Category: ERP

SAP Commerce Cloud: The Path to Delivering an Omnichannel Experience

The accessibility of the internet and various commerce solutions have broken boundaries to open up a global market. As a result, many businesses are looking for e-commerce solutions that are flexible, scalable, and provide highly targeted customer experiences across multiple touchpoints. Enter- SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly known as SAP Hybris Commerce).

What is SAP Commerce Cloud

SAP Commerce Cloud connects the dots in a comprehensive commerce portfolio integrating all digital and physical activities of the customer, creating a smoother and more personalized shopping experience. SAP Commerce Cloud is one of the five key components of the SAP C/4 HANA suite. SAP Commerce Cloud, together with SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, and SAP Customer Data Cloud form the entire CRM environment. 

SAP Hybris Commerce was renamed to SAP Commerce Cloud since SAP shifted their technology from proprietary infrastructure to the cloud. SAP Commerce Cloud uses an open-source Kubernetes technology and runs on the Microsoft Azure Hyperscale platform.

Features of SAP Commerce Cloud

• Omni-channel Storefront – gives your customers a consistent view of your contents or end-products across all their devices – PC, smartphones, or tablets. Today, customers interact with a brand both online and offline before considering to purchase an item. 
• Personalization –  You can improve the average order value and augment gains by providing tailored content, based on the shopper’s behavior and buying history. SAP Commerce Cloud allows you to segment customers and provides relevant product recommendations based on preferences. 
• Order Management – Managing global market channels lead to complexities, data fragmentation, and high costs, making order management a challenge for companies. SAP Commerce Cloud solutions can support any B2B, B2C, or B2B2C go-to-market strategy through a single commerce platform and simplify the process. You can have a single view of inventory, shipping, and returns throughout the organization thus streamlining order management. Customers can have complete flexibility without cluttering stock levels.
• Real-time Customer Support – The Assisted Service mode in Cloud Commerce helps you offer real-time sales support from your business website directly. If the customer gets stuck during an online purchase or needs help at a retail store, the Assisted Service mode immediately connects them to customer support to help them complete their purchase or answer questions. The customer service representatives get a complete view of the profile of the customer complete with their purchase history, preferences, and so on.
• Accelerators – The SAP Commerce Cloud provides industry accelerators that can address the unique requirements of your industry. SAP Commerce Cloud offers cross-industry accelerators for B2C and B2B sectors, accelerators that are specific to the Chinese market, and several specific accelerators for Telco and media, financial services, travel, and citizen engagement. 

Related Reading: SAP Preconfigured Solutions Boost Efficiency Among Industries

Integrations offered by SAP Commerce Cloud

In order to ensure the best customer experience, your commerce solution needs to be integrated with the other solutions in your ecosystem. While this can be complex and time-consuming, the prebuilt integrations offered by SAP Commerce Cloud help simplify and unlock efficiencies of this process. SAP Cloud Platform Integration service eases integration by using publicly available APIs and by using industry-standard protocols for managing data transfer. 

Related Reading: SAP Focused Industry Templates & Automation Solutions

SAP Commerce Cloud offers pre-built integrations with SAP S/4 HANA, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud, and SAP Sales Cloud portfolios, services from third-party providers, and various other solutions. These pre-built integrations permit end-to-end process management with the SAP Cloud Platform. SAP Cloud Platform integrates the master data with business processes to create a single source of truth. It thus prevents the complexities arising due to siloed data. What’s more, the intuitive user interface gives control to your system administrators to manage data with transparency.

Related Reading: SAP S/4HANA: Redefining End-To-End Solution

Benefits of SAP Commerce Cloud

• Rapid onboarding by providing quick access to development, staging, and production environments 
• Many self-service features that give you the power to control the working of your commerce solutions in the cloud.
• With the cloud-native capabilities, you also gain access to the latest releases and upgrade packages, code checks, and quality gates.
• The SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory allows extension and integration of microservices without affecting the core application
• You can augment your market reach and organize data through marketplaces, search, social, and marketing channels.
• The platform is highly scalable and can easily handle your traffic peaks. In other words, it grows with your business. 
• You get automatic weekly full database backups and hourly incremental backups.

The SAP Commerce Cloud is a hyper scalable, flexible, and high-speed omnichannel commerce solution that is delivered through a SaaS model. You can exploit the efficiency and speed of the cloud by using SAP’s shared cloud infrastructure. You end up having nominal IT costs, you don’t have to maintain servers, and to top it all you have the world-class data security that SAP provides. So why not make the move (if not already done)? Fingent top software development company, can help streamline last-mile delivery and improve a number of business processes. Our team of specialists can help you successfully deploy SAP Commerce Cloud and become a truly global digital business. Contact us today.

Employee Experience Management with SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics

The spread of COVID-19 has advanced the need for a single workforce management system (Human Capital Management system) that assists people in managing their jobs, rewards, development, payments, and many such areas. It’s during such a crisis that we realize the need for our HCM system to be well-connected and tightly integrated with other enterprise systems such as IT, security, and financials. This is where SAP SuccessFactors Human Capital Management solutions join hands with Employee Experience Management solutions from Qualtrics. All these solutions come packed in the SAP SuccessFactors sales bag. 

Related Reading: How Can SAP Help Manage Your Payroll Under The COVID-19 Crisis

How SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics transform workforce management

SAP SuccessFactors has transformed from an HCM vendor to an HXM (Human Experience Management) vendor with Qualtrics. Businesses have come to terms with the fact that human experiences matter and the organizations that focus on delivering the best employee experiences realize the most stunning results. While you get your operational data or O-data from HCM systems, Qualtrics brings in the experience data or the X-data that measures an individual’s emotions, notions and goals in specific scenarios. Thus, by analyzing your employee’s perspective both inside and outside work, you build a better relationship with them. 

By combining the X and O data you can connect operational HR data with employee experience data. With these, you are armed with information based on facts as well as perception. Whether it’s for routine work events like performance reviews, role change, or for unexpected events like the outbreak of a pandemic, companies can continuously monitor and act upon the data collected. This, in turn, helps you to predict challenges, correct errors, and deliver meaningful results. Thus SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics allow you to win in today’s experience economy.

Three employee experience management solutions from SAP Qualtrics

SAP Qualtrics has introduced three employee experience management solutions that help HR leaders to gather insights by leveraging the data that is collected throughout the employee lifecycle based on feedback.

1. SAP Qualtrics Employee Engagement

This solution focuses on the factors that drive employee engagement and productivity enabling HR leaders to leverage real-time insights to attract, nourish, and retain the best talent. This solution records information through employee feedback which helps managers to use employee experiences to identify key focus areas and take necessary actions. The Qualtrics Employee Engagement solution uses powerful Text iQ analytics to scrutinize open text responses. It helps you to easily make out trends, scan topics, and track employee attitude. Managers can use the configurable and role-based dashboards to track the effects of any upgrades and drive results.

2. SAP Qualtrics Employee Lifecycle 

This solution continuously gathers data from employees across their entire journey with the organization and manages their experiences to gain insights that drive improvements. These real-time insights help spot gaps and close them w.r.t expectations and reality. Expert onboarding and exit content, data related to workflow and automation– all these can be directly embedded in the existing HCM system. Using this solution, organizations can understand the key drivers causing attrition and take appropriate actions to retain the best talent.

3. SAP Qualtrics Employee Benefits Optimizer

As global markets continue to tighten, organizations have to compete to attract and retain the best talent. SAP Qualtrics Employee Benefits Optimizer takes the guesswork out of the process of determining what employees want in terms of benefits offered. You can easily recognize the most suitable benefits and compensation packages that are in tune with the unique culture and budget of your organization by leveraging the choice-based conjoint methodology that is a characteristic of this top-notch solution. You also become aware of the trade-offs that your employees are willing to make through ongoing surveys and analysis. HR managers, thus arrive at the most optimal packages even with changing preferences of employees and shifting market dynamics.  

With SAP transforming HCM into HXM, HR systems are shifting towards micro-experiences. HXM systems let you manage all HR, IT, scheduling, and all work-related activities making it an integrated employee platform. With HR leaders struggling to find effective ways to move forward in the wake of the COVID outbreak, SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics enables you to manage your total workforce holistically. 

Related Reading: How SAP Supports Effective Business Continuity Planning

We’ve been supporting managers and leaders to expertly run, use, and maintain various SAP solutions. Get in touch with us to understand how you can leverage SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics Employee Engagement to improve your workforce engagement and experience.  

SAP Payroll Compliance: Extending Support During COVID-19

The global spread of COVID-19 has put businesses into disarray. The long period of lockdown enforced by many governments has changed a lot of things. We’re all practicing new ways to work (remote work), use software, and pursue learning. We’ve also come across many compliance changes since governments across the world are trying to help their people through the HR and Payroll Systems. Due to this, many SuccessFactors partners have released add-ons, extensions, and functionalities to help users. Free-of-charge COVID-19 extensions for SAP SuccessFactors are available where customers can directly download the instructions from the website and set up the extension in their system as a self-service application. 

Related Reading: How SAP Supports Effective Business Continuity Planning

Getting the most out of SAP SuccessFactors Solutions

It’s the right time for customers to think outside the box in terms of getting the most out of SuccessFactors Solutions. The flexibility of SuccessFactors allows you to use it in new and different ways. SAP customers can also use SAP Jam to put out announcements, publish status updates, messages from leadership, and other questions about how to use the solutions that they have, to the best capacity. 

Since most people are working remotely for the first time, staying connected is more critical than ever. Companies can also leverage SuccessFactors Onboarding for a relaunch and get the business going since many organizations have opted for temporary lay-offs. So to relaunch and get these resources back on-board, this tool can be used effectively.  

Valuable information at your fingertips

Lots of countries are putting out programs for helping workers manage lay-offs, helping companies with cash flow, and giving them financial breaks so that they can retain their workers longer. These approaches are specific and differ from country to country. SAP has created a blog to bring all those updates together in one place. Employers can leverage the schemes that several governments across the globe have announced to prevent mass lay-offs. However, these rules and schemes are subject to constant review and it’s important for employers to review and plan before implementation. Every country HR and payroll need to collaborate to ensure that the changes are correctly put into effect. 

Related Reading:5 Tips to verify the business process expertise of your IT outsourcing partner

Legal changes announced by a few countries w.r.t payroll

Following are some legal changes announced by a few countries w.r.t payroll:

The United States: 

The state and federal wage laws mandate employers to pay minimum wages to their employees and time and half the regular hourly rate exceeding forty hours in a workweek to non-exempt employees. The FFCRA (Families First Coronavirus Response Act) demands employers with a staff less than 500 to provide a paid sick leave of 10 days along with FMLA leave for reasons related to COVID-19. 

Employers can obtain tax credits for Social Security and Medicare for statutory benefits. This Act allows employers to retain the amount of payroll taxes equalling the amount qualified for sick and child care leave rather than deposit it with the IRS. If employers find that the payroll taxes are insufficient to cover the cost of statutory benefits that have been paid, they can file an accelerated payment request with the IRS. The IRS would process these requests within two weeks.

The United Kingdom: 

The UK government has come up with the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme wherein they have pledged to reimburse 80% of wages for furloughed employees up to 2500 pounds per month. All employers in the UK are entitled to this scheme. The main objective is to help those employers retain their staff who cannot afford to pay salaries. They can then get those employees back on board once they start rebuilding their businesses. 

Australia:

The Australian government has implemented a broad range of measures to provide relief to employers through its “JobKeeper Payment Scheme”, where wage subsidies will be granted to employers affected by COVID-19. This will allow employers to pay their employees and such payments will be exempted from payroll taxes. 

The Pay-Roll Tax Relief (COVID-19 Response) Act 2020 that took effect from 1 March 2020 outlines the payroll tax waiver and the exemption for payments made under the JobKeeper Payment scheme. The payroll tax relief approaches in the country differ from state to state and employers need to carefully follow the corresponding province’s website to learn more. 

Canada: 

The Canadian government has announced a 10% wage subsidy for qualified small businesses. To avail of this benefit immediately, businesses should reduce their remittances of income tax that has been withheld from their employees’ remuneration. 

The Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy Act that was announced on April 11, 2020, states that the employers who have lost 30% of their revenue due to COVID-19 are eligible for a subsidy amount equalling 75% of employees’ remuneration paid up to CAD$847 per employee per week for a 12-week period.

Brazil: 

Brazil’s government has announced provisional measures such as a temporary suspension of employment in business sectors that are adversely affected by the pandemic. The authorities have considered permitting employers to reduce the working hours and salaries of their workforce by 50%. Additionally, the employees are to be allowed to take collective vacations with prior notice of 48 hours and individual vacations for 15 days. The employers have to make teleworking arrangements and include flexibility in banked hours. 

Employers should note that such schemes have a wage ceiling, so high earners may encounter greater losses of income. Since the main aim of these measures is to save jobs, employers who utilize these schemes are prohibited from continuing business with a reduced workforce simultaneously.   

The present global crisis has highlighted the essential function of payroll. If payroll fails, everything comes to a standstill. SAP Payroll can help you maintain resilience and ensure smooth operations. Connect with us to find out how your business can leverage payroll compliance with SAP.   

Transforming Healthcare with Predictive Analytics powered by SAP HANA

Predictive analysis has been helping businesses like Uber, Amazon, and Netflix to best serve their customers. They use it to predict what shows viewers would like to watch or what items they’d like to buy. It’s altogether a different story when it comes to healthcare. 

The stakes are higher when you recommend care based on predictive analysis. That’s why many healthcare organizations prefer prescriptive analytics over predictive analytics even now. However, the rewards are potentially much greater if organizations buy into this risk balance and ensure that predictive analytics is incorporated in an appropriate way to deal with the complex operations of a healthcare organization.  

The Healthcare Data Challenge

Healthcare data doubles every three years and the $7 trillion industry is unable to keep up with the staggering rate at which information is produced. The ever-increasing medical data generated/ collected in real-time from numerous medical records, clinical trials, research, personal fitness bands, wearables, implanted devices, sensors, and health apps will be equivalent to 300 million books. That means the average person is likely to generate more than 1 million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime (source: IBM Research). 

Related Reading: 5 Ways Big Data is Changing the Healthcare Industry

So, we require smart tools to use these massive data efficiently and derive clinically actionable results from them. While treating patients, we need to gain insights faster to provide specifically tailored treatments that are based on biological, genetic, and physical information. 

 SAP HANA Helps Unlock Massive Health Data

SAP HANA is the platform that integrates disparate and fragmented biological, clinical, and lifestyle datasets, helping users to analyze them and gain insights from them. SAP HANA enables users to conduct predictive analysis to examine and identify patterns across healthy as well as patient populations. 

Predictive analytics powered by SAP HANA combines the depth and speed of in-memory analytics with the potential of native predictive algorithms to process huge amounts of healthcare data on a real-time basis. In industries such as healthcare, most of the data is unstructured. Whether you use Enterprise systems, data warehouses, data marts, spreadsheets or Hadoop environments, Predictive Analytics solutions from SAP HANA combines both structured and unstructured datasets from any source. 

Leveraging SAP predictive analysis for visualization, R’s extensive library of statistical and data mining techniques, and SAP HANA predictive analytic library, data scientists get everything they need to predict the future in real-time. For instance, you’ll be able to predict the “patient footfall” in a hospital in a given period of time. Once you have the expected number of patients walking in, you can easily make arrangements to meet their needs like adjusting the bed capacity, maintaining stocks of critical protective devices, medicines, and so on. These proactive decisions can be extremely helpful in the current COVID-19 crisis situation.

Related Reading: Data Mining and Predictive Analytics: Know The Difference

Implementing SAP HANA Solutions in Healthcare

Does this sound too futuristic and hard to deploy? 

Well, you’ll be pleased to know that using SAP HANA for Predictive Analytics is also easy. You just have to use a drag and drop visual interface for data selection, preparation, and processing. You can create models by using native predictive algorithms as well as algorithms from R. So it’s not only for the experts. With SAP BusinessObjects and business intelligence integration, you can unlock predictive insights. Moreover, the stunning and advanced visualizations help to reveal valuable, hidden insights. The Mitsui Knowledge Industry has successfully used SAP Predictive Analytics to provide a one-stop-shop for genomic data analysis of cancer patients and support personalized therapeutics. 

Today, global healthcare industry experts are moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach. Personalized and preventive medicine is taking the center stage so that the right patient gets the right treatment at the right time. This, in turn, paves the way towards improved clinical outcomes and cost savings. Genomic research is gaining importance as it not only helps predict the signs of diseases even before they occur but also helps learn their physiologies. This can enable healthcare providers to determine the treatment plan on an individual basis thus greatly improving the efficiency and standard of healthcare. 

However, the challenge is to store the growing data. Only the genetic sequencing data would amount to approximately 5PB for 6 billion humans on the planet! Analyzing and interpreting this data is another challenge. Using SAP HANA researchers can analyze this data almost instantaneously. What once took 48 hours to analyze now takes only a few minutes with SAP HANA. This ultimately means a faster and precise diagnosis, better care, and fewer visits to the hospital.  

With SAP HANA, medical researchers and clinicians can integrate genomic data with clinical data to find associations with genetic markers and certain types of diseases. Once a doctor accesses this data in real-time, he can provide personalized treatment that is specific to certain genetic markers of the patient. 

Uncover hidden trends, take proactive actions, conduct new research on pharmaceuticals, and plan for future needs with Predictive Analytics from SAP. Fingent’s SAP experts help you take advantage of your SAP investments. Talk to us to know more.      

Understanding the Significance of SAP Support and AMS

Any SAP user can vouch for the fact that the SAP plays a significant role in their company.  Since business operations depend upon the reliability of the SAP system, any flaw can develop into a major problem hampering business operations. The effectiveness of your SAP support functions will determine how quickly your organization can restore operations. Choosing the right SAP Support model is, therefore, critical. So let’s dive right in and understand SAP support functions.

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

Types of SAP Support Functions

SAP support functions can be divided into 4 types: 

• Business Process Support
• SAP Functional support
• SAP ABAP and Interfaces Support
• SAP Basis or Technology Support

1. Business Process Support: 

The role of this team is to assist in various business processes and streamline them. Since the best role is played by the internal staff who are well versed in the workings of the company, you’ll see external consultants in this capacity.

2. SAP Functional Support: 

This team assists you with how to use the SAP software in the most effective way. Every now and then situations may arise where you require help. Your business may also demand frequent reconfigurations to handle new scenarios. The functional support team handles all these requests. This team needs to have an in-depth knowledge of the SAP system and a working knowledge of business processes. 

3. SAP ABAP and Interfaces Support:

This support team is also called as the technical team. While implementing SAP, the team that configures the system gathers business requirements and tries to meet them. Ideally, the ERP system should cater to all business needs. Of course, the business processes are re-engineered to meet best practices, but in the end, the role of SAP is to support business processes; not the other way around. While doing so, you realize that there are gaps and the ERP is unable to handle everything that your company does. This is where the ABAP and Interfaces Support team comes in. They go under the hood and modify or extend the software to meet the needs that could not be realized before. Similarly, if you want your SAP system to communicate with another ERP system or software, you’ll need help from the technical support team to write programs that enable the smooth flow of data between the two.       

4. SAP Basis or Technology Support: 

This team maintains the health of the infrastructure. They make sure that the SAP software is up and running on various environments such as production, testing, development, and training. Additionally, for each environment, you may have multiple machines. Thus the SAP software is running on multiple machines that host the database, operating system, hardware, and network. Depending on the size of your company, you may require a larger team to manage more number of machines. Of course, if you’re going on the cloud then you won’t need all this. The PaaS provider is responsible for maintaining the software as well as the infrastructure.  

Related Reading: How To Choose Best IT Infrastructure For SAP HANA

How SAP Support Works

All four support teams interact with each other based on requirements. Most SAP users have a team called SAP CCOE or Customer Centre of Expertise wherein the IT and (Line of Business) LOB collaborate with each other. The IT department takes care of the infrastructure and supports the technical part (SAP ABAP and interfaces), whereas the SAP configuration and business procedures are owned by the LOB. 

The SAP CCOE aims to promote transparency, efficiency, and innovation to drive continuous improvement. The CCOE program starts with the Primary Customer COE and allows customers to gradually mature into certified Advanced Customer COE(s).  Advanced Customer COE(s) help by providing a clear definition of the IT service portfolio and cost models. Apart from service provision, they leverage their knowledge of business processes, objectives, and technical feasibility to implement innovative ideas using leading technologies. Advanced Customer COE(s) thus provide competitive business advantages by including both IT and business in decision-making processes.     

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

SAP AMS (Application Management Services)

All said and done, internal SAP support teams have to face many challenges like :

• Providing and maintaining competencies for all business areas covered by the system
• Strategic talent management to meet the dynamic demands of ERP support 
• Ensuring that all problems will be solved within the allotted time frame 
• Ensuring efficient work-load planning
• Maintaining cost-effectiveness
• Maintaining effective contingency plans 

While SAP keeps adding new and valuable features and functionalities to their software at regular intervals, even in the current gloomy market, SMBs are forced to upgrade in order to maintain vendor support. All these challenges have led many organizations to look for third party support or SAP AMS providers for support. 

You can considerably reduce the support and maintenance costs of your SAP software by opting for Shared Team Delivery Model offered by Fingent. With shared services, you have a larger pool of resources to support multiple customers. Collaborating with various team members in a shared team enables the team members to learn about industry best practices thus enhancing skillsets. Customers can enjoy the benefits of improved scalability and flexibility. 

With support from an AMS provider, you get continuity of support in accordance with the SLA. However, you have to take care to avoid setting simple SLAs for support. You need to focus on getting more value from the SAP AMS provider. 

Related Reading: SAP Preconfigured Solutions Boost Efficiency Among Industries

Choosing an AMS provider that fits seamlessly as an extension to your existing staff can help your organization to deliver desired business outcomes. Of course, every company may have unique processes that call for unique SAP support. With Fingent top software development company, you get solutions that are tailored to your needs. Our service delivery structure is designed to manage costs and improve service levels. Thus you are freed from vendor lock-in, empowering you to focus on improving agility and innovation. Contact us to learn more.    

What is SAP Leonardo?

Though businesses are flooded with Big Data, IoT, Machine Learning, Blockchain, and other latest technologies that support innovation, many of them are unaware of how to bring these technologies together for enhanced business results. This is where SAP Leonardo comes in. SAP Leonardo brings these technologies together by integrating the key features of innovation to drive business outcomes. It is a “digital innovation system” that allows you to innovate at scale, thus rethinking your business models.

SAP Leonardo uses a rapid innovation process that embraces design thinking by utilizing the power of core technologies like Big Data, Analytics, IoT, Blockchain, and Machine Learning. SAP Leonardo is built on the SAP Cloud Platform. It is the first digital enterprise platform that gives you the freedom to choose any infrastructure provider you want: SAP, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform. So, whichever IaaS provider you choose, you do not have to compromise on agility and ownership costs.  

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

SAP Leonardo: The future of intelligent ERP   

SAP Leonardo offers a basket of features intended for transforming organizations into intelligent enterprises. 

1. Rapid innovation process: 

SAP Leonardo’s rapid innovation process is a combination of innovation services and design thinking methodology. It helps companies to move from concept to blueprint by driving the process of picking the best projects that are more likely to succeed while minimizing risks. This process encourages users to think about big ideas or challenges by taking small steps at a time. Design thinking being the core of the process will help you amplify your human-centric activities with the help of technology. This is done by embracing empathy and collaboration in a rapid and iterative environment.  

2. Automated innovation: 

SAP Leonardo empowers companies to innovate based on real-time information. Fiori apps can directly interact with IoT systems located on-site through the SAP Cloud. Thus the IoT system can learn and adapt automatically to the ongoing processes that can impact its performance. However, the company will always hold control and can accept or reject the recommendations made by the system. Thus, SAP Leonardo enables companies to gather and process data most efficiently.

Six core technological domains: 

SAP Leonardo combines 6 core technologies and builds solutions on that foundation. 

Following are the six core technologies:

1. IoT: With SAP Leonardo you can connect people, processes, and things based on real-time data received from IoT services. You end up with enriched IoT data on a unified semantic model. Thus you watch your insights turning into business outcomes.

2. Machine Learning: Though machine learning has been around for some time, these projects always existed in silos. With SAP Leonardo, machine learning is made available to everyone and everywhere by embedding it into enterprise applications. With this integrated intelligence, users can solve common problems and also facilitate the deployment of deep learning models for continuous improvement of business processes.

3. Blockchain: With Leonardo, SAP has moved into the BaaS technology accompanying giants like IBM and Microsoft. These companies have incorporated blockchain as the core of a secure transaction-based business. The SAP BaaS is ready-to-use and allows you to experiment on the distributed ledger technology with minimum risks.

4. Analytics: Analytics is crucial to all business processes and applications. With SAP Leonardo, embedded analytics is combined with machine learning, enabling you to create new processes and applications based on insights. Using Predictive Analytics you can leverage machine learning to take proactive actions and improve transparency across your team. 

5. Big Data: The SAP Data Hub, which is a part of Leonardo, helps to turn your chaotic data into context. It combines business with IT and simplifies data sharing. Thus, you can easily promote complete data transparency in your company.

6. Data Intelligence: SAP Data Intelligence combines the salient features of SAP Data Hub and SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation into a single integrated service in the SAP Cloud Platform. SAP Data Intelligence helps you to monetize your data and leverage open source technologies.

SAP Leonardo comes with a set of industry accelerators: 

In order to maximize ROI, you have to innovate quickly at scale. SAP Leonardo makes rapid innovation possible as it is delivered with a set of industry accelerators. They combine software and services that reduce the time of implementation considerably. In other words, the digital innovation system capabilities of SAP Leonardo are wrapped in a set of industry best practices gained from years of experience. All these accelerators combine industry knowledge, data intelligence, and software needed on an open innovation path.

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

SAP Leonardo has powered SAP’s own digital transformation: 

SAP is using Leonardo throughout the SAP portfolio to make its business suite and system of applications powerful. SAP Leonardo powers everything from SAP Ariba to SAP S/4 HANA, making them more intelligent.

In addition to improving reliability and efficiency, today’s ERP solutions have to be the foundation on which future business models are built. Rather than just making profits, businesses should focus on altering customer experiences and gaining new market shares. To become an intelligent enterprise, you need an intelligent ERP and SAP Leonardo is definitely the future!   

Contact us if you have a query on how SAP Leonardo can benefit your business. Our consultants will be able to assist you. 

5 Tips to verify business process expertise of your IT outsourcing partner

From creating growth models to maintaining healthy margins while managing ever-rising prices – industries today face a number of challenges. Being able to face this challenge is what sets successful businesses apart from their competitors. Business process expertise in SAP has helped businesses achieve just that in today’s hyper-competitive environment.

This blog will help you decide if you need industry and business process expertise in SAP. It also gives a few tips to help you verify if your IT outsourcing company is truly a business process expert or not. But before that, let’s find out what is industry and business process expertise in SAP.

What is Business Process Expertise in SAP?

Business process expertise in SAP can be attained internally or externally with individuals or groups of people who are experts in this field. Their job is to bridge the gap between business professionals and information technology.

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

Individuals with business process expertise are not only tech-savvy; they also understand the implications of the business process requirements and factors such as data volume, existing landscape, programming language, and security. They need to frame strategies by keeping in mind the legacy of the organization. They use their expertise in driving innovation within the organization and use best practices that go beyond the scope of a single department. They are ones who can recommend, design, and implement SAP solutions that are tailored for your business.

Why Do Businesses Require Industry and Business Process Expertise?

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”-Benjamin Franklin.

True to these words, a business process is not a project with a defined beginning and an end date. If you desire the best results and want to ensure that your process grows and adapts to your business, you need to keep improving them continually. And that is where business process expertise comes to play. Business process experts ensure that your business experiences continual and long-term improvements on various metrics within the organization.

Having business process expertise adds to the skill set required to develop ongoing assessments and action plans, communicate changes and provide the necessary training that impacts your business units. The expertise could be used to identify who is truly performing statistically better or worse compared to others in the unit. This way, business process expertise helps businesses measure and monitor performance improvement initiatives. 

Let’s say you are now convinced that your business needs to incorporate industry and business process expertise. The next step is to choose the right IT outsourcing partner with the expertise you need. How can you tell if the company you are looking to hire is a business process expert or not?

Related Reading: 7 Tips To Ensure A Seamless Transition To SAP S/4HANA

Five Critical Skills to Look For In Your IT Outsourcing Partner

Your IT outsourcing partner should be able to understand both your business process requirements and the technologies needed to map, model and implement the required changes within the given time frame and budget. To this end they would require these five skills:

1. Experience: Your IT outsourcing company’s staff should have business process experts who have grown into their role by participating in multiple projects that involved members from both, business and IT. 

2. Modeling knowledge: Along with the knowledge of basic principles and theoretical concepts, business process experts should know modeling. They should be able to artfully describe objects, rules, and roles and should be able to relate them to your business process with a descriptive language from your viewpoint. 

3. Tool knowledge: An increased number of model-driven tools that go beyond the classical tools are hitting the market. Since the role of your IT outsourcing partner is to build the business process, they should be able to use SAP tools. They should be able to use those tools to impact the level of granularity or modularity of the model.  They should also be capable of implementing it within the same tool environment. 

4. Internal and external expertise: The company’s experts should be familiar with the internal structures, the evolution, the history and the long-term strategy of your business. They should know who or which unit would give them the needed support. You will have to check their aptitude in understanding your business. Externally, they should be able to bring in fresh views, especially those that have a long-term positive impact on your business.

5. Communication: The experts of the IT outsourcing company need to have the ability to move diplomatically on the slippery floor of communication. They should be able to explain the terminologies to each team without compromising the facts required for decision making and implementation. They should be able to break down complex facts to simple yet accurate definitions. 

Take the Next Step – Leap Into the Future

At Fingent top software development company, our SAP experts focus on creating measurable results that are customized to your needs. Fingent can help organizations to implement and manage SAP and non-SAP applications using the central SAP Solution Manager platforms. 

Talk to us to understand how you can take the leap with our SAP business process expertise. 

Seamlessly migrate to S/4HANA with these tools and methodologies

Digital transformation or innovation has become the topic of discussion in every boardroom and LOB agenda. However, many business leaders find that the complexity associated with digital innovation is a major obstacle preventing them from realizing any true value. Companies need a digital core to overcome complexity and drive digital transformation. SAP S/4 HANA is such a digital core that can help companies overcome complexity and thrive in today’s disruptive market. S/4 HANA helps you reinvent your business model by providing easy access to real-time data.

Related Reading: 7 Tips To Ensure A Seamless Transition To SAP S/4HANA

S/4 HANA implementation Methodology

Let’s jump ahead and have a look at the ‘new implementation’ scenario with SAP S/4 HANA. SAP recommends the SAP Activate Methodology for SAP S/4 HANA implementation. It succeeds the ASAP and SAP Launch methodologies and combines 3 core pillars – SAP Guided configuration, SAP Best Practices, and Methodology. SAP Activate Methodology offers both Cloud and on-premise solutions. It is a modular and agile framework that accelerates migration or implementation to S/4 HANA. 

SAP Activate consolidates the knowledge and accelerators to help you innovate faster than before. Throughout the project life cycle, SAP Activate follows 6  phases: Discover, Prepare, Explore, Realize, Deploy, Run. 

The SAP S/4 HANA Roadmap provides detailed information on implementation and specific methodologies. The Roadmap Viewer Tool is based on Fiori and aims to guide you on your SAP S/4 HANA journey by providing you project accelerators, templates for key deliverables and other relevant information on the product implementation. The methodology content is divided into the following hierarchy: Phases, Deliverables, Tasks. Additionally, companies can make use of the Value Assurance Packages for SAP S/4 HANA projects that follow the SAP Activate methodology.

Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

Tools for S/4 HANA implementation

Data Migration is an important aspect of any system implementation. After moving to the SAP HANA platform, your data has to be of high-quality and should assist your business in achieving organizational goals. SAP provides tools to simplify this process. These tools do not require any programming by the customer and help you to reduce test effort and minimize downtime. 

• SAP S/4 HANA Migration Cockpit: This is a web-based tool that helps to migrate Legacy data into S/4 HANA. It is packed with a set of pre-existing objects that are updated with every release. Apart from the set of standard objects, you can also develop new objects or enhance the existing ones based on your specific needs. Migration Cockpit is available for S/4 HANA Cloud and on-premise from the S/4 HANA Release 1610.
• SAP S/4 HANA Migration Object Modeler (MOM): As mentioned earlier, the standard objects that come with the Migration Cockpit don’t always meet customized requirements. For such cases, SAP has provided another tool: SAP S/4 HANA Migration Object Modeler (MOM). Using this tool, you can create new source structures, manipulate existing ones, change field mappings, add rules to manipulate data and create totally new objects. The Migration Object Modeler consists of global data, source structures, target structures, structure mapping, and field mapping.  
• SAP Rapid Data Migration with SAP Data Services: SAP Rapid Data Migration with Data Services allows you to safely migrate your data within SAP systems. With SAP RDS, you can cleanse, transform and load data into new SAP applications easily and quickly.  
• SAP Readiness Check: SAP Readiness Check is a self-service tool to check the pre-requisites in software, requirements in infrastructure, functional implications of SAP S/4 HANA, custom code adaptations that are required and data migration requirements. This tool helps you to analyze whether your existing ERP system is ready for S/4 HANA adoption. You can find valuable information on sizing, add-on compatibility, use of Fiori and other details.  
• Guided Configuration for SAP S/4 HANA: In a cloud-based system, customers prefer pre-configured solutions for fast ROI. Hence, SAP provides a guided configuration for S/4 HANA which provides easy-to-use, web-based activities for personalization. With Guided Configuration you won’t have to define parameters in tables as you did in ERP systems. Thus you can greatly simplify the implementation process.   
• SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) software: SLT is an ETL tool that helps to migrate and align any type of data in your current SAP landscape. This tool can steer you through business reorganization of any size. It automatically supports non-Unicode and Unicode conversion during replicating or loading. Thus the SAP LT tool allows easy and fast deployment.  

SAP has notified that from 2025, they will stop supporting ECC. So migrating to S/4 HANA is inevitable, to keep your business running. Since the clock is ticking, you need to make your move soon. The digital core that powers S/4 HANA combines CRM and traditional ERP and also enables a whole slew of cloud applications like SAP Ariba, Successfactors, C/4 HANA and many more. Get in touch with our SAP expert to get free guidance on migrating to SAP S/4HANA seamlessly.

SAP Model Company: Understanding the Significance and More!

With changing business requirements, you need IT systems that support rapid business transformation. Your company needs to focus on innovation that is result-driven. Traditionally you had an on-premise style of implementation where you spent around 6-18 months implementing a solution. But this approach is not feasible in today’s ever-changing environment. If only you could find tried and tested solutions that could speed up your digital transformation. Here’s where SAP Model Company comes in.

What is SAP Model Company?

The SAP Model company is a set of pre-configured, ready-to-use, end-to-end business solutions that focus on ramping up the company’s digital transformation process. These solutions are customized for a particular industry or line of business. There are many teams working to outline the core processes of an industry or LOB. They combine the best practices of various successful business transformation projects which are powered by the most modern applications. In other words, you get prepackaged reference solutions that are based on what other companies have done successfully. Thus, the SAP Model Company is so much more than the older typical environments like IDES. 

SAP Model Company is an industry solution that helps companies in their move to SAP S/4 HANA. Apart from SAP S/4 HANA, the SAP Model Company also contains SAP C/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors and many other SAP solutions. It can be used in both Greenfield and Brownfield applications. 

SAP HANA Technology – The Game-Changer

Why you need SAP Model Company?

• The complexity of SAP solutions overwhelmed users and hence they demanded guidance.  
• SAP users had little or no knowledge of how to use or implement industry and LOB-specific processes using standard practices.
• Changing times demanded rapid innovation. Companies required accelerators that helped to reduce the time of implementation and also reduced the risks of failure.
• Enterprises spent a considerable amount of time on the blueprint phase just to find out that their concept could not be implemented using current technologies.  

Significance of SAP Model Company

The SAP Model Company is a true reference solution. In other words, you are to use the Model Company as a dictionary. You look into it for the terms and definitions and choose what you would like to take into your landscape. If you find a 100% fit, you can directly import the processes from the Model Company into your development environment. 

However, the Model Company focuses only on really important processes. For instance, a Model company in oil and gas has a very limited scope on how to manage a pipeline, whereas in a real-life scenario you have more than hundreds and thousands of pipelines. You can refer to the configuration guides in the Model Company and then scale out as required. 

SAP Model Company is Future-proof!

In the words of Stephan Klein, SVP and SAP Model Company Lead, the Model company is set to become the baseline for the entire SAP product portfolio. It spans across all SAP solutions for on-premise, single-tenant, multi-tenant cloud and hybrid platforms in industries and LOBs and is completely interoperable. 

The planned portfolio for 2020 constitutes more than 30 model companies for industries and LOBs. The industry model companies include Consumer Industries, Service Industries, Discrete Industries, Public Services, Energy and Natural Resources. These industry model companies are structured on top of the LOB model companies such as Digital Supply chain, CRM and Customer Experience, Financial Services, HR and People Engagement. The very baseline of the portfolio is built on S/4 HANA Best Practices or on SAP S/4 HANA Multinational Corporation. 

Accelerate your business growth and intelligence with SAP Model Company

The SAP Model company contains market standard business processes together with their configurations. It aims to transform business processes by enabling enterprises to adopt industry best practices and incorporate innovative technologies wherever possible. 

Here are a few benefits of SAP Model Company:

• Faster time-to-value, freeing up your resources for further innovation.
• Accelerate your digital transformation by reducing costs and risks of implementation.
• Choose the right solution based on the industry reference architecture.
• Lower ratio of service costs compared to software costs. 

In the case of a cloud environment, Model Company services can be accessed immediately, within hours. If you want to use the Model Company on-premise, then you can start with your business users, fit-gap analysis or even your business blueprint design right away. You thus accomplish value-based outcomes in weeks rather than in months. Along with greenfield implementations, you can also use the Model Company as a sandbox system to facilitate back to standard discussions with your business. The end-to-end LOB-proven processes allow you to minimize customizations and benefit from the latest innovations with proven standard practices. 

Need help with your SAP Model Company implementation? Why not ask the pros? Contact us now!

Tips To Help You Choose Between ERP & Digital Transformation

If you are a business aiming for delivering value to your customers and willing to accept challenges to integrate technology for a better tomorrow, then Digital Transformation is your Nirvana!

Small to large enterprises, require digital transformation to remain ahead of their competitors. The increasing value offered to your customers and digitally transforming your business goes hand-in-hand. According to IDG, State Of Digital Business Transformation, 89% of businesses have accepted their first business strategy as digital transformation. This includes 95% in Services, 93% in Financial Services, and 92% in Healthcare Services, followed by other industries. 

Related Reading: Here’s a guide to help your organization digitize with IoT.

Key Objectives Of Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is undoubtedly one of the biggest buzzwords of today. Enterprise leaders are looking for strategies to digitally transform their business to leverage the benefits. According to IDC, as per the Worldwide Semiannual Digital Transformation Spending Guide, the worldwide spending on digital transformation, by the year is forecasted to reach $1.97 trillion by the year 2022.

 The major objectives of digitally transforming your business include the following:

• Improved Customer Experience
• Increased Operational Workflow And Agility
• Enhancement Of Workforce
• Better Work Culture
• Integration Of Digital Technology

Related Reading: Check out how Artificial Intelligence Revolutionizes Small Businesses.

How Is Digital Transformation Different From ERP Implementation?

ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning software is a suite of applications that can be customized to allow businesses and enterprises to manage their processes. 

However, with the Lidl software disaster followed by the National Grid lawsuit, enterprises are skeptical about ERP implementation, to the core. Some people consider ERP implementation as a broader form of Digital Transformation. But, both are different in various ways. Let us walk through the following key differences between the two:

• Differences In Technology

Core ERP vendors such as Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle rely on technologies that automate back-office functions. On the other hand, digital transformation makes use of a variety of technologies that include ERP, Artificial Intelligence, Internet Of Things, Industry 4.0, to transform their existing business models. 

ERP is a typical enterprise application that integrates phases of business operations such as product planning, manufacturing, sales, financials, inventory management, marketing, and human resources within a single MVC architecture, that is, in a single user interface, application, and database. 

• Differences In Business Process Management

ERP systems approach business processes by incremental steps towards business processes for incremental benefits. On the other hand, digital transformation approaches business process improvement by “quantum leaps”. That is, only digital transformation supports a reengineering of business processes. 

Business processes can be processed such as customer onboarding, managing insurance claims, etc. The difference lies in the approaches as well. ERP systems take a holistic approach altogether, whereas, on the other hand, digital transformation requires a strategy. 

Additionally, ERP systems aim at providing data and functions to deliver products and services more efficiently to customers. On the other hand, digital transformation enhances the way products and services are delivered to customers. Digital transformation additionally changes even the products delivered to the customers. 

In a nutshell, ERP implementation is automating the existing business processes, whereas digital transformation involves taking quantum leaps for improving business value. Transforming businesses digitally involves business process re-engineering and optimization. Additionally, digital transformation relies on disruptive changes in existing business processes and are open to new business models and strategies on doing business as well.

• Differences In Organizational Change Management

Though there are MNCs are adopting technologies such as SAP HANA, Oracle Cloud ERP, or any other ERP implementation, is likely to witness an organizational change management challenge. Organizational change management associated with ERP implementation aims at training people on how to perform the same processes and transactions in a new system. 

According to its definition, Enterprise Resource Planning Organizational Change Management (ERP OCM), is a framework to manage the impact of new business processes along with the organizational changes in an enterprise. 

However, digital transformations aim at helping the workforce change their job roles to support new business models. Digital transformation makes use of disruptive technology rather than automating the status quo. This is because while ERP systems provide an incremental improvement, digital transformation aims at materially disrupting the existing business model for improvement. This leads to the provision of better products and services to customers. 

In a nutshell, Organizational change management in ERP systems aims at addressing the people side of change management in enterprises. It can be also defined as strategies that help stakeholders and employees migrate from their existing state to a new system altogether. On the other hand, digital transformation changes the existing business model with a disruptive technology mechanism. 

While ERP implementation focuses on achieving greater efficiency with an enterprise’s existing business model, digital transformation disrupts or changes the existing business model. 

• Differences In Providing Business Value And ROI

A recent HBR survey was conducted for certain companies that invested in digital transformation. This survey that polled 2216 employees illustrated that these companies invested in digital transformation and embraced an annual revenue of $500 million. This figure shows that strategic planning on transforming their businesses digitally resulted in increased revenue and reduced costs. 

ERP implementations can deliver a good ROI for enterprises within a few years with all business processes going well. Whereas on the other hand, digital transformation potentially delivers an exponential increase in revenue and considerably reduced costs. This, in turn, leads to enhancements in business value, significant ROI increase, customer loyalty and satisfaction, improved efficiency and other benefits.

• Differences In Employee Strategies

Enterprise Resource Planning systems focus on getting their employees trained on new systems. This transactional training addresses organizational change management concerns. On the other hand, digital transformation aims at employee acceptance strategies of the new systems. Enterprises adopting digital transformation perform so by making use of comprehensive organizational changes and employee transition methodologies.

ERP systems hardly, invest in organizational change management strategies. This, in turn, leads to high failure rates in enterprises adopting ERP implementation. Whereas on the other hand, digital transformation invests largely on organizational change management strategies. This increases the people side support considerably. This largely explains the success rate and improved ROI as well as the increased business value in enterprises adopting digital transformation strategies. 

Related Reading: Check out the Global ERP Technology Trends For 2019.

ERP Implementation or Digital Transformation – Which Is Better For Your Business?

To automate business operations entirely, some enterprises choose a single technology platform. Leveraging on the plethora of technology advancements is the key solution to improving business processes. 

A right Risk Mitigation strategy can work wonders in managing your business processes irrespective of which strategy you choose to implement. To this strategy, it is also required that all employees be equally aligned to this strategy as well.

There is no universal or all-purpose solution as to a perfect business strategy implementation. This is where our experts can provide you with the best roadmap for your business. Our experts can guide you with step-by-step guidance for implementing the best technology that suits your enterprise. Call our strategists right away to learn more about which strategy is best to implement for your business!