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The Integration Conundrum – A Point of View Paper on SAP Integration Portfolio

I would like to begin this article by first introducing the CIO Guide that was published by SAP, documenting SAP’s vision around integrating SAP applications in both a cloud and hybrid landscape. I personally think that the guide is a great starting point to deal with one of the evolving architecture decision point around integration especially when organisations move towards adopting cloud applications.

While SAP treats the enterprise in a ‘SAPcentric’ way (this is SAP’s own disillusioned ‘Geocentric’ model of the enterprise world), most enterprises are heterogeneous (no surprises there) and the EA needs to be considerate of that fact. In this article, I would like to bring together all components and develop a single consolidated view of this portfolio, share an independent view around the SAP integration technology portfolio and the positioning of these different platforms/technologies in the enterprise.

Not many may realize, but SAP has a massive portfolio around integration (this is inclusive of the wider context of integration i.e. process optimization, DQ, Edge integration etc). A quick snapshot of this portfolio is below;

Note: The one in blue are the on-premise solutions and the others are cloud offerings, part of the SAP Cloud Platform.

There is already a good blog that introduces the cloud solutions that should provide you with a decent understanding of the capabilities and help with a choice of what to use when.

Below are extracts on the onpremise solutions;

Process Orchestration – SAP’s strategic onpremise integration solution for enterprise A2A and B2B integration along with Business Process Management and Business Rules Management.

Fitment: Enterprise landscape integration, business process optimization and automation, rules management.

Operational Process Intelligence (OpInt) – This is a solution in my view SAP’s Advanced BAM. OpInt promises Process transparency, Limitless scenario transparency and Insight to action around business processes with the key USP being the real-time data context aspect.

Fitment: Real-time insight to action for operations (linked to critical business processes)

Process Mining – A data-based process discovery tool that promises to help enterprises gain complete transparency into how processes are executed, increase process efficiency by identifying process deviations and weaknesses, improve compliance by detecting non-compliant processes and drive profitability.

Fitment: Process discovery and a foundation for business transformation

SAP Data Services (BODS) – This is SAP’s technology encapsulating data integrator and data quality. BODS is one of the most popular solutions when it comes to data provisioning and ETL, used widely in data migration and DQ led initiatives.

Fitment: Data integration and Data quality initiatives

Gateway – SAP Gateway is an open standards-based framework that developers can use to more easily connect non-SAP applications to SAP applications. It is also used to connect to and access SAP applications from mobile devices. As a result, it is a chief enabler of some of SAP’s newest and most prominent technologies, including the SAP Mobile Platform and SAP Fiori.

Fitment: UI/UX transformation for the SAP landscape

You would notice that most of the technologies have an overlap in terms of capabilities (functional and technical) and it tends to create a natural confusion for any enterprise architect team to provide guidance on tool fitment.

I would assume that a company like SAP would have consolidated their portfolio around these technologies but apparently it is either it has been a slow process at their end or that their internal strategy once again is so SAPcentric that they seem to spawn parallel products with overlapping capabilities.

A closer look might reveal that at times these products are very scenario-specific, catering to distinct use cases. Say for example Gateway – I have often wondered, wouldn’t it have been better than the capability of exposing SAP business data as ODATA services be a part of the Process Orchestration (SAP PO) suite, driving consolidation? But for two reasons, Gateway now has a strong fitment in the landscape, one being the fact that not all ERP customers would have a SAP PO license and the other being that specific use case Gateway looks to target that is enabling business data as lightweight APIs (ODATA) for the consumption of primarily UIs.

Again, from a consolidation perspective, I would have wanted to see the consolidation of distinct platforms like SAP Process Integration, SAP BRM and SAP BPM into SAP PO happening sooner. While SAP PO is now a very stable platform and is one of the leaders in this space, further consolidation could position SAP stronger at the enterprise level. An example of this would be the API management solution. As of today, API management is a separate technology component both on the cloud and on-premise. Most technology vendors have already consolidated this capability onto their ESB or integration-PaaS solutions making their platforms much more comprehensive for the new enterprise’s (read the advent of cloud, mobility and UX) integration needs.

But having said the above, SAP comes out very strongly with their portfolio and the set of technology tools provides one with an exhaustive capability list spanning most needs of enterprise integration.

On the cloud, SAP seems to be investing significantly and innovations are being rolled out for general availability very frequently. One such example would be SCP-Integration. SCP-I started out with being a cloud integration solution for mainly SAP to SAP applications (on-premise to cloud or cloud to cloud). Over the last 15 months, it has positioned itself in the iPaaS category with major capability additions around connectivity to varied systems, support for multiple protocols and the recent addition of B2B/EDI capabilities. SCP-I is a challenger in many ways, but it still serves a limited scenarios coverage. In comparison to its on-premise counterpart i.e. SAP PO, SCP-I has its shortcomings. While customers should look at taking advantage of the packaged integration content that is one of the key USP of SCP-I, two specific capability areas that deserve attention from a roadmap perspective are around the connectivity (adapters) and B2B integration.

Note: This blog documents the existing gaps around EDI/B2B capability on the iPaaS solution.

The recent addition of SCP-Workflow and Rules packs a lot of power into the cloud offering, opening up a lot of possibilities around innovation and application development. Other individual components like the IoT services, SDI, SDS, API-M etc put together makes it one of the most competitive iPaaS currently that customers can possibly adopt.

So it comes down to one question and that is how does one make a choice around what technology to adopt? While the above can guide you to possible fitments, at an EA capability level, many decision-makers are forced to concern themselves with the choice of on-premise vs cloud solution stack.

In my many discussions with CIOs and IT stakeholders, there is an urge to go onto the cloud. I sense that though on most occasions this is driven by the long term strategy of cloud adoption, at times is also misplaced in many ways.

I would want to choose my words carefully here but what is a point of view if not for its genuineness. Most IT decision-makers are being swayed into the technology bandwagon that is cloud esp. around integration. Keeping aside an immediate benefit say via the attractive license models and a possible reduction in your OPEX, let’s not forget that each tool has its own fitment. So when it comes to investing in an on-premise solution vs an iPaaS to manage the enterprise integration needs, I believe the decision has to be predominantly driven based on the answers to the below questions;

Is the enterprise landscape predominantly on-premise or cloud?

Does your immediate roadmap include multiple cloud applications?

What are the various integration points and the protocols in your landscape?

How much B2B/EDI heavy are you as an organization?

Is connected devices part of your IT strategy?

Do you manage data on the cloud (read analytics, reporting etc)?

Do you have a microservices architecture planned?

Do you have an imminent need to govern and monetize your APIs?

Asking these questions will help strengthen your decision making. A simple rule of thumb I believe works well is that if more than 80% of enterprise applications are on-premise, then investing in an on-premise solution to manage integration is ideal. If it is that 80% of your applications are on the cloud, iPaaS is the way to go. But you will find that most companies are in a process of transition and hence the importance of a hybrid architecture where both the on-premise solution and the iPaaS become complementary. Even in this case, one is forced to answer the question of what to use where. Here we need to scrutinize the capability of platforms (keeping a close track on their roadmap).

A good example would be to say EDI integration. Many large organizations depend on the EDI solution to run most of their business. Hence EDI becomes mission-critical. Imagine you are a customer with your core ERP solution on-premise, using a legacy EDI solution running a large set of interfaces with a large set of trading partners and are looking to modernize. If you are faced with a decision to use SAP PO vs SCP-I, at this point in time, I would be inclined to use SAP PO due to the stable core and the rich capability the platform provides around EDI/B2B. On the other hand, if you had a relatively smaller EDI landscape, one would choose to onboard trading partners onto SCP-I because the trade-off can be managed. Do note that these decisions are time frame driven. In say 6 months from today, SAP decides to close all gaps around the capabilities/functionalities in this space, one will lean towards using an iPaaS solution for doing EDI.

Also is the fact that of having a consolidated landscape. If you are an enterprise heavily invested in on-premise applications, will it make sense that you use iPaaS solutions for your B2B and also your A2A? Why would you want to integrate two on-premise applications via an iPaaS solution? The answer always lies in your enterprise strategy around cloud adoption. This is also where the hybrid landscape gets reinforced. If you are heavily on-premise in the application space with that estate continued to be retained on-premise in the long term, I would place my bets on an on-premise solution for integration and for the scenario that is vice versa on an iPaaS solution. But most cases when you are embarking on a cloud journey, hybrid integration would find its fitment. The idea is to be aware of the capabilities of the platforms and base your decision along with your business needs.

I personally feel that for the next 5 years, the relevance of the hybrid landscape will become more and more prominent. IT decision-makers and Enterprise architects will have to define decision points and enforce the right usage of platforms, primarily driven through use case fitments.

We look forward to meeting you at the SAP Sapphire and ASUG Annual Conference 2018, 05-07 Jun, Orlando, FL. We are at Booth-1089C. To see Session Catalog: Click here

marketing@incture.com

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From Apps to Enterprise Mobility: Crossing the Chasm

CIOs around the world are under pressure from their user base to extend support for mobility. Their users are familiar with ‘Apps’ that people build and release at the drop of a hat. This leads to an expectation that the Enterprise Apps that they want should also have the same turnaround time.

However, this is far from reality…

Before embarking on an Enterprise Mobility strategy, it is important to understand the difference between an App and Enterprise Mobility and what it takes to cross that chasm.

Let’s understand what an App is – It is typically a mechanism to collect inputs from users and either share it with other users/systems or use that information to push out content to the user. Primarily it provides a mechanism to view data and communicate. Enterprise mobility, however, covers a larger scope. While an App is an integral part of Enterprise Mobility, there are many other components to it. These include the following:

Connectivity, Data Extraction, and Processing: An enterprise will have hundreds of business applications. When it comes to connecting to and rendering these over a mobile device, one of the first requirements is that of integrating with these varied systems. The purpose of integrating is to collect and send data from the front-end mobile app to these varied systems. This is a big pain point for the CIO’s IT teams since there is no defined protocol/methodology to achieve this. And this contributes to delays in these projects.

Security: Enterprise Applications need to mirror the security standards that are defined at the organizational level. All aspects of authentication, authorization and access control need to be adhered to.

User Experience: While user experience might not be a big driver in adoption when it comes to Enterprise Apps, the need or focus on it cannot be discounted. It is important that the Apps that are built need to match if not exceed the user experience that the typical enterprise user is accustomed to.

Understanding these differences is the key to success here. A CIO can then educate his/her business teams on the complexity involved. This realization will help them lead their organization to cross the chasm from Apps to Enterprise Mobility.

marketing@incture.com

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Rethinking User experience: Developing Smart Apps that Transform Outworn Enterprises into ‘Engaging Workplace’!

The term ‘User Experience’ or ‘UX’ is common parlance in most product-based companies in the world today. In order to truly examine user experience, one must ask five basic questions-

How engaging is it?

How good it looks?

How easy it is to use?

How relevant it is to what users are doing?

How fast is the response?

All these questions pertain to elements that contribute to a compelling experience, regardless of Industry Vertical, Line of Business (LoB) or Application Type. Though the subject of user experience has been around for years, the scope for UX development in enterprise apps has hardly seen the development and success that consumer-facing apps have experienced.

As the consumer app UX underwent a sea of change over the last two decades, enterprise applications and their experience have almost remained stagnant in the same period. Why is it that enterprise apps fail to provide the same engaging experience with the joy of work that consumer apps provide – Shouldn’t we do something about it? Making a lasting impact requires an entirely new way of thinking about enterprise app development.

The conceptualization of the app is required.

Developing structures that foster collaboration flawlessly.

Building the right internal team.

These three basic approaches become very important when thinking about developing an enterprise app. Now to deliver meaningful user experiences – timely involvement of the end-users becomes very important as opposed to the traditional software development techniques where project teams work in silos busy packing more and more features and ignoring the complexity of using the app. The app design and project teams need to discuss each and every interaction that the user has to make with the app.

Removing or improving user interactions has proven to enrich the overall experience multi-fold and add more meaning to where end-users spend their time. By having a holistic view of business process context, the kind of data that needs to be made available at every interaction by automating repetitive manual work – adds a lot in transforming the way end-users perceive enterprise applications.

As more and more businesses are starting to realize the potential and power of apps that provide great UX, organizations need applications for a new breed of workers – An enterprise software that works like the apps they use for personal use. Once this feasibility weighs in, end-users will start to make more and more decisions about what they want to get out of enterprise applications and how they want to experience these solutions. Smart apps like these will help customers see lower process turnaround times, reduced training time and increase satisfaction among their employees.

marketing@incture.com

[incture]

Faster Invoice Processing with AP Automation

How intelligent is your process to understand the payment invoices and receipts? One of the biggest challenges for the accounts payable section of any organization is the tracking and maintenance of numerous bills. As businesses struggle with issues like invoice processing delays, processing errors and late payment fees, it’s imperative that accounting automation tool is the ultimate set-up.

Enterprises are increasingly aware that paper and people-based processes lead to high AP transaction costs and missed business opportunities. In a recent survey, 42% of the organizations stated that they were experiencing delays in receiving invoices and/or difficulties in information matching. Researches show that automation is the ultimate way forward for cost savings and improved efficiency.

In fact, companies with best-in-class automation ‘are 89% more likely to view AP as either exceptionally or very valuable from a strategic perspective’. Taking a cue, Incture technologies have built Cherrywork’s Accounts Payable Automation (AP automation) application, with basic Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, predictive analysis and distinctive 2-way and 3-way matching process.

Successful implementation of this tool is reducing the invoice-processing time by over 50%. This tool reads the invoices in various formats (paper, email, PDF, XML, EDI, etc) from every possible source. The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scans the invoice headers and line item data and converts it into a readable data. From OCR, the data is then uploaded in the SAP landscape. Hence reducing the time-limit invested on reading the invoice by almost 200 percent.

PROCESS FLOW

It is a complete, integrated solution that addresses full range of functions across the accounts payable process. It includes invoice capture, single point of entry, scanning, data validation, extraction and integration with SAP, electronic routing for approvals and other workflow (exception handling), Two Way Match, Three Way Match, Planned Cost, Unplanned Cost Details, PO / Non PO based invoices with all process variants.

One of the world’s largest online grocery store has been successfully auto-posting almost 500 invoices every day. It even routes the invoice/bills to the accounting clerks and has made the system paperless. Unique functionality of 2-way and 3-way matching helps to segregate the line-items of the invoices

Benefits

Reduces the cost of operations

Speeds up the Invoice processing

Paperless format to add more value

Suppliers/vendors get payment on time

Processes purchase-order (PO), non-PO and recurring invoices

Lessens the operational complexity

Increases profitability

Be a part of our journey and if you believe in transforming businesses, reach out to us at marketing@incture.com for a free demo!

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Delivering 70% Reduction in Time-to-Market for New Product Introduction

Developing and launching a new product (NPDI or New Product Development and Introduction Process) has been an area of both opportunity and weakness for companies in the Consumer Packed Goods or CPG sector. New successful products often translate into millions of dollars in sales but a long launch period or delay could mean heavy losses due to missed opportunity cost and potential loss of market share.

Hence, the velocity of NPD (New Product Development) is highly critical and directly impacts the top line of the organization

The Challenge

NPD is a heavily customized process and very specific to organizational or industry needs. This process traverses across multiple departments and roles. It touches many people in the ecosystem – a few hundred across various countries in case of large organizations, extending to external vendors and suppliers. Typical divisions that come into play in the process are R&D, Marketing, Supply chain, Finance, Brand management, and Master data. It is in this context that the need for an enhanced collaborative and integrated Smart App becomes more pronounced.

Tools like Product Lifecycle Management Systems, Supply Chain Systems, ERPs or other enterprise systems have been in existence for a while to address these challenges. However, many of them fail to cover the end-to-end lifecycle of new product development.

The Solution

Smart Apps built on top of a platform such as Process Orchestration from SAP comes to the rescue. These apps improve the speed of the process by bringing together various people and system components as well as through increased automation and integration. A new technology implementation or development of a new app is also an opportunity to streamline and optimize the ‘as-is’ process. As technology alone is not a silver bullet in the run in the faster product introduction lifecycle

Incture Technologies created an NPI Smart App for one of our large CPG customers with a presence in 100+ countries. Through our solution, they managed to reduce the number of steps involved from 300 to 142 and brought down the NDPI cycle from 6 months to 2 weeks.

Our solution aggregated multiple process steps into one platform, eliminated non-value-adding human touchpoints in the system and converged UIs across systems into a single user interface. This created a common layer of operations that shielded users from differences and changes in the underlying systems. For the user, this meant a common User Interface (UI) that created a highly simplified User Experience (Ux). This resulted in an overall reduction of 70% in the think time i.e. time spent on the application screen.

It is vital to collaborate with complex processes, especially in a large organization where product data is spread across divisions and multiple people donning multiple roles.

Our solution gives your company the advantage through a combination of an intelligent user interface, increased collaboration, automated substitution, workload-based routing, and improved visibility.

To know more, just drop a mail to marketing@incture.com.

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Building the Perfect Engine for a Global Delivery Race

Delivery systems have become the lifeblood of modern business. Think of the biggest companies in the world today and odds are that two of the first names that come to your mind will be Amazon and Alibaba. These are two companies whose core operations are based on flawless delivery systems and are together valued at over 1.1 trillion dollars.

There were multiple factors that contributed to their overwhelming success, but one of the major selling points from the perspective of a customer was the ease of mind over the entire delivery process. They were constantly aware of the delivery status of the package, and the delivery time was in most cases impeccably punctual.

This helped Amazon and Alibaba set themselves apart and emerge as frontrunners in a highly competitive sector. There are about 750,000 e-commerce sites in the world today. In order to even make a dent in such a market, it is absolutely essential to ensure that a key operation such as delivery is highly streamlined.

The importance of delivery systems is not something that’s restricted only to the e-retail sector, it’s just that these two global giants are head and shoulders above the rest. The increasing relevance of an efficient delivery system can be plainly seen in a variety of other sectors as well. It is a key operation for companies dealing with products as diverse as food and beverages, IT products, groceries, furniture, and even pharmaceuticals.

Product quality is, of course, the primary factor behind customer attraction and retention, therefore the primary question that faces many businesses is ‘What is my product?’ In today’s highly connected world though, there is a strong case that the next most important question should be, ‘How do I deliver my product?’

Incture Technologies is eager to play a major role in the digital transformation of the delivery process. We have worked with clients across the globe to help them digitize their delivery systems, thus helping them cut down on time taken per delivery, boost customer satisfaction, and ensure efficient utilization of delivery resources.

One of the prominent clients who have been using this solution is Synnex Metrodata. It is one of the biggest Information and Communication (ICT) product distributors in South East Asia. It caters to various customer segments in over 123 cities and offers a one-stop shopping experience for a wide range of ICT offerings, from hardware, software, and telecommunication products, both for consumers and a total ICT infrastructure solution for commercial purposes.​

Due to the scale at which they operated, they needed a reliable and effective delivery system that could minimize potential logistics errors and maximize customer satisfaction. They realized that reliance on manual information exchange would not be efficient enough, so decided to opt for a technology solution that could help them smoothen out the whole operation.​

This is where Incture stepped up to provide a comprehensive solution. Our Proof of Delivery (POD) application provided them with 100% visibility in real-time, which helped monitor the delivery agent’s location and optimize routing and deployment. It also provided shipment verification, order details on the go, and a dependable communication channel between the admin and delivery team. These features helped to significantly simplify and optimize the task of effectively managing a delivery fleet.

To know more about how we can elevate your delivery process, reach out to us at marketing@incture.com.