Top 7 Reasons to Use SAP BTP along with SAP S/4HANA

Technology is becoming more and more important to modern businesses as a means of promoting innovation, enhancing efficiency, and driving growth. Companies with a flexible technical basis and an adaptable business operating style develop almost three times faster than the industry average, according to research.

The SAP Business Technology Platform is the foundation of this revolutionary potential (SAP BTP). This complete suite provides an integrated environment to easily combine data and analytics, integration, artificial intelligence (AI), and SAP application development. There are many benefits of SAP BTP implementation. The most important is BTP connects seamlessly to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition. By allowing companies to customize and extend their S/4 HANA Cloud solutions, the integration allows for measurable efficiency and productivity gains and savings in dollars.
This blog will discuss the advantages of SAP BTP integration with S/4HANA Cloud, as well as practical examples, integration process difficulties, and solutions. It will also showcase Accely’s expertise in integrating SAP for business processes.

What is SAP BTP?

The SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is the major hub that brings together important technical areas, accelerating your path to innovation. This comprehensive platform enables the utilization of the most recent advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence while smoothly integrating a uniform application development environment, strong data and analytics capabilities, and sophisticated integration tools. SAP BTP is an all-in-one solution that contains all of the necessary tools to help support new business processes and workflows while drawing upon our existing data and applications.

What is SAP S/4 HANA?

SAP S/4HANA is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suite, which is designed to allow companies to oversee and manage certain aspects of their operations, finances, and customer relations. This innovative solution empowers managers to improve practices and provides a high level of visibility to users by integrating all key processes and relevant data into one coherent system in real-time.

A full range of capabilities provided by SAP S/4HANA Services enables businesses to efficiently handle the complex procedures. SAP S/4HANA implementation offers organisations one cohesive, 360-degrees view of their business by connecting individual domains (i.e. supply chain/inventory information, financial data, human resources data, etc.).

How does SAP BTP and SAP S/4HANA Add to Businesses?

SAP BTP provides a central, open platform for the entire SAP environment, where enterprises can extend, integrate, and innovate with business data. In an essential and strategic way, SAP BTP provides a variety of standalone or cloud-based technologies that fall under the following three core capabilities:

Enhanced Integration Capabilities

There are many transformational benefits of using the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and SAP S/4HANA integration throw-away, integration is one key area of benefit the SAP BTP offers for organizations. In today’s digital-connected world, organizations are often challenged by disconnected technologies-overlapping processes, data silos, and fragmented data. As enterprises’ integration backbone to connect SAP and non-SAP apps instantly and seamlessly, SAP BTP fulfills an important, effective solution.

Enterprises can harness SAP BTP pre-built connectors, APIs, and integration packs to extend cloud and on-premise SaaS and third-party apps. By leveraging SAP S/4HANA extension capabilities, enterprises can offer seamless transfer of data across initially disconnected ERP application instances that reside in SAP S/4HANA, other third-party systems, other enterprise legacy applications, e-commerce platforms, logistics partners, and CRM platforms.

Extensibility and Customization

ERP systems are necessary for modern businesses because they must handle not only basic business operations but also industry-specific requirements, changing client demands, and unique business models. This is where SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and SAP S/4HANA work together to provide strong expansion and customisation features without sacrificing the integrity of the main system.

With both SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP, businesses can create, grow and change applications in a fast and flexible way. SAP BTP is providing all the tools, such as SAP Extension Suite and SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) to seamlessly and securely develop new user interfaces, integrate ML models or add entirely new business process logic.

Advanced Analytics and Insights

Being data driven is not only a competitive advantage within the digital economy, it is a requirement. Businesses can utilize real-time data supported by SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) to use advanced analytics to convert data into actionable insights.

SAP S/4HANA includes memory computing for real time operational reporting with fast data processing. With SAP BTP connecting with SAP AI/ML services and Data Warehouse Cloud, in addition to SAP Analytics Cloud, businesses can have a single analytics platform with data that can give full view, converging and integrating all information across all business processes.

Industry-Specific Solutions

SAP BTP integration with S/4HANA represents a powerful convergence of industry-specific solutions tailored to meet the individual operational requirements for many industries to include manufacturing, healthcare, retail, utilities and finance. All industries are driven by the requirements of their own unique guidelines, business practices, and customer expectations that are accommodated with these industry specific capabilities. Enterprises can leverage enabled playbooks, automated task orientations, and localized consumption parameters to reduce their customization effort and expedite their deployment. SAP BTP enables enterprises to innovate, extend and integrate industry solution applications with low-code/no-code tools and embedded analytics. The platform allows companies to achieve a competitive advantage through intelligent industry-specific digital transformation, such as enabling analytics for the retail industry and providing real-time insight about customers, or facilitating the better collaboration necessary to improve supply chain optimization in manufacturing.

Cloud Infrastructure and Scalability

SAP BTP and SAP S/4HANA are running on robust cloud architecture and provide enterprises unique flexibility, reliability, and scale. Finding cloud-native architectures allows organizations to adapt business operations, in real-time, to the demand by scaling how they operate to address intensive data workloads, onboard customers, or testing new markets. With the cloud-first capabilities of SAP BTP to deploy in hybrid or multi-cloud environments, this transforms operations by enabling large-scale innovation while remaining connected to legacy systems. The cloud-first approach also provides operational agility, while decreasing infrastructure and maintenance costs, with guaranteed uptime and physical disaster recovery. As both SAP S/4HANA and BTP scale with the organization, it allows all organizations to protect the viability of future operations, while removing concerns around whether there is enough scalable capacity or inflexible architecture, while allowing organizations to innovate, rapidly pivot, and compete.

Security and Compliance

These platforms excel at offering enterprise-level security frameworks that include encryption, role-based access control and permissions, and threat detection models. SAP BTP allows organizations to extend and integrate applications in the cloud reliably and predictably and trust that data is secure and compliant in cloud and hybrid settings. SAP S/4HANA allows organizations to eliminate legal exposure and reassure customers that their information is safeguarded against unauthorized access and use by implementing industry-specific regulations and adhering to international compliance standards, such as those dictated by GDPR or SOC. Organizations can run their key operational functions in an environment that provides automated tracking and monitoring, and can be audited, with confidence, knowing that their systems and data are secure and compliant with new global regulations.

Ecosystem and Marketplace

The SAP Business Technology Platform provides businesses access to a broad firm of solutions, business services, APIs, and also pre-built connections through the SAP Store and SAP Discovery Center. This connected environment accelerates innovation by facilitating co-innovation with SAP partners, rapidly deploying industry-proven solutions, or building unique apps to fit requirements of businesses. Businesses can decide to utilize industry extensions, regional compliance modules, or AI tools, utilizing the expansive catalog of capabilities to increase flexibility and reduce time-to-value. Companies can leverage the collaborative environment to scale, adapt, and future-proof the way they operate based on continued innovation from SAP and their global partner network.

Challenges of Implementing SAP BTP along with SAP S/4HANA

Integration Complexity: The integration with SAP BTP has the potential for significant complexities with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, particularly where the integrations they want to do involve existing legacy systems and movement of data.

Data Migration Challenges: The complexity, when there is significant amounts of data, will relate to the complexity to work with inconsistent formats (case differences, spacing, etc.), different definitions, and keeping fidelity to the original data. This is especially a problem as the fidelity here is crucial for migration purposes and could mean delays and/or an integration problem if not done in the right way, using the right tools.

Security Risks: When implementing SAP S/4HANA Cloud on SAP BTP, there are risks with implementing secure strategies while also supporting new and expanded features, all without having to sacrifice data integrity.

Skill Gaps and Training: When SAP BTP is integrated with SAP S/4HANA, the need for skilled resources is often revealed, and there is a need for extensive training of end users and IT resources to satisfy this gap, or user acceptance may be compromised and the entire digital transformation journey jeopardized.

Cost and Timeline Overruns: Careful planning, implementation in phases, and sustained monitoring of the project are some of the challenges that require careful thought.

Change Management: If the change management process is mismanaged, resistance to change may arise from end-users, become misaligned, or have low adoption rates leading to failure in achieving transformative goals. Having appropriate training, relevant stakeholders, and a well-planned communication strategy to implement the change can help prepare for the risks of successfully implementing your project.

Scope Creep: This principal risk category is associated with the relative increased complexity of systems, delays associated with sometimes unclear timelines, additional financial outlay and the pressure on resources to deliver the outcomes of the project. The level of goals set for the project sufficiently defined with a clear, transparent governance strategy can minimize uncontrolled growth.

Organizational Change Management: Lack of user acceptance, lack of engagement and people resisting change will all result in risks to your project’s success. An organized path to OCM will result in appropriate incentives to engage, more seamless transitions, opportunities to capture value long term with the deliverables, and manageable change requests as work is completed.

Integration with Existing Systems: Integrating data formats, processes and interfaces is often difficult, especially when you consider that a majority of organizations are operating in diverse IT environments. If you don’t plan for integration, there may be integration issues that lead to data standpoint and a chaotic process resulting in increased operational risk.

Hypercare Period Risks: When you are in this stage of the project you are dependent on access to operations. Unresolved issues, gaps in user uptake, and sporadic unplanned system availability can all disrupt operations during this phase. Poor planning for available communication methods, support, and resolution may lead to problems regardless of user uptake, operational downtime, reduced productivity and lost trust in the new system.

Approach to harness the benefits of SAP S/4HANA in synergy with SAP BTP

SAP has determined the following three-step method for integrating the capabilities of SAP S/4HANA with SAP BTP to change old ECC operations.

Prepare

Establish the foundation for a revolutionary enterprise transformation during this stage. Choose between using an enterprise-wide strategy or utilizing current ownership and assets to get things started. If you want to prioritize process/capability ownership for transformation, use your corporate data catalog. Decide whether they are strategic, core, or foundational, and specify their precise goals. Profit from SAP BTP’s analytical capabilities to find important key performance indicators (KPIs). Making the most of these insights and implementing BTP services is essential to accelerating the deployment of S/4HANA.

Adopt

When implementing BTP and SAP S/4HANA, keep in mind well-known technical guidelines such as obeying SAP standards, maintaining the core’s cleanliness, and expanding for innovation. Three typical methods exist for implementing BTP services:
Using BTP’s SaaS service, you can:
(1) map capabilities to your functional requirements;
(2) migrate custom code with a preferred runtime;
(3) reduce technical debt by using BTP’s custom code extension services; and
(4) extend and innovate by creating solutions to improve and automate processes.
Data transfers between S/4HANA, BTP, and other applications that share a data model must be given top priority at this point.

Manage

A consumer-grade experience, including web apps, mobile apps, and more data, is now what enterprise users expect, so get your team ready to deliver on S/4HANA and SAP BTP. Reorganize your team to include analytics, integration, full-stack, and UX developers more effectively. In order to build, operate, and scale effectively, empower them as agile teams that embrace the DevOps technique. Also, give your teams access to key security and administrative tools such as BTP accounts and services, SAP S/4HANA, and BW/4HANA.