How can the Intelligent Enterprise impact Distribution

The digital economy is disruptive. Wholesale distribution companies need strategic priorities that drive transformation into intelligent enterprises. SAP powered by Approyo supports a reimagined set of end-to-end business scenarios that are part of a digital environment.

• Using value-added services to create new revenue sources - For years, most distributors have been providing value-added services, many of which have been free of charge. Leading distributors will take these value-added services to the next level and use them to significantly increase revenue and bottom-line profitability. Distributors should consider providing customers with a menu of options such as light manufacturing, sensor-based services, training and consulting services, or lending services.
• Becoming a real-time distributor - Companies everywhere face volatile customer demand and heightened service expectations. Innovative technologies can help resolve these issues by providing vital business information across the network, improving real-time analysis, and enabling better collaboration across departments and trading partners – thus transforming the supply chain into a responsive network.
• Building lasting customer relationships - Build trusted relationships with customers by empowering sales teams and personalizing buyer engagements. Provide a vast variety of ordering channels from call centers, Web sites, text messages, and in-person interaction to deliver the exact products and services customers need when they need them. The customer experience today constitutes a lifecycle, not just an interaction restricted to the front end of the enterprise.

Leading wholesale distributors are transitioning into information-centric companies that utilize new business models to gain competitive advantage and deliver premium, consistent customer service. Digital transformation fosters operational excellence, specifically across order management and inventory management processes, providing wholesale distributors with real-time information and the ability to drive immediate impact with intelligent ERP.

Responding to rapid changes
A digital core is an IT architecture that offers stability and long-term reliability for core enterprise processes, yet also provides the flexibility to adapt quickly to new opportunities, challenges, and regulations. This solid foundation gives you a single source of truth, which in turn enables flexibility for innovation to accommodate things such as new business models, new regulations, and business events, such as mergers or acquisitions.

Simulation and analytics
The ability to respond quickly is an essential part of managing a wholesale distribution company. To do this, simulation, prediction, and analytical capabilities are important components. Data is critical for gaining the insight to make decisions. This insight must be at a granular level, so that decision-makers have the details they need to understand trends, opportunities, and risks, and quickly carry out what-if analysis using predictive algorithms.

Keeping data under control
Every wholesale distribution company needs the computing capability to carry out complex algorithms with large data sets to support timely, real-time analysis. Everyone in the company must have access to data they need, whenever and wherever they need it. This is also true for the rest of the ecosystem so that suppliers can stay up to date with a company’s orders, salespeople can see customer history for credit risk and stock information, and accurate delivery schedules can be provided.

Addressing innovative opportunities
Customers in every industry are demanding innovation. Companies are responding with new products and services that better meet individual needs. These new offerings impact every facet of business, not just the front office. Companies must address end-to-end (E2E) processes across departments and lines of business to deliver on new customer experiences, products, and services.

Enhance and Extend Next-Generation Processes with Intelligent ERP
Bringing SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo technologies together as a digital core results in a more flexible and intelligent enterprise. To achieve next-generation business processes and respond to rapid changes, companies need an intelligent ERP solution that can be continuously enhanced and extended with innovative business services and applications built on emerging technologies, including machine learning, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Wholesale distributors focused on innovation or who prefer to be early adopters have already begun this journey.

New security and privacy features in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04

SAP recently announced the release of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04. SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04 includes a mix of new and continuous innovations across the themes of database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application development.

The new SPS 04 release of SAP HANA 2.0 provides important security and privacy enhancements addressing these challenges:

• Data anonymization KPIs increase transparency for decision makers when assessing anonymization scenarios, easy-to-understand new controls simplify the setup of anonymization views, and l-diversity enhances the k-anonymity method
• Audit retention policies let you specify a retention period after which audit log entries are automatically deleted
• Simplified authorization troubleshooting gets SAP HANA users up and running again quickly and with less administrative overhead

Data anonymization extensions
SAP HANA data anonymization, which was introduced with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 03, allows you to get analytical insights from data while protecting the privacy of individuals.

With the new release, SAP HANA introduces anonymization KPIs that help decision makers to assess critical variables for risk and utility. This makes it easier to achieve the right balance between the goals of protecting data privacy while ensuring that the anonymized data remains useful.

Real-time data anonymization was released with two anonymization methods: differential privacy and k-anonymity. Now l-diversity has been added, which is an extension to k-anonymity and provides additional protection for data sets with homogeneous sensitive attributes.

The setup of k-anonymity has also been simplified with the automation of generating hierarchies for generalizing quasi-identifying attributes, and data scientist can now control additional parameters when setting up anonymization views.

And finally, SQL views are now supported for data anonymization – previously only calculation views were available.

Audit retention policies
Fine-tuned retention management is an important building block for compliance. You can now specify a retention period after which audit log entries of individual audit policies will be automatically deleted.

But compliance requirements are not the only reason why you might want to delete audit log entries: you can of course also use this new functionality to free up database space, delete audit log entries that simply are no longer needed.

Simplified authorization troubleshooting
Authorization is a cornerstone of controlled access in SAP HANA. Defining authorization concepts requires careful thought and consideration. If authorization errors occur in either the test or productive landscape, they need to be quickly resolved so that users can access the database objects they require. The new authorization troubleshooting features introduced in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04 aim to simplify troubleshooting by adding two new techniques.

Learn more at: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/04/08/address-business-challenges-in-security-and-privacy-with-sap-hana-2.0-sps-04/

SAP Announces First Quarter 2019 Results

SAP Announced its first quarter results on www.sap.com. The results continue to show growth for SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA. This growth mirrors Approyo's growth and accolades throughout 2019 and align with our vision as the premier SAP Platform as a service partner.

Business Performance - Financial Highlights First Quarter 2019
In the first quarter, new cloud bookings were up 32% (26% at constant currencies). Cloud revenue grew 45% year over year to €1.56 billion (IFRS), up 48% (non-IFRS) and 41% (non-IFRS at constant currencies). Software license revenue was up 4% year over year to €650 million (IFRS), up 4% (non-IFRS) and 1% (non-IFRS at constant currencies). New cloud and software order entry was up 17% (13% at constant currencies) year over year in the first quarter. Cloud and software revenue grew 16% year over year to €5.04 billion (IFRS), up 16% (non-IFRS) and 12% (non-IFRS at constant currencies). Total revenue grew 16% year over year to €6.09 billion (IFRS), up 16% (non-IFRS) and 12% (non-IFRS at constant currencies).

SAP’s rapidly expanding cloud business together with solid growth in support revenue continued to drive the share of more predictable revenue, which grew by one percentage point year-over-year to 72% in the first quarter.

As previously indicated, the IFRS operating profit in the first quarter was impacted by recognizing the expected cost of SAP’s 2019 restructuring (€886 million) as well as higher acquisition-related charges and share-based compensation primarily due to the Qualtrics acquisition.

This resulted in an IFRS operating loss of -€136 million (Q1 2018: operating profit of €1,025 million). In contrast, Non-IFRS profit was up 19% at €1,467 million (up 13% at constant currencies). Earnings per share were -€0.10 (IFRS) (Q1 2018: €0.59) and up 24% at €0.90 (non-IFRS). Operating cash flow for the first three months was €2.80 billion, up 9% year-over-year. Free cash flow increased 10% year-over-year to €2.37 billion. At the end of the first quarter, net liquidity was -€6.19 billion. Segment Performance First Quarter 2019

SAP’s three reportable segments “Applications, Technology & Services”, “Business Network” and “Customer and Experience Management” showed the following performance.

Applications, Technology & Services (AT&S)
In the first quarter, segment revenue in AT&S was up 12% to €4.99 billion year-over-year (up 9% at constant currencies).

SAP S/4HANA
SAP S/4HANA is at the core of the Intelligent Enterprise. With S/4HANA, customers automate more and more of their business processes
enabling employees to focus on higher-value tasks. It detects patterns, predicts outcomes and suggests actions empowering companies
across all industries to reinvent their business models for the digital economy.
This quarter, SAP S/4HANA Cloud was named as a Leader in The IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-enabled Operational ERP

Applications 2019 Vendor Assessment. IDC recognizes SAP S/4HANA Cloud as an intelligent ERP that enables various business processes such as idea to design, procure to pay, plan to production, order to cash, offer to project, and core finance.

S/4HANA adoption grew to more than 10,900 customers, up 30% year over year. In the first quarter, over 40% of the additional S/4HANA
customers were net new.

View the complete Q1 results at: https://www.sap.com/docs/download/investors/2019/sap-2019-q1-statement.pdf

New Features and Functionality in SAP HANA

SAP HANA 2 is the business data platform for the intelligent enterprise. Leveraging state-of-the-art database and data management technology, advanced analytical capabilities and intuitive application development tools in the only all-in-one, in-memory-first data platform – SAP HANA 2 frees up valuable resources and human capital for new and innovative application development to meet your business’s strategic objectives.

SAP recently released SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04. SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04 includes a mix of new and continuous innovations across the themes of database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application development.

Database enhancements 

• Advanced data and privacy protection including enhanced data anonymization with additional algorithms and configurable retention policies for the audit log. 
• Improvements for high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) will further increase system availability and help protect enterprise-critical applications with a new multi-target system replication option that now also supports multiple region-local A/A secondary, a further enhanced time travel option and a “Follow-the-sun” option that optimizes the latency for write transactions by rotating the primary system around the world. 
• SAP HANA now also offers a fast-restart option that is using TMPFS on OS Level to significantly reduce restart times with existing hardware. 
• The new Native Storage Extension allows tables, columns or partitions to be flagged as warm data, residing mainly on disk. Warm data is loaded to an in-memory buffer cache only as required for query processing. 

Data Management enhancements

• Support for federated access to high-availability Hadoop clusters, and a generic adapter framework for Smart Data Access. 
• Smart Data Integration now allows to group multiple agents, provides real-time support for Mainframe DB2 and integration into Web IDE. 
• To enhance the quality of your data SAP now provides geocoding support for India addresses and FIAS compliant address assignments in Russia.
• The Enterprise Architecture Designer now offers support for SAP Big Data Services and Hadoop Hive 2.0 data lakes as well as support for HANA versioned tables. 
• Calculation View modeling via Web IDE now allows to integrate data sources more easily, comes with improved user experience, enhanced support for parallelization and extended variable support for models.

Analytical Intelligence enhancements 

• Increase the execution performance and productivity for data scientists by providing API’s for Python and R as well as a new Gradient Boosting Tree algorithm. 
• New methods for linear referencing, hexagonal grid-based aggregation, labeling tools, new APIs with reduced memory footprint and Data Hub integration will allow you to gain the most insight from geocoding your business data. 
• Improved flexibility, debugging support, new functions and algorithms as well as extended GraphScript capabilities and openCypher support allow more complex analyses and scenarios for your connected data.

Application Development and Tool enhancements  

• View functions for both SQLScript and SQL, SQLScript Debugger and Code Analyzer enhancements and a unit test framework. 
• The Web IDE comes with improved editors, Python support, wizards and dialogs and now allows multiple workspaces and mass import of synonyms. 
• A pending deployment indicator helps developer to keep track of their deployment. 
• The XSA runtime now supports X.509 as well as SPNEGO authentication, supports tenant specific installations and support for symbolic links.
• The HANA Run Time Tools include an enhanced SQL console with session recovery, performance improvements and more flexibility. 
• The catalog browser now supports search across multiple schemas and comes with an improved user experience.

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Check out our new Whitepaper "What's new in SAP HANA?" to learn more about additional features and functionality found in the latest release of SAP HANA

Download today

New Innovations in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04

SAP HANA 2 is the business data platform for the intelligent enterprise. Leveraging state-of-the-art database and data management technology, advanced analytical capabilities and intuitive application development tools in the only all-in-one, in-memory-first data platform – SAP HANA 2 frees up valuable resources and human capital for new and innovative application development to meet your business’s strategic objectives.

SAP recently announced the release of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04. SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04 includes a mix of new and continuous innovations across the themes of database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application development.

Here are the latest innovations in SAP HANA from SAP.

• Data tiering enhancements for improved scale
• Persistent memory hardware availability
• Scale-out enhancements
• Data protection and privacy
• Smart data access and Hadoop integration
• Hexagon grid clustering for spatial data
• Data scientist and machine learning improvements
• Spatial performance enhancements and algorithms
• User experience optimizations throughout

Learn more about SAP HANA at: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/04/05/whats-new-in-sap-hana-2.0-sps-04-2/

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
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Understand your path to SAP S/4HANA (updated)

By 2025, SAP will no longer support SAP ECC 6, the core component of SAP ERP. This means you will need to upgrade your SAP systems. But what are your best upgrade options?

There are three basic SAP cloud migration paths. Companies that want to start off slowly can undergo a traditional SAP cloud migration, moving their assets into the cloud without moving to SAP HANA at all. This allows you to show ROI quickly from running in the cloud while minimizing initial disruption and lets you wait for the major SAP HANA and S/4HANA upgrade for a later date.

Another option is migrating to Suite on HANA — with SAP ECC 6.0 Enhancement Pack 7 running on a HANA database. This gives you all the incremental benefits of HANA, such as faster performance and compatibility with newer applications and will get you close to a full S/4HANA landscape.

However, most companies will benefit from moving directly to S/4HANA. In most cases, a complete upgrade and migration will be less disruptive and less costly than several smaller upgrades and the new functionality will provide a major competitive advantage right away.

Deployment options for SAP S/4HANA

• Cloud - Public Cloud - SAP offers a pure Public Cloud option—Software-as-as-Service (SaaS)—such as SAP Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, AWS, or Azure, to name a few, which hosts and manages the entire HANA infrastructure, including the quarterly upgrades. This option can also be managed through the public cloud provider, internally or by an SAP partner like Approyo. 
• Cloud - Private Cloud - Under a private cloud setup, the HANA infrastructure operates on a private cloud exclusive for the use of an organization. This scenario can be managed internally or by a third-party and can be hosted internally or externally. It works best for companies looking for on-demand scalability, complete management control, and security prioritization for their IT assets while combining both on-premise and cloud solutions. 
• Hybrid Cloud - The Hybrid Cloud option involves using a cloud provider as either IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) or PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service).  With either option, the organization must manage a portion of their on-premise assets and associated services while the rest of the portions are managed by the Cloud service provider.
• On-premise - On-premise deployment is hosting SAP S/4HANA in your own data center, which isn’t mandated by SAP’s upgrade cycle. Under this scenario, the HANA appliances are hosted on partners/customers’ existing data centers. 

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Create Business Opportunities with Machine Learning

Machine learning technology teaches computers how to perform tasks by learning from data – instead of being explicitly programmed. Machine learning uses sophisticated algorithms to “learn” from massive volumes of Big Data. The more data the algorithms can access, the more they can learn.

Benefits of Machine Learning:

• Faster decisions - Machine learning algorithms can prioritize and automate decision making. They can also flag opportunities and smart actions that should be taken immediately – so you can achieve the best results.
• Adaptability - Artificial intelligence doesn’t just look at historical data. It can process real-time inputs – so you can adjust on the fly. Think of cars that can automatically stop before rear-ending another vehicle.
• Algorithmic business - An “algorithmic business” uses advanced machine learning algorithms to achieve a high level of automation. Making the shift can pave the way for innovative new business models, products, and services.
• Deeper insights - Machine learning can analyze big, complex, and streaming data, and find insights – including predictive insights – that are beyond human capabilities. It can then trigger actions based on those insights.
• Efficiency - With smart, machine learning-supported business processes, you can dramatically improve efficiency. Plan and forecast accurately, automate tasks, reduce costs, and even eliminate human error.
• Better outcomes - From triggering smart actions based on new opportunities and risks, to accurately predicting the results of a decision before it is made – machine learning can help you drive better business outcomes

Empower Your Digital Core with Machine Learning Powered by SAP and Approyo

• SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service - Optimize the entire maintenance program with real-time insights into current and future asset conditions.
• Remittance Advice Extractor - Extract payment information from unstructured documents.
• SAP Cash Application - Next-generation intelligent invoice matching powered by machine learning.
• Predictive Analytics for Contract Consumption - Proactively renew contracts by predicting their expiration and consumption.
• Predictive Analytics for Stock in Transit - Predict shipment dates and manage stock in transit.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

What's new in SAP S/4HANA 1809

SAP S/4HANA® is a real-time enterprise resource management suite for digital business. It is built on advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA, and offers personalized, consumer-grade user experience with SAP Fiori. Deployable in the cloud or on premise, SAP S/4HANA can drive instant value across all lines of business – no matter your industry or business size.

SAP S/4HANA is the digital core – the nerve center – of your entire business. It consolidates internal and external elements into a single, living structure that goes beyond traditional ERP software. In other words, it connects all of your processes, provides you with live information and insights, and seamlessly integrates your enterprise with the digital world at large.

The Intelligent Enterprise
Intelligent enterprises effectively use their data assets to achieve their desired outcomes faster – and with less risk. SAP is committed to helping every customer become a smart, best-run business and make the world run better.

Intelligent Technologies will help SAP Applications differentiate while at the same time natively comprehending the context of the business application. This includes higher-order intelligence with many scenarios oriented along business outcomes and relevant to lines of business, feedback mechanisms leveraging IoT and business networks as data sources for training feedback, as well as actionable insights in order to derive connecting insights to strategic decisions via a consistent User Experience (UX).

SAP HANA 1809 - The Intelligent ERP
SAP S/4HANA 1809, released in late 2018, significantly increases the possibilities for digital transformation across all lines of business. Imagine giving voice commands to your SAP ERP system and obtaining instant analytics. Or automating a large portion of your business processes, freeing employees for value-added activities. The streamlined architecture of the 1809 release is also scalable, enabling you to drive growth and profitability.

Industry innovations:

• Finance with Goods and Invoice Receipt Reconciliation leveraging machine learning, and the new SAP S/4HANA for Accruals Management, which is designed to support customers along the entire process of accruals
• Central Procurement, a big step in ERP landscape simplification and a functionality that will help you increase transparency across the procurement systems
• R&D innovation with the new Recipe Finder App and portfolio and project management analytics
• Manufacturing and Demand-Driven Replenishment, the game changer that helps you plan and manage supply chains based on customer demand, and not only via the traditional MRP procedures
• Retail and Fashion with new business scenarios including new planning strategies enhanced with segmentation functionality
• Banking, coming this release with and Loans Management / Deposits Management enhancements
• Public Sector, including major architecture simplifications
• Utilities with a new Analysis of meter reading, supported by an extended virtual data model
• Insurance, providing in that 1809 version a new Product configuration for insurance and digital products

Download our new Whitepaper: What's new in SAP S/4HANA today to learn more about the benefits and features of SAP S/HANA 1809.

SAP Demystified: Why is SAP HANA better than other traditional databases?

SAP HANA is an application that uses in-memory database technology that allows the processing of massive amounts of real-time data in a short time. The in-memory computing engine allows HANA to process data stored in RAM as opposed to reading it from a disk. This allows the application to provide instantaneous results from customer transactions and data analyses.

In-Memory First
SAP achieved a true transaction and analytical (i.e. translytical) platform by designing SAP HANA from the ground up with a new data processing architecture in mind.  This architecture greatly simplifies applications built on this platform removing many of the legacy overhead required to optimize applications on traditional disk-based database solutions.

SAP HANA is the only true in-memory columnar data store optimized for both high-speed transactional scenarios and also very fast query performance optimally supporting both OLTP and OLAP application scenarios. With SAP HANA, there is a single copy of data as there is no need to move data to external systems to offload analytic workloads or populate materialized views and in-memory caches to achieve acceptable performance.  This allows applications built on SAP HANA to process transactional and analytical workloads at high speed without any data duplication enabling businesses to have accurate insights based on the latest data.

Other solutions in the market typically provide an in-memory “option” to existing disk-based, row-oriented solutions, requiring a copy of data to be made into in-memory storage.  Row-based storages don’t yield the same level of data compression as columnar storages leading to higher costs and inefficiencies. These solutions may provide some performance improvements in certain use-cases, but they do not deliver the overall value that SAP HANA does by truly reducing the data footprint, increasing overall performance for all data and reducing management costs of the solution.

Scalability and Speed 
Based on the functionality of data being stored in a RAM chip instead of a hard disk, SAP HANA makes high speed processing a practical reality. Unlike the traditional process of data being read from the hard-disk and subsequently moved into RAM for data processing, the agility of SAP HANA allows organizations to achieve more with their data. For instance, an HR team could run real-time jobs in different batches without having to wait for the jobs to get completed before starting another. The fantastic capability of running multiple jobs at the same time and run them several times, if need be, gives SAP HANA an edge above the rest.

Simplicity
The biggest problem of traditional databases was their limitation of supporting and managing one business load at a given point in time. So, if a customer runs multiple businesses or has more than one line of operations such as marketing, customer support, logistics, manufacturing, finance, and more; the data in each of these systems will tend to get duplicated thus, increasing the complexity of the system manifolds. The process gets further complicated if the customer wants to view multiple kinds of data at one time. With SAP HANA integration, the simplicity of having one system for different business applications and its real-time access makes the operations extremely simple and user-friendly.

Predictive analytics and machine learning
Predictive analysis with SAP HANA includes native high-performance predictive algorithms for both expert and automated modes. Additionally, you can run open-source R scripts on SAP HANA through integration with R server and build machine learning applications with integration to TensorFlow. Some of the predictive algorithms run on streaming, spatial, and series data and are self-improving. The ability to perform predictive analytics on an entire body of transactional data lets you develop modern applications that forecast outcomes and help your business adapt processes in real time. Machine learning helps you build applications that can adapt and automate some of the manual business process step.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Innovation powered by the intelligent enterprise

An intelligent enterprise is a smart, best-run business. It is an organization that capitalizes on intelligent technologies to automate complex business processes, anticipates new customer needs and invents new business models.

To build an intelligent enterprise, you need to be equipped with the tools of the future.  Only SAP solutions have the depth of experience combined with the breadth of industry knowledge to offer innovative solutions that can effectively streamline your business from end to end. SAP solutions powered by Approyo are committed to delivering continuous innovations to our customers to ensure they continually have access to the latest innovations and best-of-breed technologies to deliver the visibility, focus and agility they need.

• Award-winning digital-age user experience (UI): SAP has delivered the world’s first hands-free ERP. It’s built on an award-winning UI including a context-aware, business-savvy digital assistant for the enterprise.
• AI-powered automation: Combining learning capabilities, predictive analytics, and real-time insight adds automation to key functions, notifies users when input is needed, and enables faster and smarter decisions.
• Next-generation business processes: SAP helps you rethink how business is done by reinventing and redefining processes with applied best practices built on the latest innovations. 

Get the most out of your data
To get the most out of your digital journey, you need to utilize data from multiple sources, including core data from your business processes, as well as external data sources such as connected sensors, weather information, satellite pictures, road conditions, market data, and social media.

Digitization is creating tons of data every day, much of which is unstructured, such as images and videos. This data by itself is of little use. Insights from data are essential for today ́s business, but they’re useless if you can’t make sense of them. Intelligent enterprises are driven by data and insights. It’s not just about having the right data at your fingertips but having the analytical insights from that data linked to your core business processes. This is where machine learning can help, as it unlocks knowledge from structured and unstructured
data to enable the intelligent enterprise.

Be intelligent – use machine learning
Machine learning lets you make sense of raw data and unlock new insights by learning from data, rather than programming explicit rules. Deploying machine learning capabilities across relevant business processes can help identify untapped opportunities, expose hidden risks, and automate repetitive tasks or knowledge-based work.

Unlock the value of IoT
Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been around for decades, but now it tops the agenda for many companies. That’s because the evolution of connectivity, Big Data management, analytics, and cloud technology are presenting new opportunities for IoT in business. Initially, IoT applications focused on operational activities on shop floors because downtime or system failure could result in significant losses. Aside from the benefit of uptime, the data collected from IoT technology wasn’t generally used. Now customers are using SAP powered by Approyo to leverage that data to shift from reactive maintenance practices to proactive endeavors to work smarter, get better insights, and provide new services to their customers based on IoT data.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Data Powers Digital Business

The digital economy is driving a massive increase in the volume of data created by devices, business networks, organizations, and individuals. This tidal wave of data is driving demand for capabilities like machine learning and AI, and dramatically impacting economic productivity.

But core to all of this opportunity, is data.

In the new digital economy, data is essential in powering digital business. Data is the currency that provides the foundation for business insight, action, and innovation across the extended enterprise, from partners and customers, to assets and employees, all driven by the digital core. 

Companies will need to capture and exploit data in increasingly creative and complex ways.  And the ability to digitize business events across customer touch points, partner interactions, asset states and employee activities, and to create meaningful insight, will allow businesses to be more agile and responsive than their competitors, and to open up new sources of value.

On average, companies today use only a fraction of the data they collect and store, and if a company is already struggling to store and analyze its own data, it will be drowning in data in the next few years.  Future success will depend on a company’s ability to:

• Transform Data into Insight – Data without insight is meaningless, it is essential for organizations to take the information at their fingertips, to understand it, and turn it into insight.
• Act in the Moment – Without the ability to take action quickly and effectively, there is no opportunity to create new value.  And thus companies must also focus on the ability to turn insight into action, in real time.
• Innovate without Constraints – And finally, with insight and the ability to act, the final critical need for competing in the digital economy is the ability to innovate and build new business models and create new outcomes for the organization

These three imperatives combine to demand the organization’s attention if it is to succeed in it’s digital journey.

SAP powered by Approyo can help you lead your organization’s digital journey and address the challenges of data proliferation from enterprise data, Big Data, IoT, and beyond.

And we help you to transform your all of data, the foundation of a digital enterprise, into insight to drive innovation and create business value.

As a result of optimizing existing processes and driving greater efficiencies, you can help fund new innovations.

Only SAP powered by Approyo allows you to innovate now with intelligent, real-time data to build new business applications

• Flexible and faster app development environment on ONE platform with choice of programming languages. Deployment available on cloud, in the data centers, and on laptops
• Applications can leverage hyper fast transactions and analytics to automate business processes with intelligent guidance
• Enrich applications with ONE platform that includes predictive, text, spatial, graph, and conversational UI capabilities

View the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Approyo moves to new office Location in Brookfield Wisconsin

Approyo is proud to announce that we have moved to a new office in Brookfield Wisconsin to accommodate our growth. Below is the full article on BizTimes Media from Molly Dill about our recent move.

SAP software company Approyo LLC has moved to a much larger headquarters in Brookfield to accommodate its growth.

Approyo’s headquarters was previously located in a 900-square-foot space at W144 S6311 College Court in Muskego. Earlier this month, the company moved to a 7,800-square-foot space at 13100 W. Lisbon Road, Suite 500 in Brookfield. It has an option to expand into another 10,000 square feet of adjoining space.

“The opportunity for the (new headquarters) space was great,” said Chris Carter, chief executive officer. “It’s centrally located for the staff that I was looking to hire and I can grow the company to where I want to grow it to and bring them all into one area instead of having to move multiple times.”

Approyo implements, hosts, manages and supports SAP HANA systems for corporations. Founded in 2013 by Carter, former owner of Milwaukee SAP firm CCI, Approyo was recently named to the 2018 Inc. 5000 list with three-year growth of 557 percent. Its 2017 revenue was $4 million, and at the time of the listing it had 73 employees. But Approyo has since cut all of its workers in India to focus on new hires in the U.S., a spokeswoman said.

Approyo now has 28 employees globally, 11 of whom are based in Milwaukee. Four of those Milwaukee employees were added within the past month, Carter said, and if one of four pending large contracts closes soon, the company will add up to 10 more employees this year. The company has about 27 clients worldwide, including French company Atos, for which Approyo manages 42 SAP systems.

“The great thing right now is SAP is in what’s called an upgrade cycle,” he said. “We’re showing companies that we can help them with that upgrade and then manage and support their systems.”

View the original article at: https://www.biztimes.com/2018/industries/real-estate/fast-growing-tech-company-moves-to-brookfield/

Digital Transformation for the Insurance Industry with SAP powered by Approyo

Radical change in the insurance industry is occurring at a rapid pace. Changes in technologies, in business models, in standards, and in the makeup of insurance companies themselves require constant adaptation. Insurers must be able to respond to rapidly changing conditions yet still comply with all standards. How does a digital core with a true single source of truth help?

Responding to rapid changes
A digital core is an IT architecture that offers stability and long-term reliability for core enterprise processes yet also provides the flexibility to adapt quickly to new opportunities, challenges, and regulations. This solid foundation gives you a single source of truth, which, in turn, enables flexibility for innovation to accommodate new business models, new regulations, and new business events, such as mergers or acquisitions.

Simulation and analytics
The ability to respond quickly is an essential part of managing an insurance company. To do this, simulation, prediction, and analytical capabilities are important. Data is critical for gaining insight to make decisions. This insight must be at a granular level so decision-makers have the detail they need to understand trends, opportunities, and risks and quickly carry out what-if analysis using predictive algorithms.

Keeping data under control
Every insurance company needs the computing capability for carrying out complex risk assessments with large data sets to support timely, real-time analysis. Everyone in the company must have access to data they need, whenever and wherever they need it. They must also manage the enormous amount of data generated by connected networks to develop and deliver leading-edge products and services.

Addressing innovative opportunities
Customers in every industry are demanding innovation. Companies are responding with new products and services that better meet individual needs. These new offerings impact every facet of business, not just the front office. Companies must address end-to-end (E2E) processes across departments and lines of business to deliver on new customer experiences, products, and services.

The Intelligent ERP
Bringing SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo technologies together as a digital core will result in a more flexible and intelligent enterprise. To achieve next-generation business processes, companies need an intelligent ERP solution that can be continuously enhanced and extended with innovative business services and applications built on emerging technologies, including machine learning, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Insurance companies that have big innovation appetites or prefer to be early adopters have already begun this journey.

An End-to-End Intelligent Enterprise for Insurance
Insurance companies need to constantly innovate across their company value chain to drive profitable growth and adapt to how customers want to apply and pay for their policies and services. The capabilities delivered with SAP S/4HANA and the preconfigured, native integration with LoB solutions from SAP help ensure processes run smoothly and efficiently across the engagement lifecycle, allowing companies to drive sustainable revenue growth and maintain margins.

View the full post on www.approyo.com

Digital Transformation for Telecommunications with SAP S/4HANA powered by Approyo

Thanks to massive investments in mobile and fixed broadband and in wireless network infrastructure from telecommunications operators, our planet is now a true “global village.” The proliferation of connectivity, Internet access, smart devices, and SIM cards has created a new digital life and digital economy. 

The growth of mobile subscribers, mobile data, mobile applications, and mobile commerce has exploded over the past decade. Hyperconnectivity has changed everything from the way we communicate to the way we work, shop, pay, and play. 

Paradoxically, telecommunications operators risk becoming front-line casualties of the digital revolution they have helped create. They are disrupted by aggressive, new, over the-top (OTT) players such as Apple or Google, which deliver services on the operators’ network infrastructure and siphon off core revenue . Operators are restricted by regulations that bind them to domestic rules in an increasingly global world. Their core services are completely commoditized, putting pressure on their margins. They are engaged in an endless round of network upgrades, causing capital expenditures to skyrocket and making return on assets unpredictable.

To succeed in this competitive market, telcos will need to put in place a coherent digital vision with clearly articulated offensive and defensive strategies. In particular, they will need to ensure they are maximizing their operational efficiencies while defining and delivering new revenue generating services to drive profitable growth. To execute on this, telcos will not only need to reengineer their business processes, but they will also have to evaluate if they have the right technology platform that can deliver on that vision.

This platform requires an IT architecture that provides both stability and long-term reliability for core enterprise processes, and, at the same time, allows for flexibility in areas where change is happening on a constant basis. The digital core is the foundation for the core processes that need to run consistently and flexibly. It provides uninterrupted, real-time transactions and analytics; the ability to work with Big Data; and the delivery of new services such as connected cars, smart transportation, connected health, and much more. 

SAP S/4HANA was specifically developed to represent the digital core in this “bimodal IT architecture.” It provides telecommunications companies with a proven framework to adopt industry best practices while attaining operational excellence – specifically across core financial and engagement management processes.

Process simplification SAP S/4HANA provides reengineered and simplified business processes that can yield significant benefits. Financial processes are transformed by using central finance functions that integrate all ledgers into a single source of truth. Disparate close processes can be consolidated into a universal journal for more-efficient processing, enabling telcos to close more quickly. Support for new revenue accounting and reporting (RAR) add-on for IFRS 15 compliance enables telcos to view multiple ledgers comparing traditional, local GAAP results with new IFRS 15 results.

An end-to-end solution for telecommunications companies
Telecommunications companies need to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of bundle and service definition, marketing, delivery, and billing. This includes segmenting customers, defining thousands of unique bundles, efficiently delivering services and devices, analyzing margins on services, and managing the demands of customers through building the workforce and talent pools both internally and externally to meet these demands, and then efficiently and profitably delivering services to delight their customers.

The capabilities delivered with SAP S/4HANA and the prebuilt, native integration with LoB solutions help ensure processes run smoothly and efficiently across the end-to-end service delivery lifecycle, allowing telcos to deliver personalized and profitable services and drive sustainable revenue growth.

View the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Demystifying SAP: Understand your Journey to SAP HANA

By 2025, SAP will no longer support SAP ECC 6, the core component of SAP ERP. This means you will need to upgrade your SAP systems. But what are your best upgrade options?

There are three common SAP cloud migration paths. Companies that want to start off slowly can undergo a traditional SAP cloud migration, moving their assets into the cloud without moving to SAP HANA at all. This allows you to show ROI quickly from running in the cloud, while minimizing initial disruption and lets you wait for the major SAP HANA and S/4HANA upgrade for a later date.

Another option is a migrating to Suite on HANA — with SAP ECC 6.0 Enhancement Pack 7 running on a HANA database. This gives you all the incremental benefits of HANA, such as faster performance and compatibility with newer applications and will get you close to a full S/4HANA landscape.

However, most companies will benefit from moving directly to S/4HANA. In most cases, a complete upgrade and migration will be less disruptive and less costly than several smaller upgrades and the new functionality will provide a major competitive advantage right away.

Understand what option is best for you and get started today
If you run ECC 6.0 or earlier version, you will need to upgrade by 2025. Don't wait, start planning for your best upgrade path now and schedule a complimentary consultation with our team. We will help you understand all of your options and help you choose the best path forward.

Five Technologies Impacting Healthcare

Leading healthcare organizations investing in digital capabilities require a framework designed for change –one that supports new business strategies and ensures agility while delivering value-added patient services.

We are witnessing an unmatched era of digitally driven innovation. Breakthrough technologies have matured and hit scale together, which will change how we provide healthcare. A digital network solution is arising that blurs the lines between patient, professional, and provider for more responsive, patient-centric care. Five defining technology trends have already emerged which are powering this digital healthcare network according to SAP:

• CLOUD COMPUTING - Technology adoption and business innovation now move at lightning speed. Technology infrastructure can be rented to eliminate barriers to entry, and transactions among healthcare players are moving to new cloud-based collaboration platforms that can connect millions of users.
• SMARTER DEVICES - “Smart” devices, wearables, sensors, robotics, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence are the new normal. This technology can turn Big Data in healthcare into smart data, resulting in insights for clinical decisions relevant to each patient’s specific situation.
• HYPERCONNECTIVITY - Every patient, healthcare organization, and machine is connected –changing all the established rules for healthcare channels. Connectivity drives the collaboration of patients, providers, and supporting businesses and assets in the digital healthcare network.
• SUPER COMPUTING - Networking and in-memory computing allow for the creation of an infinite number of new business opportunities for the healthcare industry. For example, genome sequencing costs decrease even faster than Moore’s law.
• SECURITY - The digital healthcare network is a prime target for digital attacks and sabotage. Because trust remains the ultimate business currency, healthcare organizations must make cybersecurity a top priority in designing and operating a digital business network.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today...

Read the full blog post at www.approyo.com

Approyo achieves significant growth and adds new team members

Approyo, a leading enterprise SAP HANA Solutions Provider headquartered in Milwaukee has seen significant growth in a state that is also seeing substantial development in the technology sector.

The Wisconsin based company has added to its team with three new employees. Alfred Wedding, Tim Reiss and William Sean Beasley join the Approyo team and will be working hand in hand with its customers and partners to manage and support SAP environments.

• Tim Reiss joins the team as Senior Director of SAP. Reiss brings more than 20 years industry of experience to the Approyo team.
• William Beasley, Director of SAP has more than a dozen years of cloud migration and experience working with SAP.
• Alfred Wedding comes to Approyo as an SAP Basis Coordinator with multiple years of experience with supporting SAP. Wedding is a Naval Veteran and resides in Wisconsin.

 “We have a top-notch team and we will continue to grow our organization. We are proud to be based in Wisconsin, where there is an exponential amount of growth in the technology sector,” says Chris Carter, CEO of Approyo.  “It’s an exciting time to be part of the SAP ecosystem and we can’t wait to see continued growth over the next several years.

Approyo was recently ranked #895 in the Inc Magazine 5000 for the third year in a row. It is very rare for companies to achieve this recognition for three years in a row. In addition, Mirror Review has listed Approyo among the top SAP solution providers in its latest magazine, “The 10 Best SAP Solution Providers of 2018.”  The technology company was also named one of “The 10 Best Performing SAP Solution Providers, 2018” by Insights Success.

Approyo is one of many technology companies in Milwaukee that is adding to the economy.

Milwaukee is making significant progress developing as a technology-based employment cluster. A report titled, Milwaukee's Tech Talent Impact, was compiled in June by several key employers in southeastern Wisconsin and identified 76,000 technology workers in 89 distinct occupations, contributing more than $27.6 billion in economic impact.

3 Major Business Benefits of SAP HANA

SAP HANA provides a single in-memory data platform that supports both transactions and analytics on diverse data, a key requirement for applications supporting a modern, real-time digital business. In today’s digital economy, businesses cannot take action on stale insights, thus a true in-memory data platform should support real-time processing for transactions and analytics for all of a company’s data. This is a key differentiator of the SAP HANA platform against other traditional database vendors. Here are the top three benefits of deploying SAP HANA according to SAP.

In-Memory First
SAP achieved a true transaction and analytical (i.e. translytical) platform by designing SAP HANA from the ground up with a new data processing architecture in mind.  This architecture greatly simplifies applications built on this platform removing many of the legacy overhead required to optimize applications on traditional disk-based database solutions.

SAP HANA is the only true in-memory columnar data store optimized for both high-speed transactional scenarios and also very fast query performance optimally supporting both OLTP and OLAP application scenarios. With SAP HANA, there is a single copy of data as there is no need to move data to external systems to offload analytic workloads or populate materialized views and in-memory caches to achieve acceptable performance.  This allows applications built on SAP HANA to process transactional and analytical workloads at high speed without any data duplication enabling businesses to have accurate insights based on the latest data.

Other solutions in the market typically provide an in-memory “option” to existing disk-based, row-oriented solutions, requiring a copy of data to be made into in-memory storage.  Row-based storages don’t yield the same level of data compression as columnar storages leading to higher costs and inefficiencies. These solutions may provide some performance improvements in certain use-cases, but they do not deliver the overall value that SAP HANA does by truly reducing the data footprint, increasing overall performance for all data and reducing management costs of the solution.

Managing Data of All Sizes
Does it always make sense to have all data in-memory?  Realistically, this is not necessary. SAP HANA provides an innovative way to manage hot and warm data storage in an optimal way to strike the right balance between price and performance.

SAP HANA Dynamic Data Tiering provides multistore table partitions which easily allow a single table to span across memory and disk.  This greatly simplifies access to hot and warm data in consuming applications and greatly reduces the administrative effort to manage large data volumes. This provides for much lower total cost of ownership by reducing the amount of hardware needed, lower administration costs, and more efficient IT operations overall.

Foundation for a Modern Data Platform and the Intelligent Enterprise
SAP HANA is a modern multi-tenant in-memory platform to build next-generation Big Data, IoT, translytical, and advanced analytics applications. SAP HANA allows advanced analytics using a single data platform.  How is this done?

SAP HANA natively provides capabilities for machine learning, spatial processing, graph, streaming analytics, time series, text analytics/search, and cognitive services all within the same platform.  Applications on SAP HANA can provide real-time actionable insights from a wide-variety of data types.

Combining these innovative technologies with SAP HANA’s advanced application development, modeling and custom algorithm support inside the database layer, more business logic can be executed close to the data.   Specifically, SAP HANA’s support technology like stored procedures, business functions, core data services, rules framework, calculation views, and the application function library provide developers with a way to easily model complex data-intensive operations as close to the data as possible.  Most competitive solutions require that you copy the data between core data storage and other technology stacks to perform these advanced analytics on the data.

View the full post on www.approyo.com

How the BOHH Labs and Approyo Partnership Can Accelerate Transitioning to SAP HANA in the Cloud

The enterprise technology landscape is rapidly changing, and more companies are embracing digital transformation and integrating cloud services to enhance business agility, efficiency and extract analytics. In fact, technology leader in business applications, SAP, has pegged a deadline of 2025 for when it will terminate support for its ECC6 on-premise solution.

For businesses looking to migrate to more advanced SAP HANA systems in the Cloud, this may seem like a long way off, but the deadline shouldn’t be the only driving force behind your migration strategy. Cloud-based SAP HANA solutions offer businesses a vast array of benefits, as they look to harness the potential of digitization and business transformation.

However, digital transformation is an evolving market and there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. For businesses to be successful in their transformation to Cloud-based SAP HANA solutions, there must be collaboration, and Approyo and BOHH Labs have teamed up to offer SAP customers seamless migration to SAP HANA Cloud environments. Approyo CEO, Chris Carter and BOHH CEO, Simon Bain illustrate below how strategic partnerships can create a best in breed solution that bring success for the end customer.

According to Chris:

"As part of the push to move to the cloud, SAP has developed SAP S/4HANA, which is built on the advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA, and is an entirely new generation of SAP Business Suite. It fundamentally redefines how enterprise software creates value across industries with instant insight. SAP S/4HANA also personalizes the user experience on any device and natively connects to Big Data, the Internet of Things, and business and social networks - all in real time.

Like all new things, especially in technology, the updates can be daunting. Approyo can help businesses move SAP applications, such as SAP S/4HANA, to the cloud with tailored implementation roadmaps to ensure every organization undergoes a seamless migration. We are one of the only SAP partners in the world that can migrate SAP applications to the cloud, provide ongoing support and provide long term managed services for hosted cloud environments."

Simon Shares:
​​
"While Approyo specializes in making SAP migrations smooth from an implementation standpoint, we combine with their capabilities to make the migration smooth by enabling better security and access to data stored with SAP HANA. We bring security to the data and the business suite, so customers can get simple access to their complex data. We provide total security on all stored data by uniquely providing database or specific file security, enabling prioritization and control of sensitive data. BOHH’s security service provides full text search capabilities, even on secured data, and supports Bot technology for data to be conveniently accessed and bring enhanced access flow to data within the system."

Chris adds:

"Often companies are hesitant to migrate completely to cloud deployments due to security, performance disruption and accessibility. This includes migrating to the new SAP S/4HANA platform. The BOHH/Approyo partnership is reducing these setbacks."

Simon also adds:

"By partnering together, Approyo and BOHH Labs can address customer demands and focus on what our enterprise, integrator and reseller customers need to secure access to their business-critical applications and data in the cloud with minimal disruption. The joint solution between Approyo and BOHH Labs is addressing the challenges enterprises face migrating to the cloud and enables SAP customers to leverage the analytics capabilities of SAP HANA, while gaining a secure method to easily access all enterprise systems to quickly find, search and unlock the value of all their data."

Read the full blog post: www.approyo.com

Approyo CEO Chris Carter featured on Game-Changing Predictive Machine Learning, Presented by SAP

Approyo CEO Chris Carter was recently featured as a guest on Game-Changing Predictive Machine Learning, Presented by SAP. During this episode, Chris talks about Big Data, Machine Learning, AI and more...

About the episode: 
Big data has officially crashed into the business world, taking competition to new levels.

Can your business benefit from big data without investing in qualified data-science resources – an entire lab and pedigreed experts – to navigate and take advantage of this new business domain, which includes AI and Machine Learning?

Good news!
Packaged application software has lowered the skills barrier to mining the data. Our panel is proof that anyone can successfully use data analytics tools. Hear what they wish they’d known when they began.

Listen on-demand: https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/108752/business-analyst-by-day-data-science-hero-by-night

Featured Guests

Christopher Carter
With almost three decades of extraordinary working experience in the SAP industry, Christopher Carter, CEO at Approyo, founded Approyo with the goal of making it easy for customers to embrace SAP HANA. Chris works with businesses around the globe and is known to assist them in their journey to the usage of Big Data in the forms of Hadoop (Cloudera and Hortonwork’s) and SAP HANA. His experience has earned him a national recognition by the American SAP Users Group, SAP, Hadoop World, Cloud Expo and more. Additionally, Mr. Carter was fortunate to create the first SAP cloud ever used by an SAP client in 2005, and the first Client SAP HANA Production cloud.

Jason Olson
Jason Olson is an Analytics Specialist at Kimberly-Clark Corporation. He has spent the last 15 years working in every area of the Business Intelligence field accumulating end-to-end technical and functional expertise. He earned his BBA from the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater in 2003 and MBA from University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh in 2011. Leveraging his business acumen and technical expertise, Jason bridges the gap between technology and the real business needs in a wide range of business functions. His real passion is having a seat at the table with business users to accomplish their goals, demonstrate the art of possible, and enabling those who know their business best to leverage advanced tools and techniques. Jason’s current focus is on Machine Learning and enabling a diverse user base to leverage.

Samantha Wong
Samantha Wong is a Product Manager for Predictive Analytics at SAP. She has been part of the SAP Analytics team for over 4 years, and in her previous role, she supported customers across the Asia Pacific Japan region to drive actionable insights out of their data. With a Bachelor of Commerce degree specialized in Marketing, and experience in Advertising, Banking, and Insurance, Samantha fits the profile of analyst turned citizen data scientist. Connect with her on LinkedIn for interesting articles and commentary on the ever evolving world of Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today...