The Integration DNA of the Intelligent Suite from SAP (+ DEMO) | SAP TechEd in 2020
[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, my name is Bharath Ajendla. I'm from SAP S/4HANA Product Management Group focusing on integration. Today, I'm joined by my colleague Samir. Hello, good morning, good evening, good afternoon to you, too, from me, Samir Bigdeli, part of the SAP S/4HANA Product Management Team for integration and accessibility, as well. Thank you, Samir.
So today, we are pretty excited to talk to you about the integration [INAUDIBLE] intelligent enterprise suite. The contents of this presentation include, in the beginning, we're going to talk about why integration is a challenge for our customers and how the integration strategy has been evolving in SAP and why. Next, we're going to talk about our intelligence suite, and especially how we are bringing a common foundation in the formal suite qualities to address all types of integration related items, so that you can have, really, an end to end business process feel to our various applications rather than you are dealing with individual lines of business applications. We're going to take hire to retire as an example today, and I'll walk you through that. And finally, since S/4HANA being a core of the digital enterprise, we want to talk a little bit about API strategy.
So that's the agenda we designed for you. So first of all, SAP's success, when it founded 50 years ago, was based on its ability to support mission critical business processes end to end across a whole value chain. And it happened because all the application capabilities are based on one technology stack, one data model, so it was much easier.
A lot of our customers have not only used that as application, but also as a platform to do all kinds of extensions. Over the years, as we move to the cloud based strategy, we acquired many solutions as well as many different lines of business capabilities are divided into different applications, whether that is homegrown or acquired. As you can see here. With this, what ended up happening is these applications have different technology stacks, different data models.
So the integration has become a challenge. Until last year, our focus is based on APIs and also providing point-to-point based integrations. And based on talking to our customers and partners, and also we realize that that is just not enough. And we wanted to take the integration to the next level, that's when the new strategy has formed to create really an intelligent and right suite with common set of foundation.
And this was published by our none other than Christian Klein, CEO in a series of paper called Integration Strategy for intelligent enterprise. With a really focus on a plan integration plan in the cloud. And this strategy paper can be downloaded. His blog can be seen in with the links in the slide. There are four main key parts to the strategy.
First, what is the big picture according to an enterprise suite? And how we are bringing the various line of business applications holistically into an integrated business processes using this common set of foundation called suite qualities. The third item is how our cloud platform integration suite it's going to help with the extensions and providing a common set of services across various applications. And last, the strategy paper also contains a roadmap, which you're going to see also in the rest of the presentation.
In this strategy, our goal is to make SAP to SAP integrations easier, as well as a separate analysis integrations easier. So the way that we looked across all our applications and grouping them under N2N make up business processes. In these core makeup processes that listed here lead to cash, source to pay, recruit to retire, design to operate. For example, recruit to retire tries to bring S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Fieldglass, Concur together in a really end-to-end process fashion. And Lead to Cash, for example, brings the C/4HANA applications as well as S/4HANA applications together.
When we bring multiple applications together by using the suite qualities that I listed in the bottom here, we think all of these applications type to feel like one in the context of the end-to-end business process. Starting with the first suite quality, seamless user experience. This is meant to really provide a harmonized look and feel and navigation pattern across all our applications. And the next one is the workflow inbox, which is providing kind of like a central place where someone can carry approvals as well as their tasks. And for example, the first two are focused on the end-user experience providing consistent harmonized experience, while the end-to-end business process blueprints and qualities aimed at providing architects and the implementation teams a view into how to become an integrated enterprise. I have several sites talking about each one in detail, but what I want you to understand really one thing.
Some suite qualities are focused on the end-user experience. Some are focused in the architects and the implementation schemes, and some are focused on administrators. For example, the lifecycle management of identity and access management is geared towards that. And aligned data model is another important one where we try to bring applications not only to hit a process level but also the data more level so that sharing and distribution of data becomes easy across all SAP applications. And this is I would say that integration DNA are brought it into the enterprise suite.
Now, why don't we take a look at each suite quality in detail now. The first one is a seamless user experience, especially when you're dealing with SuccessFactors, Fieldglass, Ariba, Concur, C/4HANA applications. We don't want our users to feel that they're dealing with each individual line of business application. By providing users with consistent user experience, same navigation patterns based on theory, we believe they will have a much better user experience. And some of these are a mandate for all our applications now to have this common user expedience, seamless user experience. And in this case, lead to caches leading the trend without a end-to-end business process also will follow the suite.
The next suite qualities of workflow box. And there may be new name, but by the time you will see these recording. But my thing is, especially in a recruiter to retire scenario, if you have a approval item for purchase requisition coming from Ariba, Fieldglass, S/4HANA, or Concur, you don't need to be switching between different applications to do your approvals.
You could be assessing it in one application, whether it is that mobile, whether you carry out your tasks and approvals. And that's the goal of this one workflow, inbox suite quality. This is, again, work in progress. You may see that by the end of year for many applications and more and more early next year. End-to-end process blueprints. It's often not disinformation on how to become an intelligent enterprise is not readily available always, and this particular suite quality addresses that.
In this, we provide end-to-end process blueprints from it both from a value business value perspective, as well as all the way where you could be able to drill down to runtime artifacts. These are already published for Lead to cash, Source to pay, Recruit to retire, API Business Hub. And in the next slide, I have a demo on this particular one. Now I also highly suggest you to go to the blog I listed here to understand more. And this is especially for the solution architects, enterprise architects, or any organization. Now I will spend some time on the demo.
I'm looking at a reference architecture in the SAP API business hub. Let's go to SAP API business hub by going to this simple URL, api.sap.com. SAP API have both generally designed so all the APIs from different SAP products could be accessed in one place. That's why you would see on the left side S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Fieldglass, Concur, et cetera product.
And also, we have API from third parties like Open Connectors through which you can connect to hundreds of other applications, and also of some partner content is also there. And we have traditionally had been different content types APIs and integration content, but we have introduced a new content type called Business Processes. Here, this is where we would find the reference architecture for various end-to-end business processes. And let me click on View More. And here you could see Lead to Cash, Hire to Retire, Travel to Reimburse, and a few different variations around, Source to pay, and so let me set a Hire to retire.
When you click on that, you would see a end-to-end value flow. Here we are looking at Hire to retire process. It starts with requesting a position, which is really part of the Workforce Recruitment onboarding. And then how is the administration in the lifecycle of a particular employee and what do they do from time management payroll and payments and et cetera. So each are, this as we call as the valley flow, and each of these blue chevrons circle value process steps. Then you click on each one of them, it would take you to a software collaboration backup, and this diagram actually lays out how different components in a application or several applications interact with each other, what is the starting point and also what are the integration points and all of it linking you to the runtime artifacts.
In this case here, it starts in employee central approving a headcount by creating an open position, and here you have a third party integration to an extent a job board which when you click on it, it would, in this case, it's open up, opens up a SAP note. However, it could open an API or an integration flow depending upon how is that integration point is. So the biggest value add is the ability to start from the business value and then drilling down to each individual collaboration diagrams and also the ability to see the integration find and how and what is behind it actually and without even looking into a system. So especially this is useful to a solution architect enterprise architect of any organization. The other thing I wanted to mention is these end-to-end business processes roadmaps that are available in SAP road maps. Also, we introduced here the view of an intelligent enterprise scenario view here.
And if I select Recruit to retire, you would be able to see that roadmap of those scenarios end-to-end. So again, please check out API business Hub for the reference architecture. And if you're interested and know what is coming up in the future quarters, you can look at our roadmap. Thank you. The next suite quality, probably one of the most important one, is the aligned data models.
It's often challenging when that data model for the same business object is different. All that complexity will creep into the integration layer. In order to address that, we started to semantically align the business objects across all our applications. The key examples are Cost Center and Workforce person. These are available as services in cloud platform integration.
And all our applications will add up to the same data model so that the integration will be a simple one-to-one connection through the, and this massive data integration layer. So we started shippings since 2000, 20, 05. More and more objects will be added to this to make the data distribution, the cordless synchronization across IES application, Intelligent Enterprise Suite applications, much easier. Also, one often asked frequently ask questions is, how does it relate to master data governance? In Master Data Governance is meant for orchestrating and approving Master State changes, and massive data integration and cloud platform is meant to distribute and synchronize data across various applications. And they both can co-exist well and perfectly fine.
The next suite quality that's often ignored in integration is the whole concept of user provisioning user single authentication and roll and roll and access governance. By bringing the central services from cloud platform, especially the identity authentication service, identity access, and governance service, we are able to make consistent approach to this whole concept of user provisioning single sign-on and roll access management. And this is also very important not only from a user experience perspective but also from a compliance reasons. Hence, this is, again, this is like the bread, like a common foundation service that we are bringing with all our application, will support the same set of services, and we make this out of the box so that these things can work as soon as you provision them. The Integration, it's often there is a lot of effort goes into setting it up. And we wanted to make it easy with this sweet quality of coordinated lifecycle management.
When we say lifecycle management, there are really multiple aspects to a lifecycle. What is the provisioning of the systems, set about the integrations, then finally monitoring the health of the integration. In order to especially address the first one, we wanted to go as much automated as possible.
In order to support that, there is a service called cloud, sorry, cloud integration automation service. And this provides that guided workflow so that the steps required to set up an integration can be orchestrated pretty easily. And already we support more than 50 scenarios in this, and more information can be found in those blogs listed. Often the next challenge in a big challenging integration is the integration monitoring. When you have a source, and then we relay middleware and the target, it's often the case that we need to monitor in these three different places, not to see the full big picture with the introduction of integration monitoring in the cloud application lifecycle management to the cloud ALM solution.
You could be able to see this in one place, and some of these innovations are coming and up this year, and more and more will be coming up next year. The last but not least is the analytics. It's often the value comes when you bring data and see the analytics from different business processes in one place. In order to address that, we started embedding our analytic solution Analytics Cloud. In S/4HANA, cloud as well as SuccessFactors, and still have started to build these end-to-end cross-application dashboards.
One example would be to see spend across the end across all applications. The Ariba, Fieldglass, and Concur. So you could see an entire enterprise span in one place. But in the future, we have plans to also come up with these people analytics so that you can see the cross-application analytics from SuccessFactors, Fieldglass, and S/4. So we also, before we talk about how we are making SAP to SAP integrations easier, using suite qualities but often we understand that as APIs systems co-exist with many other applications on your landscape. Now in order address those challenges, Cloud Platform Integration suite really comes handy.
Here, starting with the API management, when you need to provision APIs in a secure fashion and maintain the lifecycle around it, that purchase always really comes handy. And integration advisor really helps you to suggest mappings in these different guidelines, interface guidelines, when you're doing third party idea integrations. Many are open characters is another great example.
It comes with more than 150 plus connectors to integrate with pretty much any non-SAP applications. So remember the combination of contact from integration as a middleware and all these different services one can connect to pretty much any other non-SAP applications. Next, Mike Alexander will walk you through the Hire to retire business process and example.
Here, we are bringing success factors and S/4HANA together using the common set of suite qualities and to make the integration seamless. Thank you very much, Bharath, so I'll take over from here now. So let's take a look.
So what does Hire to retire? Basically, Hire to retire is now a subset of Recruit to retire, which is seen on the very first slide of Bharath. So whereas the Recruit to retire focuses on the total workforce and the total flow of an employee with a workforce person through the process. The Hire to retire really focuses on the internal employee and what he does within the company.
They are out of the main components that are used for the recruit to retire, which SAP [INAUDIBLE],, SAP Concur, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP SuccessFactors for the High to retire. The most prominent ones are the SAP SuccessFactors as well as S/4HANA cloud. What we would like to focus on now is only one of the suite qualities.
Again, you've seen the suite qualities with Bharath's part, and we focus on the aligned domain models and what this means and into how we want to realize this. So what SAP has come up is to align the data models across all the applications that we have. In this example, we align the domain the data models for both the cost centers and the people data. So once the costs are flowing from SAP S/4HANA cloud, cloud to ACP success factors employ central, keep the data as flowing the other way around. Having these aligned data model obviously simplifies the integration effort for SAP substantially, and thus also for our customers. Because in the past, we had to provide mappings customers had to maintain the mappings.
Now we have the same data model that is understood by all the applications and thus simplifies the whole integration effort substantially. Additionally, we are also going to realize this in a slightly different way. So having a common data model alone doesn't really bring all the value that is needed because still we are looking so far at point-to-point integrations, and this proved to be very inefficient. So what we're actually going to do is introduce ACP cloud platform master data integration service.
As a central hub for all master data and this will act basically as [? set ?] up, it will consolidate the data from the various providers that could be there in the example for recruit to retire. You could have internal employees for SAP SuccessFactors and external employees from SAP Fieldglass. It would consolidate this with NDS master data integration service and distribute it to all the consumers that are there and that require people data to run the business processes starting with SAP S/4HANA cloud, but also SAP concur, or SAP Analytics Cloud.
And again, this is just an example now and just the front runner that we are talking here, so this is a really big topic that SAP is targeting here. By having this architecture, we get to much more modular way how cloud should behave because it become so much easier and cheaper for customers to switch off a legacy HCM application, for example, and replaces the cloud one. You don't have to rebuild 10 integrations to rebuild one integration from your legacy HCM system to the central hub, instead of rebuilding the integration to all the different consuming applications. And by applying these changes, we are able to add substantial amount of additional functional capabilities for SAP S/4HANA cloud that have not been supported so far. So how this looks like, and how does this work.
So, on the one hand, we have SAP SuccessFactors. We have, in the middle, couple of services on the cloud platform. We have, on the other side, SAP S/4HANA Cloud. So and as you can see on the previous slide, we have the master data flowing in both directions. So once the cost centers are flow from SAP S/4HANA cloud via the platform of the data integration service through SAP SuccessFactors, employees with work assignments are flowing the other way.
Since employees and users are always very closely interconnected, I mean, usually, all your users in your systems should also be employees. We also see here tied interconnection to another suite quality that was the user, not the user experience, the single sign-on, and identity management. Consistent identity management. From the MDI, we will feed our identity services on the cloud platform like identity authentication service, Identity Provisioning service, and SAP Cloud Identity and access governance. Who wants to provide single sign-on for all cloud applications and on-premise applications, but also to provision users with correct authorizations and draws to the systems from the get-go based on employment information.
So how to set up this whole thing? Because this is very complicated, and still, these are multiple applications that need to work together here that need to be aligned. And how to set up and what we do here is we basically reuse what is already known from the SAP activate road map and the activate methodology. So we've prepared an overall guided procedure along the methodology and steps from discover prepare explore realize deploy and run.
We defined the deliverables and tasks along this way with clear instructions and transition paths. And we didn't know rework every piece of information that's already out there because they said most of the information is already out there. But we clearly linked these detailed documentation to these steps in the task list. And differently to what was done before, we've now aligned this across the different products. So that it does clearly saying and giving a guided procedure along SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, the master data integration, and the Identity services on how to do what, when, in order to set up the integration properly, and with this, I would head over once again to Bharath to talk about the API strategy. Thank you, Samir.
That's a great explanation on about Hire to retire business process. Remember, Hire to retire process is part of the Recruit to retire make up process, and there are other processes, such as Travel to reimburse and external workflows are part of Recruit to retire. And more of that reference architecture, and that would be published to API business hub in the coming months. So stay tuned. And just to recap what we have covered so far in the beginning, we talked about why integration has become a challenge for our customers, and how our integration strategy has been evolving and now where we are at, and how the latest integration plan in the cloud from our management, again, has been receiving are getting a good response from our customers and partners, and how we are making some progress there.
And please note that we already made significant progress on enabling the suite qualities for our cloud application integration, and more will be coming up for hybrid implementations in the future. That being said, for an intelligent enterprise suite, S/4HANA plays a key role. It's the digital core. So the next few slides are focused on getting you to know about the API strategy for S/4Hana, SAP S/4HANA.
First and foremost, data, all the APIs selected to SAP S/4HANA cloud, are published in API business hub. Currently, there are close to 400 APIs are published. And these are OData and SOAP. Depending on the user, you can definitely leverage them in any SAP to SAP integrations as it as non-SAP. And we have more than 3,000 CDS views. And these are not like an API that you would expect, but using the extension capabilities of S/4HANA cloud.
You can expose them as whole data service so you can do many read-only operations [INAUDIBLE].. And the last, in the next set of APIs, on core business events, we have more than 150 that are published. And these will let you know when a certain sales order is created or cancel central events, they don't necessarily give you the entire business object data, but they'll let you different events. With these capabilities, you can build many different creative extension in cloud platform.
Last but not least, we have some traditional set of APIs, BAPIs, and IDOCs that are published in these SAP notes. They're really meant to support your extension capabilities on exceptional basis and some approvals that way with. Additionally, BAPIs and IDOCs are not meant to be used in the cloud solutions. But however, in case you needed them and no public API is available, those are the alternatives available.
Then the other thing especially helps in your journey is this pre-out-of-the-box integrations in cloud platform integration. We have more than 1,400 APIs out-of-the-box integrations published, especially around S/4HANA cloud. And some of these integration content helps you to integrate with not only SAP applications, in this case, integration with Salesforce or any other third party applications. And if you have an application that you're trying to integrate and if it's not directly available here, but if something close that close something close available, you may want to take a look at it so that you can follow the integration pattern and the APIs and other documentation that is available in there.
This is, it's not only about S/4HANA Cloud. SAP S/4HANA cloud often is requested by our customers and partners that made up the AP S/4, SAP S/4HANA on-premise. In order to address that particular requirement and request, we have plans to publish SAP S/4HANA, on-premise is also the API business hub. And by the time you will be seeing this recording, they may be available in API business have already.
So our goal is to publish mainly the new generation APIs to SAP, API business hub, especially the auditorium SOAP services. And the traditional API such as BAPIs and IDOCs. We have listed some documentation and documentation. However, they can really, really explore within S/4HANA on-prem system itself. So stay tuned for this.
I'm sure you all will be eagerly waiting for that one. Remember where to find more information. API business hub is a central place where you can find information about API out of the box integration content, whether it is coming from SAP or our partner content is available there. Now, as open connectors, which lets you connect to non-ACP applications up to more than 150 applications. [INAUDIBLE] are available.
And we also started to introduce new content types such as business processes and API business hub, and that is very will find the reference architecture for various mega end-to-end business processes. And that content is being and reached on a quarterly basis now and always up-to-date, so we can be looking for your any feedback you have. The next place to find a good information is the SAP roadmaps. Here is where you will find what is coming up in the near future, and like I mentioned in my demo, this content also can be viewed based on the product, are also based on end-to-end business process.
Last but not least, if you have any requirements and you would like to influence the product roadmap, you can also log request in our customer influence portal. And here are some of the sessions that give you more information about the integration topics somewhat related to the integration [? DNU ?] like we talked about today. Some are focused on speech quality, and some are really focused on advanced topic such as event-driven architecture and more about various capabilities of our cloud platform integration.
This is especially important for integration architects in your team to know more about. And most importantly, education doesn't with TechEd or any particular event. It's a continuous thing. And so far that, in order to support that, we have our learning hub, which is available here.
With these links, you can have second free access using the links provided here, and that's something you can definitely explore. That being said, thanks for attending our session. We really appreciate it, hope you were able to get more information about the integration DNA or Intelligent Enterprise Suite. And we are excited, and we think this new strategy really will help to make the integration seamless for our customers.
Our contact information is listed here. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, feel free to reach out to us. Thank you so much. [MUSIC PLAYING]
2021-01-09 08:32
