Unleashing the power of SAP digital integration for a digital ecosystem

Introduction

You should be reading this blog if you are looking for a seamless digital integration of different components of your landscape & you have challenges with legacy , hybrid and complex apps that need to be brought together for seamless connectivity. You are evaluating which of the middleware tools can help you achieve this with less effort & options for scalability and easier adoption.

The approach mentioned below is based on my experience as an expert in SAP New Dimension Technologies for a corporate major in helping customers to digitally integrate their ecosystem seamlessly and leverage on the digital innovations.

The Real Problem

Companies are changing fast, their business changing, most of our customers don’t realize it, but slowly they are becoming an digital organization. Any customer’s ecosystem typically has an amalgamation of legacy, hybrid, composite applications, native ERP applications & COTS products, bespoke applications, and challenges persist with bridging the landscape and seamlessly integrate with each other.

In most of our engagements we see a rising demand to digitally integrate their corporate landscape in alignment with their future roadmap to take advantage of the collaborative Open source applications that exist in the market. Many of their applications are legacy-based, use old file format, including flat files for integration.

So how do we approach it, and how is customer benefitting from it-? 

The biggest problem was to keep every connection updated every time a new version of that product came out. Adoption to new changes with the widely dynamic ecosystem poses a big challenge and scalability and upkeep with new trends is an important consideration.

Based on our assessment of different needs in a customer landscape & challenges and hyper scalers needed we propose SAP Cloud Platform Integration( SAP CPI), the integration product of SAP Cloud Platform automatically updates in case of a new connection.

Why SAP Cloud Platform Integration

Digital integration with SAP using SAP Cloud Platform Integration is the recommended solution to achieve seamless connectivity with all the systems including On-Premises & Cloud.

Compared with its peer the On-premises SAP Process Orchestration & other middleware tools

• Enables integration of different business processes, cloud, On-premises solutions with SAP, non – SAP systems.
• It provides open connectivity using open & SAP standards and employs the integration design patterns & co-relation patterns.
• Availability of pre-packaged content adapters available with most standard partner systems
• Easy adoption and development with a process driven approach

A proposed 3- Step approach for a seamless digital journey makes the digital integration easy

A 3 -step journey towards digital integration is recommended approach towards achieving a digitally integrated enterprise.

• Assessment & evaluation
• Standardization
• Digital Integration

Assessment involves understanding the existing landscape and understand the different points of integration. It includes preparing an assessment checklist on the legacy, hybrid, SAP, non -SAP components, Cloud, On -Premises and complexity analysis.

This step involves a deep dive into the

• current level of standardization of integration protocols.
• business processes and
• current integration design patterns.

Evaluation involves analysis of the current landscape with an ability to arrive at the position of the landscape is in terms of the digital integration

The following steps are involved:

• Understanding of file formats
• Understanding of standard integrations and custom designs
• Complexity and dynamics of partner applications
• Limitations in the digital integration journey
• Templates to map seamless adoption with SAP Cloud platform. Integration for individual workflows.

This enables us to understand the next set of journeys , efforts involved and  complexity involved with digitization.

Standardization involves bringing the landscape as per standard protocols for integration .

The following steps enable easier adoption with SAP Cloud Platform integration.

• Use guidelines & best practices for integration between partner systems
• Apply SAP CPI integration design patterns façade , SOA based
• Avoid point to point integrations
• Use pre packaged content of SAP CPI in all Cloud solution based integrations

Well standardized integrated systems also enable bringing in new system adoption a seamless process with minimal efforts and  intervention enabling less cost of development.

Digital Integration: Once standardization is established and the landscape has standard touchpoints, we can use SAP cloud platform Integration and its powerful open  adapters, connectors and pre-packaged content to bring in intuitive, useful digital solutions for provisioning. We can leverage on the intuitive SAP solutions like Api management, the Leonardo suite with IOT, block chain, mobility and open source integrations to bring in the best ones integrated by SAP Cloud platform integration. The pre-packaged content for standard solutions is a big advantage enabling easy adoption. This in-turn powered by SAP cloud platform enables a hybrid cloud platform for hosting the existing solutions as well. Digital integration comes with strong monitoring capabilities for the landscape processing several business messages with less intervention enabling better performance.

Conclusion

Digital SAP integration powered by SAP CPI is, to a huge extent, a possibility even on the most complex hybrid landscape. With a systematic approach toward digital integration, organizations can achieve tangible cost benefits, providing a seamless journey with other powerful solution, ability to expose our solutions easily to a hybrid premise. Mobility enablement, a virtual workplace, and user delight are other benefits. Easier adoption with adapters & connectivity enable the landscape to leverage on the modern solution including Google , AWS and Azure .From several customer engagements, we have gained insights around benefit margins improving from 30-80% due to productivity and reduced support cost. Moving toward operational agility empowers personalization, improves productivity and drives insight to action.