At SAP TechEd in 2022, SAP featured 10 SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) use cases in more detail. Since then, many customers and partners have had their first experiences with existing use cases and missions. Brazilian food company Pif Paf Alimentos and Portuguese banking customer Novo Banco are two of them.
Some use cases have proven to provide guidance and help customers with their transformation journey to the cloud. Other existing use cases and missions could be further enhanced to become even more meaningful. SAP listened to feedback and, where applicable, added more helpful business content to existing use cases and related SAP Discovery Center missions. Building on best practices, this business content represents single business scenarios or events as plug-and-play code snippets within the whole use case with software for an existing business problem. In other cases, proven examples were added to the existing catalog of use cases. Some already feature the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) or SAP Build Apps, and how they were integrated into a customer’s software landscape.
Customers and partners alike can use this detailed experience and shared knowledge for their own purposes. Companies and organizations can get inspired, learn from other solutions, or improve their existing architectures to become future-ready.
To set expectations, Juergen Mueller, chief technology officer and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, explains: “Businesses that use SAP Business Technology Platform do not have to start with a blank canvas. Our expert-built use cases and pre-built business and industry content help customers understand what is possible to keep their business innovative and future-ready. One thing to remember is that pre-built business content may not get you 100% of what you need but is likely to get you 80% or more to where you need to be. You can then add the remaining specific features and functionalities required for your business.”
So, these actionable use cases and related missions can show customers what can be done with the platform to help meet certain requirements and solve specific situations in their enterprise. As Mueller puts it, “They were prepared for business experts, software developers, and architects to show the art of the possible.”
Here are two concrete examples of customers working with repeatable use cases:
Pif Paf Alimentos Builds Mobile App for Maintenance Technicians
In less than three weeks, Pif Paf Alimentos launched a mobile application for its maintenance technicians. The new mobile app significantly reduces the use of paper, improves the efficiency and accuracy of administrative tasks, and does not require an Internet connection. Pif Paf Alimentos, having worked with SAP products like SAP Integration Suite and SAP ERP before, took advantage of SAP Build Apps to help resolve its technicians’ problems by building and deploying a working mobile app solution.
Why was the deployment process so fast? SAP Build Apps allows users to build apps in a low-code manner by providing drag-and-drop user interfaces (UI) for common app components. This successful implementation is now reflected in the SAP Discovery Center mission “DC-4024: Use SAP Build Apps to Build Side-by-Side UI Extensions for SAP S/4HANA.”
From a Sustainability App for Banking to a Repeatable Use Case at Novo Banco S.A.
Novo Banco S.A. wanted to encourage and enable its approximately 1.5 million customers to be more climate conscious while strengthening their loyalty to the bank. It focused on a target group of customers between the ages of 18 and 30 because young people are well aware of the global climate situation but not necessarily of their own carbon footprint.
Together with SAP and partner Connect Earth, the bank continued to build upon its SmartCO2nverter idea, a concept that had won SAP’s “Save One Billion Lives” challenge in 2021. Since money movements and payments can give a good indication of an individual’s carbon footprint, it aimed at improving the customers’ carbon literacy by analyzing and using the users’ bank account transactions and spending behaviors in a meaningful and transparent way. While this project brought about a solution design at the proof-of-concept stage, SAP did not stop here and aimed at offering this solution approach on a broader scale.
Anirban Majumdar, vice president and head of SAP T&I Platform Adoption & Advisory, describes the journey: “Nothing gives us more joy than building SAP BTP use cases that solve business challenges for our customers. One new use case we’re particularly excited about is a banking sustainability calculator app we’ve built for Novo Banco, an innovative financial institution based out of Lisbon, Portugal, that is deeply passionate about environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). The mobile app itself is built using the reusable architecture principles of SAP Cloud Application Programming Model and React Native on SAP BTP. After the project, we extended the application architecture with a GPT scenario offered via the Azure Open AI service. We are excited about the possibility of combining business context with the capabilities of large language models on SAP BTP without actually disclosing any critical data to third-party APIs. We will open-source our code on GitHub in time for SAP Sapphire in 2023, when you can check it out and let us know if you find the use case relevant for your business problem.”
Scaling via SAP Ecosystem
The concept of building upon best practices and experiences made by others is not new to SAP and its ecosystem. Repeatable use cases and solutions are built by SAP and its ecosystem alike.
To give an example, “SAP AppHaus Network, with its 20 partners globally, has developed more than 20 solutions that can be found in SAP Store and offers more than five missions in SAP Discovery Center,” confirms Andreas Hauser, SVP and head of SAP AppHaus Network.
Seeing this level of enablement happening across the entire SAP ecosystem equals standing on the shoulders of giants and getting an impressive idea of what is possible.
Imke Vierjahn is communications lead of SAP AppHaus, T&I Integrated Communications.