Innovation at Hitachi High-Tech Through Mastering Side-by-Side Development - DT131v
Hello, everyone. I'm Yuri Yasuda from Hitachi Hi-Tech Corporation. And I'm belonging to Digital Transformation Business group have been mainly working on SAP related products since ECC 6.0 and now for SAP S/4, Hana Cloud and SAP BTP and in charge of since implementation project through operational support after go live to our group companies in Japan and overseas. This time I'm very pleased to have an opportunity to introduce our experience and challenges of side by side development on SAP Business Technology platform in Hitachi High Tech. It is crucial architecture model for our digital transformation project.
First, let me briefly introduce our company. Again, we are such high tech based on Tokyo in Japan. The corporate vision of Hitachi Tech is to simplify our customer's high tech processes. Then our mission is to help our customers be fast moving and successful cutting edge businesses based on our core technologies, observation, measurement and analysis. In particular.
As you can see in the slide, we have four business segments. One of our main product is DSM, which is a dedicated system for measuring the dimensions of the fine patterns of the semiconductor wafer. And we continue to keep our top share about 70% in the global market. In addition to this, there are also the major products, blood analyzers, immunodiagnostic, analyzers, etcetera, and also these core technologies applied to the semiconductor manufacturing equipment and so on. This is a global network of Hitachi High-Tech. We offer a variety of products and services in 25 countries and regions around the world. One of the characteristics of our products is that a single piece of equipment may contain as many as 50,000 parts.
We deliver it in worldwide, and we need to comply with each country's laws and regulations such as FDA, substance content, export control, etcetera. We design our products to reflect the concept and request from each customer and then manufacture, sell and provide after maintenance services from end to end. Next, I would like to talk about a company wide DX project that led to utilize the SAP Business Technology platform. In 2018, we have started DX project as business Transformation Project. This was also the timing to consider migrating our SAP, ECC to SAP Hana, but it was not the project we pursued how to simplify our business processes, how to digitalize our management in order to create a new business processes which realize next ten year growth strategy.
In terms of our previous core systems, we implemented SAP ECC for all of our companies about 20 years ago in order to support four business segments. We continued to develop add ons on ECC itself. It accumulated about 9000 custom objects in total for 20 years, such as user exit, appends tables, report programs, system interfaces and so on. It was so complicated and deteriorated in our ECC then it affected to increase in operating expenses to make so response to our new technology. And it prevented us to adopt rapid change. How we proceed with this process reform in project is as follows, Previously we performed fit to gap approach to cover the gap with custom add ons to meet the business requirements.
On the other hand, the new approach is fit to standard. We discussed how to fit our business process to SAP standard as much as possible and try to reduce system at a minimum by going through our own deliberations with upper management. We run this cycle again and again and also we changed our mind in company wise. That from system is what you make and into system is what you use.
This is a DX project go-live status. We adopted a S4 Hana two tier model when S4 Hana Cloud Private edition is in production in headquarter, some manufacturing site and group companies in Japan. And also as for S4 Hana Cloud Public Edition is in live in ten overseas countries already in United States, Europe, Korea, Taiwan and ASEAN region and project is still ongoing right now.
Then here was the main part side by side development approach on SAP BTP in Hitachi High-Tech. In 2019, it had started the realization phase of our DX project and we consider the following for our new platform. As a DX project architecture strategy. First to keep S4 Hana clean and promote side by side development in order to update the system constantly and obtain continuous innovation from them.
And second, new platforms should enable the DX phased approach with flexible combinations of cloud service on prem, legacy and new systems in the transition period. Because it is impossible to launch every new system at the same time and also at the IT trans point of view. Third, to adopt open source, we try to translate from other based to open source like Java, JavaScript based programs and also make system interfaces with RESTful API and Force Micro surfacing. We developed so many other ones on itself but wanted to translate from this monolithic system to a micro servicing. The approach is combining small services and build one big application.
Then we decided the one makes them realized. Next we define our own development policy class by the add on types. At first, and basically in S4 Hana we only allow the key user extension functionality and for field extensions or custom tables, which is officially announced, not affected by future upgrades. And regarding valid proposal or check logics, we developed only authorized ones by strict add-on console so far, and it is also allowed for us to develop custom data API and which is needed for side by side development on SAP BTP For the other add ons types such as validation type, add on programs, including subsystem interfaces, custom screens are developed on SAP BTP. This is our basic configuration of SAP BTP Add ons for SAP. S4 Hana Cloud. The purpose of our SAP BTP applications are basically to make updates into S4 Hana or
to extract business data from S4 Hana in terms of SAP, BTP applications based on multi target application, so-called Project for Development item provided a standard template on BTP and coded with SAP, Ui5 and Java basis. We also utilize the SAP S4 Hana Cloud as custom data tables on BTP and regarding integration with SAP S4 Hana Cloud, both private and public Edition unified all cases into rest integration with all data based APIs which are previously our system. Integration with SAP ECC was based on BAPI, but BAPI requires a dedicated adapter in posing system site, but only data API is allowed in Hana Cloud Public Edition. So actually no choice of BAPI in public cloud.
And also we believed all data can be expand the capabilities much more eventually. For example, even another subsystems or front tools gets popular in the future. Same API might be utilized for input or extract data in Hana. These are the reason behind for this basic concept. Actually, this concept goes well already. We have several add on patterns such as user interface with online program background process, with the job triggered system integration with several SAP systems and process automation by robots, we are unified.
S4 Hana interface with our data API basis and we could expand the usage of multiple services easily and quickly. This is a innovation point which we feel these are the services which we implemented so far. Hotel for UI related implemented some application with using development tools such as application runtime with SAP five and Java based programs, SAP, Hana Cloud, Adobe Forms and SAP Build. And also we developed some workflow and RPA for process automation and we utilize SAP Cloud Integration Suite a lot to support our business processes. And now verifying the event was ongoing and also some system operation and security services are also activated, such as alert notification, application, logging and API management.
The really good point of SAP BTP is you can launch as many subaccounts as needed even under ongoing project in transition. And also it is easy to get started from a wide range of services and to make it from just. One at all. As introduced, Hitachi High-Tech tried to reduce the total number of add ons itself, but
BPT could realize to develop, for example, only two workflow processes. Just three robots. Et cetera. You don't need to set up all servers and install the software for it. Many services are offered in one package. This is also the innovative point on BTP then. Now SAP BTP is the core architecture of our DX project.
Besides two tier LPs is SAP S4 Hana Cloud Public and private. Finally, 9000 items have been reduced to less than 1000 at this moment. And also in up add on in. SAP S4 Hana is just 22 for now. Here, let me introduce the effect of side by side development along with reducing in app add on. It made increasing upgrade cycle of our S4 Hana private edition previously in ECC version up project was held every five years and it took over a year.
But now we could upgrade as well to private once a year since 2019, and it takes only about a month from verification in development test system to Switch in production. We can keep our sonar core the latest always. This is the lessons and learned results and benefits of side by side development of us. First, keep S4 Hana core clean.
As mentioned just before it makes dramatic reduction of S4 Hana upgrade effort. And second, it enables us to separate SAP BTP AND S4 HANA lifecycle. We can run new development on SAP BTP without depending on S4 HANA situation and also it is easy to try new services with small start. And third, it enables us sharing other add-ons between S4 HANA cloud, private and public, and also first approach can be achieved among cloud, on prem legacy and new systems with flexible linkage. Even in the transition period, it was good choice to launch development environment outside with SAP S4 HANA.
These are the future improvement point for us. First, we would like to continue regular upgrades, at least annual and also we need to understand and utilize new features provided by each S4 HANA upgrades in a timely manner. Second SAP BTP is a development environment which can do anything, but it is still difficult for us to deal with it by only self-study.
Actually, even there are so many self-learning contents provided by SAP. So we need to get learned about Business Technology Platform more and more. And also we expect SAP to extend and provide standard templates or predefined contents continuously, including with standard CDS and APIs in S4 Hana as well. And third, we need to optimize our cloud operations and management across S4 Hana private, public, and SAP BTP, such as monitoring, log management, CI, CD perspective and performance tuning.
Next step Why we stick to keep S4 Hana core clean and adopt side by side development approach on BTP. Needless to say, we would like to obtain new technologies from them, especially on SAP. BTP. Your services have been launched constantly and now we get started to utilize the SAP, build services to make our process automated and also build up fast and boost productivity. We are just feeling that it is easy to expand the capabilities of our methods of side by side developments to these new services. And also we really expect and can't wait some new services based on business AI functionality in your future. So then we will look to pursue toward real digital adoption, real digital culture and
real data driven management in Hitachi High-Tech. This is the end of my presentation. I highly appreciate all of your support from SAP team and also the partners involved to our DX project. Thank you very much for your attention.
2023-12-17 18:23
