Archives August 2020

U.S. enterprises are using S/4HANA, SAP’s intelligent ERP system with integrated artificial intelligence, to transform their business processes, with many using SAP service providers to manage these installations, according to a new report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

The 2020 ISG Provider Lens™ SAP HANA and Leonardo Ecosystem Partners Report for the U.S. finds many enterprises here interested in a two-tier adoption model for S/4HANA, with many opting for on-premises installations with heavy customizations for their main offices and the cloud version for their satellite or regional offices. The cloud version of the ERP package allows for less customization, but also for automatic upgrades and faster implementation.

S/4HANA focuses on alleviating business process problems by applying analytics to speed up delivery of insights. Many service providers, meanwhile, are focusing on lowering costs and speeding up delivery by using artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic process automation to streamline incident management and speed up configuration, the report says.

In addition, SAP-certified professionals working at service providers are managing complex SAP installations for customers, the report adds. “Certified professionals can serve as one of the differentiators for service providers looking to showcase their SAP expertise,” said Jan Erik Aase, director and global leader, ISG Provider Lens Research. “Top providers are investing in reskilling employees and are growing the number of their SAP-certified professionals.

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, is causing some enterprises to postpone new large-scale S/4HANA implementations and transformations, the report says. A few companies have completely halted their S/4HANA deals or decisions, but many others are asking services providers to “keep the lights on” and continue with basic SAP management support. Service providers are continuing to serve SAP customers with employees who work from home.

In response to COVID-19, enterprises may move their SAP workloads to the cloud to cut costs, the report adds. As the pandemic continues, enterprises may migrate S/4HANA to the cloud, and providers may offer preconfigured templates to help with that process, the report predicts

The report finds growing demand from U.S. enterprises to integrate agile and DevOps processes into SAP services. Service providers are leveraging their proprietary tools and accelerators to deliver S/4HANA services, and they are integrating agile and DevOps methodologies with their frameworks to increase efficiency and reduce delivery times.

Many service providers also are increasing their focus on creating ready-to-run templates, industry-specific solutions and preconfigured offerings for S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Platform and Leonardo. Enterprises are embracing these solutions, seeing them as enabling faster time to market and helping them become intelligent organizations.

The implementation of SAP S/4 Hana is not an isolated IT project. It triggers a comprehensive business transformation process, making it necessary to rethink and adapt corporate goals. This is not a journey that companies should take lightly – they need a comprehensive business transformation roadmap. Six key factors decide if a roadmap leads to success or sets a company up for failure.

Business alignment

Companies need to realize that aligning strategic business goals is a fundamental requirement for sustainable transformation. Only then do they really know which processes and functionalities they require from the new software. Without knowing where you are and where you want to go, even the best next-gen ERP system will not be able to effectively support your business.

Evaluation

For a successful roadmap, it is essential that companies thoroughly evaluate all of their business processes to see which of them really are mission critical, which have more of a supporting function, and which can be optimized (within reason). For example, retrofitting systems to comply with standard best practices can also achieve higher levels of automation and process optimization.

Onboarding

However, business alignment also means that everyone involved – from C-level executives to interns – needs to be on board. Companies need to talk to all affected employees and, taking their job level and prior know-how into account, acquaint them with the new technology. Effective change management is key for successful software implementations and business processes optimization.

Competence

Internal acceptance and necessary know-how are essential to bridge the gap between IT and business. A competent consultancy and system integration partner is able to facilitate and orchestrate this process. Together, company and partner need to develop a structured transformation plan to make subsequent implementations or migrations as seamless as possible.

Comprehensiveness

For thorough evaluation, considering the process landscape in its entirety is indispensable. Individual departments like finance, procurement, sales and marketing need comprehensive analysis of their processes to know how to improve and optimize them with the new technology.

Prototyping

Before companies actively start tackling the implementation, it is recommendable to have kind of a test run. This ensures that everyone involved works towards and subsequently benefits from business transformation. A prototype guarantees transparency of changes on a technological and organizational level. By using a prototype, companies can furthermore gain experience and consider what they learned in the actual implementation. This minimizes risk in business transformation efforts.

Conclusion

Business transformation closes the gap between where companies are right now and where they want to be by optimizing the use of software and technology. To be successful, companies need a comprehensive roadmap that considers every area of business and is aligned with strategic corporate goals.

Learning management systems are becoming more important. SAP is offering two cloud solutions to address this need: SAP Litmos and SAP SuccessFactors Learning Management System. What are their core functionalities and how do they differ?

The need for learning management systems is increasing. There are many reasons contributing to this trend, for example new regulations concerning certifications or the growing realization that employees are a core resource of every company and have to be invested in. If a company has decided to opt for a learning management system, it is going to be spoilt for choice. SAP offers two modern cloud solutions, SAP Litmos and the Learning Management System (LMS; integrated in SuccessFactors).

In this article, we will take a look at what these systems can do and how they differ from each other.

SAP SuccessFactors Learning Management System

The module LMS is part of the SAP SuccessFactors suite and is therefore already seamlessly integrated with master data records and other SuccessFactors modules. This makes it possible to e.g. connect individual goals and objectives to specific courses, classes, or more informal study groups. If you already use SuccessFactors, opting for LMS may be the most logical choice as it offers seamless integration and a consistent user experience for employees.

LMS offers a granular access management system, enabling companies to tailor user and administrative rights to their specific needs. Concerning learning material, LMS offers predefined standard integration with various course providers. For example, SuccessFactors LMS makes it easy to integrate LMS with LinkedIn Learning, ensuring that employees benefit from countless courses. What is more, standard integration with common VLS (Virtual Learning Session) system, like Skype for Business and Webex, is also supported.

SAP Litmos

SAP Litmos is a modern and user-friendly learning management system. The implementation is fast and easy, ensuring that the solution’s rollout doesn’t take more than a few days. SAP Litmos is a stand-alone solution but can also be integrated with master data systems. The functionalities for users and administrators are intuitive, meaning that no additional training is necessary to operate the system. If companies have complex, specific requirements, the design of the platform can be individually adapted.

A huge advantage of SAP Litmos is that learning materials and courses about specific topics or industries can be licensed with the system. This means that in a span of just a few days, companies not only have SAP Litmos set up, but they also have a complete set of course material on there as well. Of course, other course providers can be integrated via pre-defined standard integration interfaces.

Conclusion

SAP Litmos and SuccessFactors LMS are both tried-and-tested solutions with numerous happy customers worldwide. Both have a number of advantages, but they also have limitations. Which system best suits a company heavily depends on specific requirements as well as the needs of HR and employees.

If you are already leveraging the SAP SuccessFactors suite and have more complex access management requirements, LMS offers many advantages. If you want a user-friendly learning management system with fast implementation times, preconfigured learning materials and more adventurous features, SAP Litmos is a good fit.

SAP IN has announced the launch of SAP S/4 HANA Cloud and SAP Commerce Cloud on India data centre. With this launch, Indian enterprises can now meet end-to-end customer demands, make commerce frictionless while ensuring compliance with current and upcoming Personal Data Protection Bill.

“Adoption of agility like that of a Digital Native model across the business landscape can lead India Inc to quicker recovery as well as push the demand of a digital buying mindset (electronic commerce),” said Debdeep Sengupta, President and Managing Director, SAP Indian Subcontinent “With SAP’s locally available Business Cloud, we are easing Indian enterprises transition to be a digital business.”

As the economy shifts towards a consumption-based model, SAP brings together core technologies into one “stack” to deliver a high level of scalability and flexibility in the country while adhering to localization of the data policy. Further, with an € 5.5 Billion addressable market opportunity by 2023, SAP believes the need for companies to dive into technology areas such as user experience, data analytics, cloud solutions and mobility.

The availability of S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Commerce Cloud in India will offer enterprises a quick and easy way to consume the latest solutions in the cloud and enable them take advantage of next-generation software and services.

SAP Commerce Cloud will offer a comprehensive, end-to-end commerce solution powering real-time, intelligent customer engagement with individually relevant, in-the-moment experiences, seamlessly crossing channels, spanning front office to back office and connecting demand and supply chain.

The name SAP Data Services is used for an entire family of products. The core is SAP Data Services itself, then there is SAP Data Integrator, SAP Data Quality and SAP CPI-DS.

The first three are the same product but differ from the enabled transformations. Data Integrator has all the base transforms plus typical data integration transforms like History Preserving. The Data Quality bundle consists of the base transforms plus Data Quality transforms like address cleansing. The SAP Data Services bundle contains all transforms.

Over the years Data Services grew to a very powerful tool and allows to implement every requirement efficiently and quickly. When I was part of the team, the development guideline had been to enable the customer performing even the most complex transformations with the combination of a few transforms. The tool also supports all SAP APIs available to pick the best suited one. Connecting to the database, generating Abap code for the extraction, call BAPIs/RFCs, send and receive IDOCs, use the modern ODP/ODQ API, web services, restful,… you name it.

Simplify integration

At one point in time, our team got tasked with a cloud version of an ETL tool – Cloud Platform Integration – Data Services or short CPI-DS. Its backend is still a normal Data Services but easier to install. Building a proper Web UI is expensive and, in some areas, not even possible.

Also, the goal was to simplify things. The easiest way to simplify a UI and keep development cost down is to remove functionality. CPI-DS can therefore be used for some specialized cases only.

In a few areas the development of Data Services did a wrong turn, for example the Business Objects Enterprise Portal integration for unified administration and monitoring was a bad idea and never undone. As a result, the installation is unnecessarily error prone and time consuming.

The unique selling point of Data Services is how well it supports the human approach of data integration. We love to think logically and step by step: First I need to read the data from the following objects. Next I want to rename the columns so all gets readable and also let me do some simple data conversions to prepare for the hard work.  Then join the data with another table, pivot the result and load that into the target. This is exactly how the dataflow is created. This allows to build the flow quickly initially and in a couple of months, when it needs to be tweaked to produce more data, it is easy to understand.

SAP Data Services delivers on promises

All the marketing statements I heard recently have been supported by Data Services since the beginning. “Move the transformation to the data, not the data to the transformation” (SAP Data Hub) is called a pushdown in Data Services. “ELT instead of ETL” (SAP Hana) means to extract (E) the data first, then load (L) it into the target system and do the transformation (T) inside the database as follow up step.

Depending on the case, this is a good idea and therefore Data Services supports both approaches and the optimizer picks what makes the most sense.

Realtime Data Integration is supported also, but not implemented very well. It starts with the question “What data has been changed?” – a requirement for realtime streaming of changes. The philosophy of Data Services is to provide all techniques and APIs for any given source system and the user can choose which one to use. This makes sense as each has pros and cons.

There are other tools, SAP SLT for example, which can do a single method only, which reconfigure the source system to produce the changes and therefore getting changes in realtime is simpler. Both approaches have their merits.

“That’s what you should expect,” says Joshua Greenbaum of Enterprise Applications Consulting. “At the beginning of the cycle of uptake you would want to have an absolute rock-solid assurance that you can make a 20-year investment in your technology.”

SAP co-CEO Christian Klein says enterprises are keen to move to S/4HANA, but some of the larger ones are telling him they won’t be ready by 2025, the deadline SAP had previously set to end support for its legacy software. For those companies, “It’s not so much about the technology, it’s really about adapting long-standing business processes, adapting to the needs of the customers in the digital world,” Klein says.

There’s also been some concern that an SAP skills shortage could leave some customers without the help they need to migrate their systems.

“The demand is high, but the partners now are ramping up as we speak,” Klein says. “I just talked to the three largest systems integrators and they are very confident that we overcome this shortage of skilled SAP resources really near term.”

The 2 percent solution

Extended maintenance will cost an additional 2 percent of the annual license fee, on top of the 20 percent fee for mainstream maintenance.

The new cut-off date will affect users of SAP’s core enterprise software component, ERP 6.0, and the core applications of SAP Business Suite 7, including Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management and Supplier Relationship Management.

Procrastinators hoping that SAP will relent and offer another extension in future are out of luck: “For extended maintenance for the Business Suite 7 core applications, the end of 2030 is really the final date,” Klein says.

Even 2027 will be too soon for some, says EAC’s Greenbaum, noting that there are companies still running instances of R/2, a version of SAP’s ERP system that was superseded in the early 1990s.

The extension will remove a key commercial argument for SAP competitors such as Oracle, who have been playing on the uncertainty of what will happen after 2025 to tempt customers to switch, says Greenbaum.

The introduction of S/4 Hana is a major game-changer for SAP, as it offers a solution that’s designed to meet the challenges and requirements of the digital economy. And as 2025 marks the deadline to switch from ECC to S/4 Hana, it’s no surprise that large numbers of SAP customers are now preparing to migrate.

One of the biggest but often overlooked considerations within moving to the S/4 platform is the issue of security. This is largely due to the introduction of SAP Fiori – a key aspect of S/4, which emphasises the role of mobile.

The result will be greater productivity and efficiency – as all users will have better and more flexible access to relevant systems and information, wherever they are. Yet this improved mobility also has its drawbacks when it comes to security, as it opens up many potential routes into core business systems and data.

How to navigate the security risks

• Set up an external gateway. This is a gateway that resides outside the organisation’s own network and requires users to log in using a set protocol. This adds an additional layer of security to the login process that protects the network.
• Ensure encryption is enabled. Encrypting files and making them unreadable without the correct encryption key significantly enhances security. Even if someone does manage to gain access to these files, they won’t be able to do anything with them. Enabling end-to-end encryption ensures that communications between SAP and users cannot be intercepted, even if they are using public Wi-Fi hotspots.
• Develop strong and effective mobile device management. Controlling device access to company networks and data keeps the enterprise on top of who is doing what with which devices, so it can feel confident that mobile users are working within company policies. This requires a robust approach to the management of mobile devices, which will ensure knowing where devices are and keeping them up-to-date and patched. Usage should also be monitored to make sure that password standards, and other configurations, are being enforced.
• Introduce certification protocols. The system can be secured, and unauthorised users kept out, through the introdution of certification protocols, so that each user has to be certified before accessing an organisation’s system.
• Improve intrusion detection and prevention through network traffic monitoring. Traffic across the network should be automatically monitored and analysed to check for any suspicious usage patterns. This protects the system from network-based threats.

Conclusion

The introduction of S/4 Hana offers an incredible opportunity. Thanks to the ground-breaking introduction of Fiori, it dramatically modernises the user experience and speeds up planning, execution and collaboration.

However, the potential security risks that come with the new platform cannot be ignored, making it a careful balancing act. Overly restrictive controls would be counter-productive to the huge benefits offered by S/4 and Fiori as they would take away the increased mobility offered by the platform and potentially harm the business case.

AI has enormous potential for almost every company. SAP customers are therefore faced with the question of which technologies SAP offers them to upgrade and enhance their existing system landscapes.

For the longest time, artificial intelligence (AI) was nothing more than exciting material for science fiction novels and movies. In 1982, Harrison Ford was hunting down replicants in ‘Blade Runners’; in 2001, Steven Spielberg wove an intricate tale of a relationship between human and machine in ‘A. I.’

Technologies that emulate or surpass human skills and characteristics are fascinating – not only on the big screen. For decades, scientists have dedicated time and money to the topic of artificial intelligence. The workshop ‘Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence’, held in 1956 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, is seen as the starting point of AI as academic subject.

Progress in the field of AI wasn’t exactly on the curriculum during that workshop at Dartmouth. However, over the past few years, the futuristic visions of scientists and Hollywood directors alike have become more realistic as the power of computers continues to increase, more digital, connected products are flooding the market, and our society and economy are producing enormous amounts of digital data.

What AI can and can’t do

What we are missing is a valid common definition of AI or, more generally, what counts as intelligence. What we can say without the shadow of a doubt is this: To some degree, machines are capable of autonomously making decisions and acting on them. They are capable of recognizing and analyzing patterns in data, language or images. In most of these cases, machines do significantly better than humans, as their analysis is usually faster, more comprehensive, and more accurate. Technology-based methods – like machine learning – are a requirement for these processes to work seamlessly.

AI: Potential value of €430 bil.

Since ‘strong AI’ is still a distant vision of the future, today’s focus is more on ‘weak AI’, meaning manageable, ethical software and solutions for practical use cases. According to consulting firm PwC, (weak) AI alone will generate value of €430 billion in Germany until 2030. In another study, PwC studied the most common use cases of artificial intelligence. A majority of respondents indicated that they used AI for automating existing business process and analyzing data. AI is the most useful when dealing with one individual, complex task involving an enormous amount of data.

Automation through ML and AI

Instead, SAP is now focusing on business processes and company-specific requirements by integrating innovations and individual solutions. SAP offers customers different ways to join the world of artificial intelligence, each of which is tailored to different target groups while still complementing the others.

In its new ERP system S/4 Hana, SAP has embedded some AI functionalities which are supposed to make individual S/4 applications intelligent. The goal is the automation of routine tasks to relieve employees of monotonous work, shifting their focus to more complex scenarios. There is more than one approach to reach this goal.

SAP Data Intelligence

Running on SAP Cloud Platform (SCP), SAP Data Intelligence is by far the most elaborate AI solution in SAP’s portfolio. While it is the most likely ‘successor’ of Leonardo, the focus has shifted to business. SAP Data Intelligence combines a more conservative business world with open source, making it more open to different solutions and applications, like Jupyter Notebooks (Project Jupyter), Python and Python-based frameworks for machine learning like pandas, scikit-learn or TensorFlow.

Focused AI strategy

With SAP Data Intelligence, the created data models can be transferred to a company’s SAP landscape for further development, testing, and performance monitoring. And, most importantly, AI scenarios can be audited, complying with regulatory guidelines.

SAP has recognized that AI is an important – if not the most important – technology topic and is enthusiastically adding to its existing portfolio without losing sight of business requirements. Actively researching AI is not SAP’s forte, however. Companies like Facebook, Google or Microsoft as well as open source initiatives are and will continue to be the driving force in AI innovation.