My PoV: SAP Business Suite on HANA

[former_member198108]

This detailed PoV is made up of the following sections:

1. Recommendations
2. SoH: POV

Recommendation:

• Weigh the benefits and opportunities against the challenges and risk

Business Suite on HANA provides customers with real opportunities to improve their businesses. However, the significance and value of these benefits for organisations will vary and need to be identified and balanced with the fact that the technology is yet unproven in a production environment (with the exception of a few beta customers).

• Use value identification/discovery workshop (industry, technical expert) to identify sweet-spots

  Each customer should carry out a business value exercise to identify the possible sweet spots. Account teams/industrial teams/SAP/Analytics team should do work beforehand instead of relying on customers to identify.

• Create a HANA roadmap aligned to the organisations application and platform strategy and review periodically
• Establish whether the organisation is a leading edge adopter (risk taker, leader); a challenger or a follower – based on opportunities identified against risks and costs.

Customers should take the opportunity to evaluate Business Suite on HANA.  Evaluate the possible benefits and opportunities that the real-time data platform (HANA) offers and develop a HANA roadmap to fit into their application and platform strategy.

1. The roadmap should outline a time frame for adopting HANA in its different forms (side-car, BW, Business Suite) for strategic planning.
2. Periodic review of the roadmap with the associated benefits should be done as the customer base grows. Time frames could be:
   1. Leading edge adopters: within 12 months
   2. Challenger:  2- 5 years
   3. Follower: >5 years / defer for foreseeable future.
3. As part of the HANA roadmap/strategy the customer should consider how the data warehouse fits in in-light of the enhanced SoH analytical capability (SAP HANA Analytical Framework and additional analytical apps created on HANA)

• Understand the cost of ownership: database license costs, investment of cost adoption:  migration, integration etc.

Whilst the business case for SoH should be based around business benefits, there are notable IT benefits however there are additional IT costs too!

• Organizations interested in SAP HANA DBMS technology for large scale, business-critical deployments should adopt HANA when disaster recovery, high availability and partitioning tools are sufficient to meet current needs

SoH: My POV

Embed Real-Time Analytics in the Transactional/Operational Process/System

The ability to perform analytics on transactional data real-time and embed them into processes.

• No need to extract data from transactional system and aggregate to data warehouse for reporting.
  • Eliminating the data warehouse layer and associated costs (licenses, hardware, software, support, landscape systems) – in some cases
  • Reducing the time taken to access the data for reporting. Since it does not need to be loaded and aggregated to the data warehouse. The data is available for reporting as soon as its created in the transactional system.
• Embedded intelligence, real-time reporting, prediction, operational-data with social analytics/sentiment analytics etc – all require different types of people.

POV: There is still a case for data warehouse, for example if there was a requirement  to do historical reporting over a dataset extending 10 years, it’s unlikely that a transactional system will hold such data;  and enterprise data warehouse where there are many different source of data.

Business Benefits

• 24 pre-built scenarios
• “Imagine” new use cases – the art of the possible
• Base for new business model
• Improved performance:

PoV: The technology in the HANA platform can speed-up application processes compared to other database systems. SAP has a roadmap (some developers, others to be developed) of creating 24 businesses processes/scenarios optimised for HANA. These  resource-intensive processes will yield the greatest benefits such as material requirements planning (MRP). This speed will enable the business to interact with the results differently significantly changing the business interaction and opening up new competitive business models.

A break away from the traditional SAP mentality that organisations processes had to be adapted to “best-practice” SAP processes is guised under the terms innovation and “imagine”. SAP is providing the technical framework for companies to re-think how they do business and interact with customers.

Technical Benefits

• Technically non-disruptive migration (database migration)
• Lower total cost of ownership.
• A simplified DBA experience.
  • Dramatic landscape simplification.
  • More functionality with less code.
  • End of batch programmes

POV: The technology need is being proven in an increasing number of implementations.