Intelligent Transformation Accelerators Using SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP [DT119]

Intelligent Transformation Accelerators Using SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP [DT119]

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[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome everyone to SAP TechEd 2022. Thank you for joining our session on intelligent transformation platform using SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP. I'm Mahak Bachhawat.

And I'm the product manager for EY Intelligent Transmission Platform at EY GDS India. Today, I will be presenting this session with one of my copresenters Mr. Rakesh Verma. Rakesh, would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, Mahak. Thank you. So I am Rakesh Verma.

I am product architect at EY GDS India. And today, I'm going to present the architecture and the services details of BTP, which helped us build the product, as well as our methodology of implementation. Thank you, Mahak.

Back to you. Thank you, Rakesh. So let me quickly give you a quick walk through of what is the agenda which we have planned for today's session. Firstly, I want to talk about what intelligent transformation accelerators are, what are the various use cases around it. And I'm going to focus on the major use case, which is ECC to SAP S/4HANA transformation. Further, I would also like to talk about EY's own product Intelligent Transformation Platform, which is a suite of such intelligent accelerators powered by SAP BTP to cater to the transformation as a use case with the help of and small example of the process analytics tool.

Further, my copresenter Rakesh is also going to share more insight and information about the key technical aspects, architecture, and the implementation methodology used for developing these key accelerators. So let's get started. Let us talk about the primary use case for our today's session, which is ECC to SAP S/4HANA transformation.

As you might be already aware that SAP has announced that it is going to stop supporting the support for all the clients who are currently running their operations on ECC after 2027. Hence, it becomes extremely critical for our clients who are currently on SAP ECC to embark on their powerful journey to SAP S/4HANA. However, as this journey is very crucial for our clients, but at the same time, it is very complex and involves huge amount of efforts and cost.

Apart from this, there are a few other additional challenges which a client faces when they want to move to a SAP S/4HANA transformation journey. Few of them are, for example, clients would like to know what is the value which SAP S/4HANA brings on the table? Or what are the process inefficiencies in the existing SAP ECC landscape? The clients are very much interested to also know about how much of a total time or a total cost it is going to take for the entire transformation journey. That's where our intelligent accelerators comes into picture.

As the name says, they have built-in intelligence within them. With the help of that, they provide key crucial information to our clients, helping them to take a strategic decision and defining their roadmap of their transformation journey from ECC to SAP S/4HANA. Now, as we have already talked about what this accelerators are and how do they help us in the overall transformation journey, let us move to the next topic, where I would like to do a little deep dive on the product Intelligent Transformation Platform, which is built by EY and powered by SAP BTP to cater to the specific use case of SAP S/4HANA transformation. Any client who is currently undergoing this transformation journey or willing to undergo this SAP S/4HANA transformation in due course of time would have to go through three important phases. First is the design phase. Second is the move phase.

And third is the deploy phase. As a part of the design phase, we at EY have built numerous intelligent accelerators powered by SAP BTP, which can scan the client's existing ECC footprint to provide key critical information about how the business and the operations are currently running in their existing system. It also provides information about how this element needs to be migrated to SAP S/4HANA or whether these elements need not be migrated because they are either not in use or obsolete or whether this elements needs to be transformed before they can be moved to SAP S/4HANA. Such kind of analysis will help the client to understand the areas of potential improvement and will also help them to support this strategic decision of defining a clear roadmap to SAP S/4HANA transformation journey. Going to the next phase, which is the move phase, which is a very important phase of the entire transformation journey.

This is a phase where the actual migration from the ECC landscape to the SAP S/4HANA landscape happens. This takes a lot of time and is a very cost-extensive operation. However, with the help of these intelligent accelerators which are built by EY and powered by SAP BTP, we help the clients to automate their migration journey from ECC to SAP S/4HANA in a very time efficient and a cost efficient manner. These accelerators will not only automate the migration of the data but will also help in the automation of the configurations, the user roles, profiles, security, and a lot of other activities from ECC to SAP S/4HANA landscape. All these accelerators are industry agnostic in nature, which means that this accelerators with a little bit of customizing can be used across the industry-wide.

Moving to the next phase and the last phase of the transformation, which is the deploy phase. This is the phase where the client, the functional team, or the testing team gets involved into a very rigorous and rigorous testing to ensure that the target SAP S/4HANA environment is ready and will be able to support the business processes in a way where it is expected. As a part of this phase, we have developed various accelerators on BTP platform integrated with the RP engine to ensure that we provide the automation testing experience to the client.

To sum it up, all this intelligent accelerators as a part of intelligent transformations of products will not only help in providing the crucial information and the automation but will actually help to support the overall end-to-end clients' SAP S/4HANA transformation journey. Moving further, as I mentioned earlier, the heart of any SAP S/4HANA transformation can be broadly classified across these eight categories. We at EY have developed dedicated accelerators to cater to each of these categories. For example, process mining accelerator can provide key information about how the business processes are currently set up in the existing system and what are the areas of process improvement. Data mining accelerators, which can provide more insights about what is the quality of the master data which is maintained in the existing ECC landscape.

Transaction mining accelerator, which will provide more insights about what are the set of transactions which are mostly in the use by the client or what are the transactions which are now obsolete in SAP S/4HANA environment. Configuration mining, which provides more insight about how the configurations are currently set up in an existing environment and will also offer the flexibility to compare the configuration across the SAP landscape of an organization. Enhancement mining, which will share more insight about how the custom codes are managed in the client's existing system, as this is also one of the very important topic for the client today because the clients are using their existing ECC environment historically for huge number of years.

Hence, the custom code library gets added up. It is very important to clean this custom code to ensure that only the right enhancements or the custom codes get moved to the SAP S/4HANA environment. With the help of this accelerator, it will not only provide this insight but will also provide a renewable path to SAP S/4HANA. User or role mining accelerators, which will provide more information about who does what in the system and how this security profile needs to be moved to SAP S/4HANA instance.

Data move accelerators, which will help the client in automation of the transactional data migration from the source to the target environment. And intelligent testing cockpit, which will provide more insight and will also help in the automation testing experience for our clients. For the sake of today's session, I would like to take one of the example of the process mining accelerator for a further deep dive. Process mining accelerator, as I mentioned before, is an intelligent transformation accelerator which is built by EY on SAP BTP platform. The main intent of this accelerator is to analyze the client existing environment to provide key critical and crucial insights about how the current businesses and the business processes are running in an existing client environment.

It also offers, out of the box, a list of KPIs to provide more information about what are the areas of process improvement, or how the client is performing in their existing setup. With the help of benchmarking and variance analytics, we also offer and provide various opportunities for the client to highlight the areas of process improvement. I will take a very quick example for one of our client where we have leveraged process mining accelerator to analyze their existing order-to-cash process to identify the process inefficiencies and the area of potential improvement. When process mining tool was leveraged for this client as it offers various KPIs. All this KPIs were analyzed. And there were few important observations which came into picture.

One of the key observation was around the lead cycle time. It was observed that the average lead cycle time for the client was very high when compared with what is the SAP's recommendation and the best practices. On further analysis, It was quite visible that they were huge numbers of sales orders which were created. However, because of this huge lead cycle time, there were a lot of orders which were either overdue for billing or overdue for delivery because of which, it poses a huge impact on the overall revenue of an organization. This was one of the very crucial information which is provided with the help of the process mining tool.

Apart from this, there's a lot of other information which was provided to the client, which helped the client to take this decision of transformation to SAP S/4HANA and how their end-to-end order-to-cash process can be automated to improve the process efficiency. This is how our accelerator helps our client in their transformation journey. I would now request Rakesh to further share more insights about the technical areas and how this accelerators are built on SAP BTP.

Thank you. Well, thank you, Mahak for sharing insights into SAP ECC to S/4HANA transformation journey, the tools, the products, and accelerators which we have built at EY powered by SAP BTP platform, which are making this whole journey seamless for our customers. So, you also talked about one of our key products, which is EY Process Analytics and its benefits, how do we do the process mining with EY Process Analytics and help understand the gaps in the process to our customers before we start the transformation journey.

So I would like to continue that journey with our audience here. And I would like to take them to the deep dive into the architecture over here. First of all, we chose SAP BTP as a platform because SAP BTP platform has a bunch of services which gives us the flexibility to scale our development in the long run.

Another benefit of leveraging SAP BTP is the flexibility of deployment. As all clients are different, and they want different deployment options to be leveraged for them. So we are able to do the job using SAP BTP platform being on cloud and having the right flexibility in place. So yeah, with that, I will share with you how do we do the process analytics over here.

First of all, clients may share their data based on the scope agreed and the process agreed with them in a flat file if they choose so, or we can connect to their system if that can also be an option. And then that flat file is moved to SAP BTP platform in a zipped format and in a secure way using SAP BTP integration suite technologies like CPI-DS, Cloud Platform Integration for Data Services. Also Smart Data Integration is a tool which helps us provision the data of SAP, ECC, or S/4HANA directly into SAP Hana Cloud. This is our database as a service available in the SAP BTP platform with a huge capability for scaling the space in terms of storage as well as helping us do the data modeling on top of the data, the way we want to show in the analytics screen.

And also we can write all our algorithms on top of it. So huge capability from SAP Hana Cloud, which can be leveraged and can have a live connectivity to the front-end applications. Front-end application being built on portal, leveraging launchpad of the portal for end users to see the application and experience it.

Smart business services are the services which help us design those analytics screen without writing a piece of code. So quite helpful. Quick over there. And then finally, coming to SAP Analytics Cloud.

It's a software as a service solution which is available from SAP. And we can design all sorts of dashboards and predictive models over there, leveraging the data from SAP Hana Cloud. The connectivity could be set up live or as needed on a batch mode as well. So we have flexibility to show in that way.

And this is what our top executives of customers can see their reports over SAP Analytics Cloud. With that, let's talk about the services now which are helping us out build this EYPA product. First, service is SAP Business Application Studio, which is an IDE, a development environment, helps us to do an integrated development in the form of various modules in the same environment like the frontend, the node application, as well as the backend, and the integration with backend. Everything is seamless. It can be done over here. This is a service available on SAP BTP Cloud Foundry.

And also the whole application can be packaged using this particular service and then deployed and integrated with Git and CICD pipeline. Second service is SAP Job Scheduling Service. This is a service which helps us do the data loads in the background and schedule the jobs and manage them without having the end users knowing that there is a job running in the background. But they see the data seamlessly in the front end, even when we have a huge amount of data to be handled at runtime.

Smart Data Integration is a tool which is an integration tool. It helps us connect on-premise solutions like SAP S/4HANA, SAP ECC, and even SAP HANA on-premise to load the data and provision that data into the SAP BTP Cloud under Hana Cloud platform. So this is an application which-- this is a service which helps us do this replication seamlessly. Then SAP Hana Cloud.

The fourth service which we are talking about here is a service which is a database as a service. And it helps us to do the data modeling, the analytics of the enterprise data, and the KPI design algorithm, and a lot of predictive capability. It is quite a capable and scalable intelligent database available on top of the SAP BTP platform. Coming to SAP Analytics Cloud, which is finally our front end to design business intelligence planning and predictive analytics screen.

This is a wonderful software as a service solution which can be integrated with BTP. And with the data available on BTP, it can really do wonders in terms of showing the KPIs to customer needs. All these services which we have mentioned here, there are hyperlinks to help.sap portal on their headings

for you to explore more. Now let's talk about our methodology to EYPA development. So basically, what was our approach of developing EYPA solution? First of all, you can see the first screen is ABAP data source. This is a data source which you can see as tables and the details within SAP BAS tool with the backend integration configuration via Cloud Connector and SAP platform.

Once that connection is done, we are able to access our ECC system and see the tables and the data which is available within the ECC system into SAP BAS application itself. We can virtualize those tables which are available on ECC system because we would like to work on those tables. We'd like to play around with those tables in terms of our data modeling and design our KPIs accordingly. So the HANA Cloud model is definitely a very, very important step where HANA Cloud plays an important role and gives us the flexibility and the power to model the data the way we want it, the virtualized data. And then we can actually expose the data in a format which is required by any of the needs of the KPI for the customer. Job Scheduler, as I mentioned, we can schedule the jobs in the background, which can load the data while the customer is executing the reports.

Moving forward. So you can see here SAP Analytics Cloud, which is a software as a service, as I mentioned. So SaaS SAP Analytics Cloud needs to have a trust establishment with SAP BTP platform. And this screenshot very much illustrates how we can do that connectivity setup between SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP BTP platform with a live connection so that the data is available at runtime. SAP BAS application screenshot which you see, it shows the modular development which we can do as a CAPM project here.

So we have module nodes which are available for UI5 frontend, also the backend HANA Cloud, as well as the node application which does the integration between the two. All of that can be developed at just one place. Also it can be integrated via any GIT framework. And then that can be used to package the solution, the whole application, and then move forward into the next environment. So with that, finally, we designed our SAP Analytics Cloud dashboard by accessing all the data which we just exposed from SAP Hana Cloud.

And these are a few of the examples of the KPIs which makes complete sense as per the process. Like invoice processing cycle time for OTC is one of the KPIs. Similarly, there are numerous KPIs which actually define and help clients to understand their gaps in their current process and where exactly they can improve also with recommendation and where they stand in terms of benchmarking with the standards. So all of that, EYPA provides that capability and supports our clients understand their complete existing environment in the right way and take strategic decisions for their transformation. This is just one of the tools.

We also have all other tools which actually completes the whole circle of transformation and make it seamless. With that, I would like to thank you, Mahak, my copresenter, and also thanks to all of you for being present today in this session. Please enjoy the rest of your TechEd 2022 sessions. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

2022-12-19 01:58

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