web site, the central entry point for all cloud solutions from SAP in the public cloud, is planned to be generally available in the third quarter of 2023. SAP Start includes business content from all integrated public cloud business solutions. Pre-integrated SAP Task Center service functionality federates data from all major cloud solutions from SAP in one in-box and now also includes SAP Concur solutions. This enables easy search and navigation to cloud business apps as well visibility into the status of workflow approvals. Users can get the most relevant business data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition and SAP SuccessFactors solutions at a glance. SAP Fieldglass, SAP CX, and SAP Ariba solutions as well as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition will follow.
In addition to SAP Start, SAP also offers the SAP Mobile Start app, which gives users a convenient mobile experience. With the app, users can access relevant business data and workflows on mobile devices running on iOS and Android. Native capabilities like push notifications keep users informed about important business events.
Improved navigation in My Home: My Home is the center of gravity for users in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition. An improved navigation for spaces makes it easier for business users to find their daily activities. Business users can now also add more insight cards to My Home, personalizing it more efficiently, and color-code the solution's header to distinguish easily between development and test systems. These features are planned to be standard in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition from the third quarter of 2023 onward.
Richer collaboration: SAP Collaboration Manager is the built-in collaboration capability in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition. Users can now share their work context directly out of an application with coworkers, for instance, by sharing screen shots directly in the solution, without the detour of a download to the local file system.
Sharing insights across platforms: Collaborative ERP introduces adaptive card-based loop components. These new adaptive cards let users share actionable information, such as "share as chat," that can be used across various Microsoft products, for example, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook, making collaboration outside the solution more efficient and more convenient.
Aligned domain models: Exchanging data between applications that don't speak the same language requires additional integration effort. To address this challenge, SAP has in recent years harmonized the domain models of the key objects across SAP applications. The newest harmonization initiative supports, for instance, the object "product" across the end-to-end lead-to-cash process.
Learn more here.
3. New functions in SAP Signavio solutions help customers uncover deeper process insights faster
SAP Signavio solutions accelerate customer ERP transformations with SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The combined power of SAP technology and SAP Signavio solutions radically reduces the time and cost of planning, deploying, and optimizing any business process transformation. Available now, the innovations in SAP Signavio solutions allow customers to continually identify and adjust processes to run at their best given current company and market conditions.
- SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite accelerates transformation for customers of the SAP ERP application. A new approach helps customers shorten project preparation time from months to hours, reduce time to deploy, and simplify ongoing optimization of transformation projects. With our new "plug and gain" approach, data from the SAP Signavio Process Insights solution directly populates the SAP Signavio Process Intelligence solution to rapidly enable robust process mining capabilities, such as process variance. It is also possible to generate a model of existing processes with one click. On this foundation, customers can draw upon the end-to-end capabilities to establish a continuous loop of improvement and value creation.
- The SAP Signavio Process Explorer solution now offers a fully integrated scenario with lead-to-cash functionality in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition for project-based services in the professional services industry. This features an end-to-end business process that begins with marketing and ends with revenue collection. Predefined process blueprints and innovation recommendations help customer continuously improve their lead-to-cash process.
Learn more here.
4. New enterprise automation capabilities in SAP Build
Organizations that leverage automation outperform those that don't. SAP uniquely empowers customers with comprehensive enterprise automation capabilities, including best-in-class solutions for enterprise integration, process mining, and low-code process automation and application development. With these capabilities, customers can fully automate their business processes at the task and system level, leveraging continuous process monitoring and AI to fix bottlenecks proactively.
Today SAP announces new enterprise automation capabilities in SAP Build, the unified low-code software that empowers SAP users of all skill levels to create and augment enterprise apps, automate processes, and design business sites with drag-and-drop simplicity.
New capabilities in SAP Build include:
- The ability to subscribe to high-scale business application events through SAP Integration Suite, such as a high volume of goods being moved or order status changes, and to trigger process automations in response.
- Integration between SAP Signavio and SAP Build that enables automatic execution of the SAP Build Process Automation solution directly from SAP Signavio solutions when inefficient processes are detected
- Improved discoverability of prebuilt content across SAP Build, SAP Integration Suite, SAP BTP and application APIs with SAP Business Accelerator Hub
SAP Build is part of the RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP solutions, so customers can start using the new enterprise automation capabilities to automate their mission-critical ERP processes at no extra cost. Customers can also leverage the new Build to Win Hands-On Workshop to explore the new enterprise automation capabilities.
Learn more here.
5. SAP and Google Cloud expand partnership to build the future of open data and AI for Enterprises
The new joint cloud offering will unite SAP with Google Cloud’s data and analytics technology, making enterprise data more open and valuable for advancing enterprise AI development.
Learn more here.
6. Innovations in SAP Analytics Cloud enable enhanced data-driven decision-making
SAP announces innovations in SAP Analytics Cloud, an integrated solution that offers analytics and planning capabilities that simplify analytics for customers and enable more data-driven decision-making throughout the entire organization. The innovations are available today.
- Natural language processing: AI-driven analytics now uses natural language processing technology from Askdata, which SAP acquired in 2022 and has now integrated into SAP Analytics Cloud. The AI technology behind the search experience provides better natural multilingual processing than previous technology based only on English-language keywords. Users can access the new feature enabling natural-language queries from their home page and will be able to visualize their query results in tables. The use of large language models (LLM) improves the accuracy and consistency of answers compared to existing search-driven offerings. SAP plans to unveil more conversational, chatbot-like interaction capabilities in the third quarter of 2023, allowing users to receive query results from traditional databases augmented by certified knowledge material.
- Enhanced planning automation: SAP has simplified the development, testing, and management of interconnected planning workflow tasks and processes to streamline planning scenarios. New application programming interfaces, enhanced data imports, and additional predicative model quality indicators increase customers' productivity and help them save time during planning processes.
Learn more here.
7. SAP HANA Cloud adds innovation to power intelligent data applications
SAP announces three new categories of innovations for SAP HANA Cloud that deliver unique capabilities for intelligent data applications. Multi-model data processing and embedded machine learning provide users of applications running on SAP HANA Cloud with transformational insights to improve business decisions.
These currently available and upcoming innovations include:
- Flexible core to memory ratio was made available in the first quarter of 2023 and provides flexibility in the mix of virtual CPUs and memory capacity to improve price performance and lower total cost of ownership. Customers of SAP HANA Cloud will be able to tailor system configurations to better suit their workload and avoid overprovisioning of resources while maximizing performance.
- Multimodel enhancements support additional innovative application scenarios with increased capabilities in a single data platform. Customers can perform graph processing with GraphScript (planned for Q3 2023) on the document store. New spatial functions (planned for Q2 2023) allow for further spatial calculations as well as validation of invalid geometries, also planned for the second quarter of 2023.
- Machine learning advancements include automated machine learning (autoML) pipeline and time-series classification. These new features, made available in the first quarter of 2023, expand the scope and accelerate the adoption of embedded machine learning scenarios.
Learn more here.
8. Improve business outcomes with new line-of-business use cases
Use cases for SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) are built to enable SAP customers – from business users to developers alike – with customer-proven, business outcome – driven examples to accelerate the understanding and adoption of SAP BTP.
Learn more here.