Using SAP S/4HANA to Support the Intelligent Enterprise

An enterprise system has evolved from a transactional system to a digital system, which provides enterprise with information, live data, and analytical capabilities. Enterprises and enterprise systems are now transforming to automated and even autonomous systems. This is known as an intelligent enterprise, or a self-driving enterprise equipped with a self-learning enterprise system. Intelligent enterprises apply advanced technologies and best practices within agile, integrated business processes.

Sustainability has also become a very important aspect of doing business in any industry: businesses want to understand and manage their impact on people and the environment.

An intelligent, sustainable enterprise is one that consistently applies advanced technologies and best practices within agile, integrated business processes. SAP helps its customers to build and run an intelligent, sustainable enterprise by enabling them to:

• Provide tools to understand what's happening across the business and why
• Infuse artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into all relevant business processes
• Embed sustainable practices into their business strategy and operations
• Build flexible value chains and apply industry practices to optimize their business
• Implement vertical industry-specific processes in the cloud to run their value chain end to end

Since the 1970s, SAP has delivered enterprise systems and now offers a complete enterprise solution that supports sustainability and leverages the power of intelligence.

Support for an intelligent enterprise consists of the following components:

• An intelligent suite:

  SAP offers an integrated suite of applications that support a company's end-to-end business processes. The suite helps manage every part of an organization: employees, customers, products, spend, finance, and IT. With embedded analytics, a 360-degree view of a business is provided.

• Solutions for experience management (XM):

  Understanding what people want, and how they feel, is critical to making the right decisions. Experience management solutions give insight on the sentiments and feelings of customers, employees, and other business stakeholders.

• Industry Cloud:

  SAP's industry cloud enables companies to discover and deploy vertical solutions from SAP and partners. These help a customer by providing leading-edge industry best practices and extend a customer's current business processes.

• Sustainability Management:

  These days, companies are expected to run sustainably. SAP solutions for sustainability will help customers understand and manage their impact on people and the environment.

• SAP Business Technology Platform:

  SAP BTP provides data management and analytics, supports application development and integration, and allows a company to use intelligent technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (ioT) to drive innovation.

• SAP Business Network:

  SAP Business Network will help a customer to digitize cross-company business processes. It builds on current procurement, travel, and contingent workforce solutions to help intelligent enterprises work together to create flexible value chains.

Within SAP's solution to support an intelligent enterprise, many different end-to-end business processes are supported. The following graphic shows examples of these end-to-end-business processes:

Lead to Cash encompasses the complete sales process, where a lead can result in a sales order, and where (after delivery) the customer is invoiced for the items sold. Recruit to Retire encompasses a complete human capital management process, and Source to Pay a complete external procurement process.

SAP provides an intelligent suite, where the applications can be found that are used to support these end-to-end business processes.

Intelligent enterprises are integrated enterprises. SAP’s integration approach goes far beyond technical integration of applications. It tries to achieve holistic integration of data, technology, and business processes. It accelerates the speed of innovation, lowers the efforts for integration, shortens time to value, reduces the complexity of operations, and allows for real-time insight. SAP’s integrated intelligent suite connects a customer's supply and demand chain to deliver an integrated, intelligent process experience.

SAP’s integrated intelligent suite consists of several applications, one of which is the SAP S/4HANA, which acts as the digital core. Besides SAP S/4HANA, other SAP products can be found here like the SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite and SAP Ariba.

SAP S/4HANA is a modern ERP system with support for embedded artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). It is available on premise, in a public or private cloud, or in a hybrid environment.

SAP S/4HANA Sales contains analytical applications that enable a company to monitor and analyze all business data. The embedded real-time sales monitoring and analytical capabilities offer a full coverage of features across all core sales processes. Top-class performance is provided by leveraging Core Data Serviced (CDS) views and SAP HANA capabilities.

Embedded analytics relieves people working in sales from repeated manual tasks. Instead of having to run multiple reports to get a feel for the performance of a product group for example, it is possible to see real-time performance information using just one embedded analytical application in SAP S/4HANA Sales.

The analytical capabilities within SAP S/4HANA can be enhanced by using SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). These capabilities are enhanced by using predictive functions in SAP Analytics Cloud.

By using predictive functions within SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), a company can leverage (machine learning) models to support decision making by forecasting the future value of a certain KPI. This is also known as Predictive Analytics. Statistical techniques, including machine learning algorithms and sophisticated predictive modeling, are used to analyze current and historical data and assess the likelihood that something will take place.

You can also use the SAP Fiori apps called Intelligent Scenarios and Intelligent Scenario Management to enable the use of predictive functionality in the following analytical apps:

• Predicted Delivery Delay
• Quotation Conversion Rates - Valid/Not Completed

There is often a disparity between how a company thinks customers feel about their products and services and how they actually do feel. Operational data (O-data), like costs, revenues, and sales, show what is happening in a business. But a company also needs experience data (X-data) to understand the feelings of the people involved and why things are happening.

With connected commerce, marketing, sales, and service data, a company can power its customer experience (CX) from demand to supply chain and delivery.

How does SAP deliver these experiences??

SAP CX offers a very robust intelligent industry focused CX solution, that connects critical SAP back end and front-end CX solutions to deliver unmatched customer experiences, with a focus on profitability.

With fully aligned front-to-back office business processes to deliver seamless experiences.

In addition, SAP Customer Experience offers one technology stack that can be used by all Routes to Markets and all key players, creating synergies between them and serving the consumer in a more holistic way.

The SAP Customer Experience portfolio of solutions contains five main solutions. These are all described below:

SAP Commerce Cloud comprises all offerings across the customer experience that unify a seamless customer experience across channels during the purchase process, such as B2B, B2C, and B2B2C.

SAP Customer Data Cloud encompasses all products across the customer experience that enable the collection, transparency, and harnessing of customer information:

• SAP Customer Consent:

  This is a cloud solution that provides customer consent management capabilities. It allows a businesses to give their customers control of their own profile information and preferences, centralize the collection and recording of customers’ consent along with terms of service and privacy policies, track versions of consent records across the customer lifecycle for auditing purposes, and synchronize preference and consent settings with downstream applications.

• SAP Customer Data Platform:

  This offering enables enterprises to manage all facets of their customer data and deliver personalized experiences using their customers' preferred channel.

• SAP Customer Identity:

  This is a cloud solution that enables businesses to securely identity, register, and engage customers across channels and devices. Companies can capture first-party data and build user profiles that respect consumer privacy as well as integrate customer data in their marketing, sales, and services applications.

• SAP Customer Profile:

  This solution offers customers a cloud marketing platform to carry out all core customer profile and data management processes in the cloud across areas of customer engagement and commerce. It includes data privacy and consent management capabilities.

SAP Sales Cloud comprises all offerings across the customer experience that relate to billing, CPQ (configure, price, quote), monetization, revenue management, and sales transactions.

SAP Service Cloud comprises all offerings across the customer experience that help secure customer satisfaction in support of ongoing loyalty.

SAP Marketing Cloud aims to:

• Unite experiential and operational data to build a single, comprehensive view of customers
• Remove silos across the organization and activate the full value of customer data
• Gain deeper insights into customers to understand their intent and anticipate their behavior
• Identify hidden trends and discover micro-segments with just a few steps to shape a company's marketing strategy