Key Takeaways from SAP FKOM

Another SAP FKOM is in the books. This year, Approyo was able to attend multiple SAP FKOM events throughout the globe.

This year the focus of SAP FKOM was new announcements from SAP including SAP Leonardo, the Cloud, IoT, AI and more. Below are some key takeaways from the Approyo team.

SAP Leonardo

SAP Leonardo was announced at SAP SAPPHIRENOW last year and continues to be a major focus for this and year and into the future.

SAP Leonardo integrates new technologies on the SAP Cloud Platform, and offers design thinking services and expertise to help fast-track your digital transformation. Use the system to rapidly adopt new business models and capabilities – and add future technologies as they emerge.

In the broader context of digital innovation, it quickly becomes clear that topics like the Internet of Things, machine learning, blockchain, analytics, artificial intelligence, and Big Data often need to be viewed in combination: This is the key to creating a framework for harnessing the latest digital breakthroughs. As well as technologies, services, and applications, the SAP Leonardo portfolio includes design thinking methodologies, data intelligence tools, benchmarking, and more.

Emerging Technology, IoT and AI

One of the big announcements was  the new gloabl partner network around IoT adoption. From SAP: This global network of partners will provide implementation services for SAP Leonardo IoT accelerator packages, which are designed to help customers quickly build IoT solutions specific to their business needs at a predictable price.


SAP Leonardo IoT accelerators provide an open, flexible path to digital innovation for customers in multiple industries. SAP and its partners will support customer deployments of 10 SAP Leonardo IoT accelerators including packages for the SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service solution, SAP Asset Intelligence Network, SAP Connected Goods software, SAP Vehicle Insights application, SAP Global Track and Trace solution, and SAP Leonardo IoT Foundation and SAP Edge Services. The accelerators follow a fixed-scope engagement with explore, design and deliver phases completed in less than 10 weeks. Read the full announcement.


SAP HCM On-Premise Option for SAP S/4HANA

SAP also continues to support our customers using SAP ERP HCM, the on-premise HCM solution. While an increasing number of them are migrating to SAP SuccessFactors solutions to accelerate their digital HR journeys, SAP also recognizes that every customer journey is unique and must be undertaken at each customer’s own pace. For some SAP customers this includes a desire to deploy their HCM solution in an on-premise environment for the foreseeable future. To support these customers’ needs, SAP plans to offer a new on-premise HCM option based on SAP ERP HCM with a comparable functional scope (except for the SAP E-Recruiting application and SAP Learning Solution).”  It is intended to be deployed alongside, and integrated with, SAP S/4HANA. The solution is planned for availability in 2023, with maintenance planned at least through 2030. Read the full announcement.

Read the full blog post on approyo.com 

Approyo named one of the "10 Cloud Providers to Watch in 2018" by CRN

Approyo, a leading enterprise provider of cloud-centric SAP solutions, announced today that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, named Approyo one of “10 Cloud Providers to Watch in 2018” in an online editorial piece on January 4, 2018.

The editorial, written by CRN Senior Associate Editor Gina Narcisi, highlights cloud technology vendors that “have made a name for themselves by carving out a niche in the market in 2017” and which “solution providers should keep their eyes on.” The 10 companies were singled out for their innovative cloud offerings and for the “aggressive goals” they set for 2018.

Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, and product procurement, in order to develop the right solution for customers. Approyo’s extensive partnerships in the industry allow us to offer top-tier SAP procurement and logistics to meet all our customers’ SAP technology needs. Approyo built an entire platform using the best solutions in the market, helping companies move to SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA quickly and benefit immediately.

Read the full post on approyo.com

See your business clearly with SAP HANA

You swim today in exploding amounts of data from internal and external sources. Keep afloat by taking advantage of the integrated data quality, data integration, and data virtualization capabilities of SAP HANA, a next-generation platform for in-memory computing. Help simplify your IT landscape and enable successful information management for all your analytical and operational implementations.

DELIVERING TRUSTED, COMPLETE, AND RELEVANT INFORMATION
Job one in the 21st century is digital transformation. But how exactly do you become a digital enterprise? At SAP, we designed SAP HANA to help you harness the latest digital technologies in the service of these overarching goals:

• Faster time to insight and action with real-time analytics
• Improved operational efficiency and productivity
• Agility to respond to rapidly changing market conditions
• Simplification of the IT landscape with integrated capabilities

Managing your valuable information successfully is the key to thriving today. With the data access, integration, and quality capabilities of SAP HANA, you can deliver immediate and targeted insight, so all stakeholders can act in the moment and make quick decisions based on complete, timely, and accurate data. You can also streamline processes to make your operations more efficient and effective – from your inner core outward to the edge of your global business network, including cloud platforms, mobile devices, and the Internet of Things. And you can seize fleeting moments of opportunity, reimagine long-standing business models, and create radical new sources of value that propel you to a leadership position in your industry.

Data Federation: Query data remotely – without moving it
Give information workers instant access to all of your organization’s data – with SAP HANA smart data access technology. Federate queries on remote data sources – including Hadoop, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE), and other databases. And retrieve relevant answers without the cost and effort of migrating data.

Data Integration and Replication: Deliver data from anywhere, when and where it's needed
Maintain business continuity with data that is always available. With SAP HANA data integration capabilities, you can move data across multiple sources and targets to satisfy a host of business needs. Ensure high availability and disaster recovery, make informed decisions based on the latest information, and more.

Our smart data integration technology also provides a single user interface for real-time data replication in batches or in real time. It offers pre-built adapters to common data sources and an SDK adapter that lets you get data from any source – for a 360-degree view of your business. 

Data Quality: Improve data quality and reliability
Deliver accurate, trustworthy data to decision makers – with SAP HANA smart data quality. Manage quality issues across all domains and sources, and cleanse data with SAP HANA. Now you can standardize, validate, and match entities – names, titles, phone numbers, e-mails, and more – to ensure accuracy. You can also use geocoding to enrich address data with location intelligence.

Remote Data Sync: Make your data available remotely
With SAP HANA remote data synchronization, you can bi-directionally synchronize data between SAP HANA and thousands of SAP SQL Anywhere databases – whether embedded in devices or located at the edge of your network. You can make enterprise data available to remote workplaces or locations beyond the reach of high-bandwidth connections. And you can collect and analyze remote data to monitor devices at distant locations – enabling your entire business to be more responsive.

Supply Chain and Manufacturing innovations in SAP S/4HANA 1709

The 1610 release of SAP S/4HANA brought advanced supply chain and manufacturing functionality such as production planning and detailed scheduling, advanced available to promise, and extended warehouse management directly into core ERP. This eliminated functional boundaries and allowed businesses to orchestrate end-to-end supply chain and manufacturing processes to better respond to customers’ demand for personalized products.

SAP S/4HANA 1709 continues the supply chain conversion path of the prior release by integrating the SAP Transportation Management application into the core, delivering the industry’s first truly converged supply chain and manufacturing ERP solution from planning and forecasting all the way to downstream production, execution, and transportation. In addition, logistics professionals can now take advantage of a new transportation cockpit as well as load consolidation, planning and optimization, automated carrier selection, and more. This reduces IT landscape complexity while simultaneously providing best-of-breed transportation tools to make your operations more efficient and effective. Plus SAP S/4HANA 1709 extends embedded analytics capabilities to cover transportation management.

SAP S/4HANA 1709 also allows you to leverage demand-driven material requirements planning in your supply chain and manufacturing environment. Now you can provide real-time prioritization of supply orders, dampen variability with strategic buffering, and shorten lead times.  This allows you to reduce cost with lower overall stock while ensuring high customer service levels. This new material requirements planning concept provides full demand transparency, decision support, instant insight, and immediate resolution based on lead time and consumption analytics.

Here are other notable supply chain and manufacturing innovations in SAP S/4HANA 1709:

• In warehouse management: integration of quality management processes and management for unplanned returns.
• In supplier relationship management: a new centralized purchase hub for consolidated purchase requisitions
• In manufacturing engineering: conversion of an engineering bill of materials (BOM) into a manufacturing BOM, 3D visual support for BOM items, and animated work instructions 
• In manufacturing for complex assembly: enhanced comprehensive planning environment, change impact analysis, and system-based shop-floor monitoring with automatic issue detection
• In extended production operations: enhanced monitor production orders and operations, root cause analysis and decision support for shop-floor operation issues, management of work queues and adjustments to existing production orders, and tracking and tracing of individual parts

Ask Approyo - What is the benefit of using an in-memory platform?

In-memory computing is the storage of information in the main random access memory (RAM) of dedicated servers rather than in complicated relational databases operating on comparatively slow disk drives. In-memory computing helps business customers, including retailers, banks and utilities, to quickly detect patterns, analyze massive data volumes on the fly, and perform their operations quickly. The drop in memory prices in the present market is a major factor contributing to the increasing popularity of in-memory computing technology. This has made in-memory computing economical among a wide variety of applications.

Some of the advantages of in-memory computing include:

• The ability to cache countless amounts of data constantly. This ensures extremely fast response times for searches.
• The ability to store session data, allowing for the customization of live sessions and ensuring optimum website performance.
• The ability to process events for improved complex event processing

SAP S/4HANA and In-Memory Computing
SAP  S/4HANA  delivers high-volume online transaction processing (OLTP) and high volume real-time online analytical processing (OLAP) based on a unified data model without the redundant data layers typically required by traditional RDBMS-based systems.  This reduces TCO while providing new opportunities to increase business value from existing investments.

Examples of redundant data layers are custom-built layers based on database tuning efforts such as secondary indexes, or application built-in performance accelerators such as aggregate tables or multiple general ledger versions for different managerial reporting needs. The massive simplifications of the data model and the data processing layers enable business and technological innovations on a broad scale, across all lines of business (LoBs) and industry solutions. The new application architecture simplifies system landscapes and accelerates cloud deployments on an economical scale.

SAP HANA and In-Memory Computing
SAP HANA relies on in-memory computing to quickly analyze massive amounts of data. In-memory computing is a technology that allows the processing of tremendous quantities of data in main memory to provide immediate results from analysis and transaction. The data is available for processing or analysis immediately after it is created. SAP HANA's performance is 10,000 times faster when compared to standard disks, which allows companies to analyze data in a matter of seconds instead of long hours.

Connected Products with SAP Leonardo

Business and IT leaders across industries are constantly searching for new and innovative ways to service and delight customers like no other competitor. With emerging smart assets that can be always-on, industries see a tremendous possibility to transform operational scenarios and re-imagine their business models.

The massive numbers of connected things and the explosion of data generated by connected devices (“Things”) will change the way we do business forever. The journey a company takes to get from “Things to Outcomes” is becoming the catalyst for digitization. IoT is not necessarily new to most companies. However, most are collecting and storing the data and may also have the ability to visualize it.

With SAP Leonardo, SAP provides a highly innovative IoT portfolio which extends the digital core with adaptive applications, big data applications and connectivity to enable:

• New business processes
• New business models
• New work environments

Connected Products - Enable end-to-end visibility to product-centric operations and ability to optimize compliance visibility and service availability
As the demand for information and insight increases, we are seeing a
significant increase in the design, manufacturing, and delivery of smart,
connected products across all industries. R&D can utilize data from sensors,
connected products, and other Big Data sources, to support the development
of more reliable and desirable products that meet target requirements.
This leads to increased demand and opportunities for you in the market,
and increased access to information for both you and your customers.

Goods and Equipment: Connect, monitor, and control a large number of customer facing products
Connect smart devices and products with core business processes and back-end systems. SAP Leonardo enables you to easily collect and analyze data from IoT devices from smart products e.g., coolers, coffee machines. At the same time, you can bring back-end business context and processes in real time by converging it with digital twins of physical product within IoT smart applications to improve efficiency, automatic replenishment – and create new product-as-a-service business models.

Product Insights: Design, manufacture, and distribute smart products to leveraging sensor data by manufacturers and consumers
Streamline and orchestrate your design networks with intuitive design and collaboration tools to enhance product and project delivery. Manage internal and external development teams, capture their ideas, and reuse your product and project data throughout the enterprise. Increase efficiency in engineering and manufacturing with a single platform for design tool integration to provide a 360-degree product view (with total transparency across engineering disciplines) through a harmonized and intuitive user experience. And master product cost potential and transparency – at a time when it counts.

Supply Networks : Manage, control, and respond to changing conditions with a digital operations center for response
Reduce planning cycle times and inventory levels and increase service quality by extending the supply chain to the business network. Connect more easily with suppliers, customers, and outsourced manufacturers for enhanced collaboration across demand, supply, and inventory. Optimize service and cost through collaborative planning of inventory, supply, and demand, while establishing a collaborative network with B2B connectivity for proficient supply chain collaboration.

SAP S/4HANA reaches 1,000 Customers

SAP recently announced an important SAP S/4HANA milestone with More Than 1,000 Companies Now Live on SAP S/4HANA. This announcement came at SAP Tech Ed. This news further supports our mission to help companies realize the full benefits of SAP applications and help them move to the cloud. Customers are starting to see the many new benefits that SAP S/4HANA has to offer. Approyo is proud to support companies of all shapes and sizes move to SAP S/4HANA. We continue to have move and more customers move to SAP S/4HANA hosted and managed in the Approyo Cloud.

Announcement from SAP:

SAP S/4HANA, designed specifically for SAP HANA, the market-leading in-memory database, is the digital core that provides broad functionality and a high degree of flexibility for businesses of all sizes, in all industries, and can be deployed on premise, in the cloud or with a hybrid approach.

The latest release of SAP S/4HANA (1709), available earlier this month, aims to make it even easier for companies to run live with intelligent ERP. It includes machine learning capabilities and predictive analytics–enabled core business processes, landscape consolidation, and industry and line-of-business innovation.

“The momentum of SAP S/4HANA, the fastest-selling product in SAP’s history, is ongoing, and there are now 1,000 live implementations illustrating our continued market leadership in ERP,” said Uwe Grigoleit, SAP S/4HANA Go-to-Market general manager and senior vice president at SAP. “SAP S/4HANA has helped customers worldwide realize benefits including improved employee productivity, real-time access to information using in-memory technology and support for the realization of new business models driving our digital world.”

Learn more about SAP S/4HANA in our new Whitepaper; 9 reasons to move to SAP S/4HANA right now.

• Improve order fulfillment
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Reduce manufacturing error rates
• Reduce procurement costs
• Respond to market fluctuations faster than ever
• Streamline your supply chain
• Improve your manufacturing cycle time
• Streamline your supply chain
• Reduce unplanned downtime

Download the Whitepaper today....