Across thousands of enterprises of every size, most users now ‘live’ in Microsoft Teams. It has become the de facto place for people to communicate and collaborate, and is increasingly the tool to which people turn first in order to get work done. As a result, it is becoming more and more important for organisations to find ways to bring information and work into Teams: It is sensible to bring work to your employees rather than for them to find it in one or many Inboxes.
SAP and Microsoft have worked together for many years to deliver integrations between SAP’s ERP platforms and Microsoft’s office platform, and the story continues to evolve.
Sharing Fiori content
With S4HANA 2023 came the ability to share content from inside Fiori apps with work colleagues via Teams. This means that data can be shared instantly into a conversation, driving better collaboration and decision-making. This requires the installation of the ‘S/4HANA Teams App’ for every employee.
Business Process approvals
SAP has provided infrastructure and development tools to extend approval processes into Teams by cloning SAP Workflow steps into Teams. This is achieved through the development of a custom application for the particular workflow step, in order to pass workflow and application data into the Teams chat, using a Microsoft Adaptive Card. The approach requires quite a bit of infrastructure set-up and work in SAP BTP, S/4HANA and Azure. The data flow looks like:
Chatbot
Another option is to build a chatbot and deploy in Teams to provide process details. Questions can be defined to which the bot can provide a response, including real-time data from S/4HANA.
You will also find some point solutions for specific business processes to enable some connectivity to Teams.
Platform
Arch provides Looply, an integration platform for enterprise processes and Teams.
Looply enable you to extend more processes to Teams, with less custom development. Looply is shipped with an add-on integration to S/4HANA / ECC, a plug-in component which handles the communication to and from the cloud environment.
With Looply you can send process notifications through Teams, as well as action cards for process approval and rejection. Each participant in the process can be updated when a change is made, not just the approver. This provides process transparency and control as well as accelerated processes, as users are able to conduct more work without leaving Teams.
Looply uses Microsoft Adaptive Cards which can be generated using AI.
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One difference with Looply is that you can configure and deploy your own Teams apps, with your own branding. Another difference is that there is no reliance on SAP Event Mesh or need to build a custom app in BTP for every integration step. Looply can integrate with SAP Event Mesh if necessary for events triggered from other SAP enterprise solutions.
Summary
Great benefits await organizations through the integration of S/4HANA and Microsoft Teams. You can transform internal communication and collaboration, improve decision-making and accelerate key business processes.
Some approaches require considerable development, but solutions like Looply are making it easier for more organizations to reap the benefits.
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