Motivation: This blog post provides prescriptive guidance to Product Owners, Solution Architects and Consultants ability to leverage SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Technology Platform digitizing, optimizing business processes both by adopting Standard and Extending business logic to scale, innovate and deploy at speed.

We come across SAP Business Technology Platform as next go to place to develop, extend and scale functionalities alongside SAP S/4HANA and other solutions. This blog post is a quick read on defining a practical approach on adopting SAP Business Technology Platform and other SaaS solutions from SAP to support their transformation journey.

All enterprise functions are not delivered by SAP S/4HANA. Enterprise IT delivers cross functions with Hybrid Landscape, Business Networks, Ecosystems and SaaS

SAP S/4HANA powered by SAP BTP enables enterprises operate seamlessly across Enterprise IT

Most often Developers, Consultants, Solution Owners or Product Owners gets Software Products and Services information from different channels. They then use it to capability fitment to the enterprise and integrate to the Transformation Implementation Roadmap based on outcome. Here SAP provides a starting point using SAP Transformation Navigator to

1. Identify relevant products and services based on industries or line of business
2. Availability of products and capabilities associated at a high-level (current and future)
3. Deployment option for the corresponding Products and Services
4. Validating with SAP Product Portfolio which has already been licensed by customers of SAP

High Level Framework for SAP BTP adoption is

1. Prepare
2. Adopt
3. Manage

Prepare:

During the prepare step you define the prerequisites required to execute a transformation at your enterprise. At this stage the recommendation is do it enterprise wide or reuse the existing enterprise assets/organization ownership to start the adoption. It helps in accelerating the adoption rate of BTP services

Get Ready For Transforming with SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP

Adopt

Adopt Business Technology Platform alongside SAP S/4HANA to achieve business goals with known technical principles like Adopt SAP Standard, Keep the Core Clean, Extend to achieve Innovation and Strategic benefits. There are 3 common approaches on adopting SAP BTP cloud services

1. Subscribe to a SaaS service
2. Lift and Shift
3. Extend and Innovate

Common Approaches on Adopting SAP BTP

A product owner and SAP consultant are facing a situation in a project where current ECC system will be replaced with SAP S/4HANA. Project is greenfield and goal is to adopt SAP standard and keep the core clean.

Let’s talk a potential use case and run through the above approach on adopting SAP BTP Cloud Services in incremental steps. Consider an Enterprise with current ECC landscape connects to a Payment Service provider. In order to make the technical connection work, Enterprises would have lengthy contractual negotiations, build custom middleware interfaces and align file formats with third parties. Now let’s use this business case to transform the current setup.

Step 1: Understand the requirement and identify the service or product

Now the goals is to adopt standard and keep the core clean. We turn up the product capability list provided by SAP. Here we use SAP Transformation Navigator to do the mapping and maintain the lifecycle throughout the transformation journey. Consider SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity service as preferred choice as it automates manual and error prone steps with execution and reconciliation of payments

Step1: Understand the requirement and identify the service or product

Step 2: Use to cloud technology to address real time access to business insights focusing on UX

As the Multi Bank Connectivity automatically updates payment status and cash positions in SAP S/4HANA system once updates are available from the banks, it further improves and streamlines the company’s treasury operations. You can do out of the cost of executing a Payment Process over time – Potentially work with your Banks/Payment Service Providers. Next Gen Analytics based on BTP open up data on Business Efficiency/Operational Efficiency in executing Payments. All these information and necessary data is provided using multiple services with common user experience based on SAP BTP Fiori Launchpad services

Adopt Next Gen Analytics and Common UX with SAP BTP Fiori Launchpad

Step 3: Adopt SAP BTP Extension suite and embed Security by design as Business Risk function

A custom app to track of whether outgoing (payment) messages have been sent to the bank by SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity for custom message issued. Data moving across your apps and services – with security framework available in BTP the backend system data is protected by default! You don’t have to think about security related governance questions, due to security by design.

Adopt SAP BTP Extension Suite and Introduce Security By Design as Business Risk function

Manage

Be prepared to have the team ready in order to deliver on S/4 HANA and SAP BTP as enterprise users expect consumer grade experience like web apps, mobile apps and more data. Hence you need to have redefined team structure with a more integrated purpose in order to organize as self-empowered agile teams adopting DevOps methodology to Build<>Run<>Scale.

Proposed Team Structure to Operate at Scale

Closing summary

With this blog post, I hope you will find a starting point to adopt SAP SaaS services and SAP Business Technology Platform services to drive standard, accelerate innovation and deploy at scale. This approach is a starting point based on my experience driving digital transformation. Goal is to bring in a structured approach in adopting SAP Business Technology Platform and usage of services like SAP Transformation Navigator to identify potential routes to standardize existing operations and reinvent the processes.

Thank you for reading my blog, please feel free to share feedback or leave your thoughts in comments. I would be excited to know your experience and more importantly to optimize the approach as things change.

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