Blog 2: The role of Business Technology Platform as an extension and innovation platform
This blog is part of the “10+ ways to reshape your SAP landscape with SAP Business Technology Platform Blog Series”
Summary: In this blog series we will look at the role of the SAP Business Technology Platform to reshape your SAP landscape including SAP and Non-SAP systems. In this second blog we discuss SAP Business Technology Platform capabilities around process automation, application development, enterprise integration, and AI. And how these capabilities support the most demanding businesses.
What does Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One have in common with SAP Business Technology Platform? -- Tons of it.
Just like any other sophisticated business, Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One is in the cutthroat business of racing. And it competes in one of the most challenging environments in global sports. Combining elite teamwork, modern technologies, high-performance management, and exceptional driving skills, Formula One is a technologically innovative form of motorsport, where incremental gains yield significant results and can be the difference between winning and losing.
So what is common with Business Technology Platform?
The Formula One team has to compete in 22-24 different race tracks during a season. Each race track presents a different set of challenges, which can only be mastered when all the data is well understood. Data is what drives strategy in Formula One. Strategy is based on a set of decisions made by track engineers, drivers, and strategists to try to maximize the result in the race and qualifying by optimizing the tools at their disposal to make important calls such as tire decisions, the timing and amount of pit stops, and the management of the cars in the race. And all the decisions for each of the scenarios require intensive data analysis. We will cover data management and analytics in Blog 11: The role of Data & Analytics in the transformation by Wolfgang Epting.
The challenges above are similar to those experienced by our customers where they have to navigate changing market situations and customer demands, and analyse and respond to dynamic requirements, all while managing quality, cost, navigating through processes, and time to market.
In this blog, I want to emphasize the Business Technology Platform, which brings cutting-edge cloud services around application development, process automation, enterprise integration, analytics, and AI, all of which should help IT deliver fully integrated rapid enhancements. The value of AI and Gen AI for business increases exponentially when combined with industry-specific data and deep process knowledge, and this is exactly what SAP does. Joule, the generative AI assistant, revolutionizes how you interact with SAP business systems, making every touchpoint count and every task simpler. More on AI later from Mark on Blog 4: The Role of AI in the transformation. Stay tuned for that.
With the switch to S/4HANA, business can build their competitive car on a new chassis. The focus is on cloud first strategy and clean core, i.e. a largely untouched SAP core. BTP is used to develop, provide, and scale new applications in the cloud. Add-on solutions on the BTP can therefore be easily connected to SAP S/4HANA, while the SAP system remains 100% clean.
Let us look at some specific areas.
Formula One has long had active aero on cars – the rear-wing-opening overtaking aid, DRS, for instance. This is part of the aero package. Obviously, the extremes would be Monza/Spa for low downforce, and Monaco/Hungary for highest. With Silverstone as maybe the ultimate “compromise” setup on the less draggy side but also needs good high-speed downforce, especially for Copse/Maggotts/Becketts where the driver experiences lateral forces upto 6Gs during acceleration, braking and cornering.
Quite the same way, SAP Business Technology Platform, is the best path to rapidly build and enhance enterprise applications, processes, and experiences on top of the S/HANA chassis for various industry and internal business requirements. The prime idea is to build competition-beating processes and application enhancements quickly and deliver them to business. An example is building intuitive applications for field staff that provide necessary data points and actions intending to reduce paperwork. Or using AI to generate work orders with necessary steps which allows planners to execute orders faster. A clean core enables you to become future-proof by ensuring faster deployment with smooth upgrades – all while using BTP allowing you to innovate at market speed.
Think about this as developing the rear wing of the car and delivering upgrades during the season. Teams have to find the sweet spot between elements such as endplates, flaps, gurney flaps, and DRS. Teams can make changes to optimize the car's performance on different tracks.
From a business perspective, this is where we employ SAP Business Technology Platform BUILD capabilities. This allows you to:
- Simplify your cloud application development to get more value and ignite innovation
- Deliver agile process automation to automate and optimize processes and tasks
- Connect people, data, and processes with engaging experiences
Approach it from a business angle. SAP Build is SAP’s low-code offering, designed to empower users of all skills to easily create and augment their SAP and non-SAP business applications with visual drag-and-drop, without requiring programming skills.
An example here is a shipping and logistics company that has built a Mobile App within 3 weeks, to allow drivers to capture damages to their vehicles. This app has greatly reduced tons of paperwork. This has been coupled with automation to help fleet managers plan required repairs and/or schedule them for a later date based on spare parts availability.
SAP Build brings together SAP Build Apps, SAP Build Process Automation, SAP Build Work Zone and SAP Build Code with generative AI-based code development into a unified development experience with new innovations to rapidly build apps, automate processes, and create business websites. These "four carriages" work together to help users accelerate application development and process automation, empowering every employee in the organization:
- Build visually: Rapidly create enterprise apps, automate processes, and design business sites.
- Integrate seamlessly: Accelerate development with prebuilt connectors and lines of business-specific content for SAP and non-SAP systems.
- Collaborate securely: Foster collaboration between business and development teams with built-in governance and lifecycle management.
In addition, SAP Build Code, generative AI-based code development with Joule copilot, will provide optimized Java and JavaScript application development abilities, providing a turn-key environment for coding, testing, integrations, and application lifecycle management.
SAP Build Code brings:
- Generative AI-based code development with Joule copilot - uses AI to generate app logic, data models, and test scripts.
- Tailored for SAP development – helps you connect seamlessly with prebuilt integrations and APIs.
- Enhanced fusion development – helps you drive collaboration between professional developers and business experts.
Each Formula One car is made up of around 14,500 individual components. Each element such as chassis, power unit, gearbox, aero package, braking systems, battery, cooling systems, telemetry, radio communications, tires, driver, etc. have to be truly well integrated to ensure the car is ready to race, is reliable and will win.
Similarly, in business, systems in isolation will never work and provide a full picture of business. They have to be integrated with core systems, and external applications, leverage 3rd party data and provide all of these integrated insights to business race engineers, and enable them to make race-winning decisions.
Hence SAP Integration Suite is essential to integrate on-premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications, events, and data and provide them securely to all stakeholders to consume and process information. This is where we offer SAP BTP Integration Suite which addresses hybrid integration strategies.
The strategy to support innovation is clear.
- Accelerate innovation and integrate without obstacles
- Speed connectivity and realize value faster
- Connect customers and workers to automated processes
- Conquer process fragmentation and drive productivity
- Streamline workflows and improve the employee experience
- Connect with partner systems and improve collaboration
Top nine ways SAP Integration Suite drives innovation
BTP Integration Suite therefore offers:
- Prebuilt integrations managed and updated by SAP
- Harmonized access to popular third-party cloud applications
- Tools for designing, publishing, and managing APIs
- AI-assisted development and integration optimization
- Tools-based, guided approach to define, document, and govern your integration strategy
- Edge Integration Cell to run integration scenarios within customer-managed private landscapes for on-prem to on-prem workloads.
The new world of innovation through Generative AI via the SAP perspective.
I would equate the race engineer to Gen AI today. Simply because today, race engineers are crucial assets in every Formula One team, as they are the intelligence who ensure drivers and their vehicles are attuned to put on a show on the track. They analyze and call on all data points. I would use the parallels where the car is business applications, drivers as users, track and weather data is external data, car data is business data, custom setups during races as Gen AI content and radio communications as prompts for business users.
SAP Business AI is aimed at making our business applications more intelligent, infusing AI technologies into our applications. Furthermore, we provide business process-specific AI services that our customers can adapt to their workflow, e.g., business document processing, data attribute recommendation, RPA, etc.
Building data understanding is essential for the success of business AI. SAP has access to business data covering finance, supply chain, human resources, travel, and tons of external data relevant for business.
To make business AI successful, we continue to build the best technology and leverage the best tools on the market.
- This includes strategic partnerships with others in the industry, such as Open AI, AWS Bedrock, Aleph Alpha Luminous, Meta Llama 2, Falcon, etc.
- Embed their tech into our products such as SuccessFactors, S4, CX and Spend Manegement.
- Enable customers to build custom ML models on SAP data easily and securely.
To conclude SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is the platform of choice to modernize, upgrade, and drive innovations in your applications. It allows you to extend and personalize SAP applications, integrate and connect landscapes, and unleash business users to connect processes and experiences, make decisions with confidence, and drive business innovation.
Let’s get out there and win every race.
The Blog Series 10+ ways to reshape your SAP landscape with SAP Business Technology Platform will be published regularly and the newest blogs can be found here: Video & Blog Series - SAP BTP MEE Overview (brandcast.io)
To get more insights, please also visit one of our BTP Innovation Days:
- Innovation Day Vienna: Vienna 04-Apr-24 SAP BTP Innovation Day Vienna
- Innovation Day Switzerland: Bern 14-May-24 SAP | SAP BTP Innovation Day Switzerland
- Innovation Day Germany Essen 16-May-24 SAP | SAP BTP Innovation Day
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