Power Week Atlanta – SAP Partners Build Extensions for SuccessFactors, S/4HANA, and Business ByDesign

Just this past month of September, the Partner Solution Center Team hosted a Power Week in our SAP office in Atlanta, GA USA. During this week of Sept. 19 we held an extendibility workshop for SAP core solutions with 11 SAP partner organizations totaling 20 consultants. The partner organizations created and submitted innovative use cases, which they would like to focus on to expand their solution options. They looked at the different capabilities and means with experts on how they can build or extend their offerings and gain a competitive edge in their markets. This comes with SAP support of partner enablement and focus to extend partner capabilities and offerings into new markets.

The SAP team put together two tracks of focus during this hands-on training Power Week to give most benefit to all those who attended. We had one track focusing on building solution extensions for SAP SuccessFactors and S/4HANA. Brand new and with great excitement, we also jointly provided a SAP Business ByDesign Cloud Application Studio track. It was a course designed specifically on how to utilize our Cloud Application Studio and how to extend and adapt solutions with Business ByDesign. For the last part of the workshop both groups joined together in one track, where they learned about building application extension with the various services provided by SAP Cloud Platform.

S/4HANA and SuccessFactors Track:

The S/4HANA and SuccessFactors PowerWeek track had a great turn out. The participants experienced a variety of lectures, demos, and spent more than 50% of their time with hands-on exercises guided by leading SAP experts. They had opportunities for group discussions on different areas and asking questions to SAP experts, related to their use cases, as well as sharing their ideas and experiences. Where it made sense, the course was broken down into partner focus topics and exercises for each backend area, such as S/4HANA or SuccessFactors with the opportunity for participants to learn about all two areas at once.

The Following topics were covered in this track:

• SAP Cloud Platform Overview
• Extending SAP products
• Extension Account onboarding
• SAP API Business HUB
• Success Factors MDF Overview
• Success Factors MDF Extensions
• CDS Views for S/4 Hana extensions
• Build UI5 Extensions
• S/4 Hana in app extensions

Business ByDesign Track:

A refreshing new addition to the traditional PowerWeek content was the Business ByDesign development track with the insight and expert guidance on how to build using the Cloud Application Studio. It was a two-day full deep dive packed with hands-on exercises, demos, and lecture overviews. The course covered a variety of topics to give partners the knowledge and a full view of the Cloud Application Studio capabilities. The expert guidance was focused on helping partners develop ByDesign solution extensions that provide additional value to their customers as well as utilizing the tool to build extensions and add-ons to tackle new industries and expand the market needs filling those gaps were partners can extend their value selling services further. The group had a jam packed session covering all topics in the Cloud Application Studio as well as allocated time to spend with the expert trainers to review their business cases. Group discussions were experience partners shared tips and tricks and provide feedback and experience using the studio tool.

The following topics were covered in this track:

• How to set up and install SAP Cloud Application Studio
• Business Objects
• Scripting
• UI Designer embedded components
• Data List and OV5
• BC, Debugging, and Tracing
• Extensibility – Extend standard BO
• Lifecycle Deployment and Patching
• Service Integration
• OData Service
• Analytics
• Approvals, Notifications, Forms, MDRO
• Mashups
• SAP Cloud Platform Overview

SAP Cloud Platform Track:

For the last two days of the workshop participants from all tracks joined together and gained a good understanding and hands-on experience of the SAP Cloud Platform capabilities. Exercise were tailored towards each backend system track whichever the partner might have joined, Business ByDesign, SuccessFactors, or S/4HANA. They learned how to leverage the broad range of Cloud Platform services to build innovative new apps and extensions that they can deploy to multiple markets and integrate with various backend systems. The SAP professional team demoed system functions and interacted with the partners during the class and breakout sessions.

The topics covered during this course:

• SAP CP Multitenant Overview
• Overview of SDI
• Workflow Service Overview
• Business Rule Service Overview
• Build Java Extensions
• Build Simple UI5 app
• Replicate Data using SDI
• Cloud Foundry overview
• Extension Account Onboarding
• SAP Cloud Platform Application Deployment
• Alexa Integration with Cloud Platform

Feedback has been very positive, with comments such as:

• Power Weeks have always been useful for our organization to develop new applications with SAP Cloud Platform.
• Excellent workshop. Very helpful.
• The current format is great.

A big thank you to the participating partners. The questions and feedback were very valuable for the SAP team.

We also would like to thank Evžen Mayer (CEO of KCTdata) who shared his SAP Cloud Platform business success stories and provided valuable guidance to the participants. Giving a partner perspective on using Cloud Platform and how his company is leveraging the Cloud Platform to gain market advantage .

Also we would like to thank the SAP colleagues that spoke, demoed and presented at this workshop:

• Milton Chandradas (SAP Cloud Platform Product Manager)
• Jennifer Cha (SAP Cloud Platform Product Manager)
• Leo Flores (Cloud Service Center – Solutions Architect and Product Owner)
• Chaitanya Kuntamukkala (Cloud Service Center – Solutions Architect and Product Owner)
• Harris Fogel (VP SAP Cloud Platform Center of Excellence NA)

Host of the workshop is the North American SAP Partner Solution Center, represented by

• Bernd Herold (Solution Principal for SAP HANA Cloud Platform)
• Quintus Smith (Solution Expert for SAP Business ByDesign)

Author of this blog is Quintus Smith, Solution Expert for SAP Business ByDesign at the Partner Solution Center in North America.