Blog 1: The Central Role of Clean Core and AI
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 first blog we discuss why Clean Core and AI are so important on your path to a future-proof IT.
Today, companies are exposed to unprecedented combinations of threats and uncertainties by economics, new competitors, wars, extreme weather events, etc. Therefore, businesses must react to this. One the one side, they need to increase agility to become as flexible, fast, and resilient as possible. This involves a new speed of innovation and the capability to tailor customer experience to individual needs. On the other side, they need fully digitized processes within and beyond the company, across the complete value chain.
In such a demanding environment business needs a powerful IT that can implement new business requirements fast and leverage new technologies such as AI.
Many SAP systems such as SAP ECC have been up and running for decades. Technologies available at that time looked totally different. Today most processes need to be automated to minimize the number of manual steps and maximize the transaction speed. By embracing the cloud, processes can be implemented much faster. Accordingly, one important step in transformation is to determine which components remain on-prem and which processes and systems should be moved to the cloud. Especially extensions and apps are often developed faster in the cloud due to much smaller lead times.
Modernization is not limited to a single ERP and should include data management, development, integration, and steering across the full enterprise architecture, covering SAP and non-SAP systems.
This is exactly where the SAP Business Technology Platform comes into play as a booster of the Digital Transformation of your systems across 4 dimensions:
Extend your applications.
Automate & integrate business processes.
Unleash your data with Data & Analytics.
Modernize your Steering.
On top of the four domains, Clean Core and AI become key in 2024.
Clean Core:
The concept of Clean Core customers can adopt to make their IT future-proof. The Core of the system, the ERP has very often a long history of modifications. Upgrades take a long time and can be very costly. New requirements often took one to two years until they were taken up into the next release schedule. With the faster changing business environments and the need to digitize much faster, the ERP systems need to be cleaned up to become more flexible and agile.
This is where the Clean Core Concept can help. The goal is to eliminate modifications with three toolsets available:
The Key-User extensibility in S/4 to enhance fields and small logic.
The On-Stack extensibility based on the ABAP Cloud. This is a complete toolbox to adapt ABAP coding. The name ABAP Cloud is a bit misleading because it can available directly embedded on your S4 system on-prem and doesn’t require any cloud services on SAP BTP.
Side-by-side extensibility on SAP BTP. Bigger developments, mobile apps and automations would typically be done as loosely coupled side-by-side extensions on the BTP.
In the concept, customers determine which type of developments they do on which tool. With eliminated modifications and a “clean system” new requirements and new apps can be implemented much faster and upgrades go faster and with reduced costs. Clean Core is not a one-time task but an ongoing exercise making your IT systems future-proof.
AI:
AI is experiencing a huge hype. The challenge is to implement the technology into real business processes. AI today at many customers is technically capable but somewhere disconnected. It is trained on some data but it doesn‘t know much about the data, the processes, the people that can use it etc. This is where SAP Business AI comes into play with its business centricity in three dimensions:
- The business context with access to semantic data, which is always available and using AI as an extension of the business process and the context being aware who can perform at which point which task and why they need to do it.
- The business-friendly experience with integrated seamless access and embedded into the normal SAP business user.
- The accelerated business outcomes with prebuilt content, actionable use cases that can be directly rolled out, automation with built-in AI, and smart support based on the context and business know-how.
The offering is relevant, reliable, and responsible. It is relevant - because AI will be embedded into all SAP-cloud-based applications. It is reliable because it is based on the customer’s unique business data and business context. And finally, it is responsible - because we will deliver AI with the highest levels of concern for security, privacy, compliance, and ethics.
The Blog Series 10 + ways to reshape your SAP Landscape with SAP BTP 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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