Digital acceleration factor

The transformation associated with digital transformation will greatly change the way companies function and work, according to SAP user representatives: Business processes would be turned upside down, customers and partners would be even more directly involved in operations, and data itself would become the basis of business models.

Even the structures of industries are facing a radical change, because in the future companies will increasingly work together in networks.

The biggest challenge for SAP users is probably the heterogeneous and increasingly complex system landscapes that have grown over the years and now have to react agilely and flexibly.

However, core applications are usually not as adaptable as mobile and customer-facing applications, which slows down the implementation of new processes and new business models.

In addition, a great deal of work in the SAP environment is time-consuming and resource-intensive, which acts as an additional brake.

Automation can achieve several goals in this context.

1. First: faster handling of processes and thus a generally faster pace or higher efficiency.
2. Second: the reduction of the permanently increasing complexity due to digitalization.
3. Third: the reduction of personnel expenditure for routine work and more freedom for the development and implementation of innovations.

Tighter cycle, higher utilization

There are several reasons why automated processes run faster: Firstly, overarching automation avoids idle time, which means that the subsequent process is triggered automatically and without delay once the previous one has been completed.

This can save hours within one working day or night. Accordingly, more data records can be processed. On the other hand, automation can ensure better load distribution so that the relevant processes are handled with the highest possible throughput. This speeds things up even more.

In addition, of course, most manual tasks are eliminated, and since they firstly cost a lot of time and secondly the relevant employees are not always immediately available when a task is due, this aspect also saves a lot of time. However, digital transformation is often also about developing faster.

However, the creation of the corresponding environments is associated with a lot of manual work, especially in the SAP environment, such as the adaptation of the logical system name (the SAP BDLS conversion) in the target system and the user authorizations, variants, links and interfaces.

The automatic creation of system copies makes it possible to save these parameters from the original system and import them again after the copying process. In addition, the user only has to specify once how he wants to create a system copy. The template can then be used again and again.

Each step is automatically documented and an employee is notified as soon as a problem occurs. In this way, the processing effort is reduced from ten to two person days.

Test environments and data at the push of a button.

Some companies work with such complex SAP landscapes that it takes four weeks to bring a test system up to date, at a cost of more than 100,000 euros.

This limits the number of updates per year and means that the tests are not necessarily meaningful. To both reduce costs and become faster, the provisioning of test environments can be automated across the board. Then an employee can use a self-service portal to request a test environment, which is created using automated system copies.

Depending on the requirements, the data is masked or only partially transferred to the test system (slicing), the clone is subjected to regression and smoke tests and, in addition, the data can later be reset to any state.

Fully automated and orchestrated, the process no longer takes several weeks, but only a few hours. In addition, all legal rules and regulations are complied with and the process is automatically documented.

Shortening of release cycles

In order to adapt the core systems more quickly to new requirements, the entire deployment process and release management can be automated. The automation solution must also be able to cope with heterogeneous environments and be equally well tailored to the requirements of development and operations to ensure the highest possible efficiency.

Once automation is established, companies can start steadily increasing the number of releases. For example, the Austrian National Bank (OeNB), the central bank of the Republic of Austria, now delivers applications 30 to 40 percent faster than before thanks to application release automation.

The automation maps the entire release process, including all environments from development to testing and maintenance to production, and is used by all IT departments at the OeNB.

Reusable workflows replace the manual work required to install, update, patch, or decommission an application.

In addition, all processes are automatically documented and this information is stored centrally.

Every company has vast amounts of data, the challenge is to aggregate, provide and analyze it to develop new business models and evaluate current business performance.

New business models based on data

But before that can happen, the data often has to be prepared first. Here, too, automation can save an enormous amount of time and reduce the error rate, so that all decision-makers are always correctly informed.

As you can see, automation, and especially intelligent and cross-system automation, makes a significant contribution to implementing the digital transformation and making it successful.

As more and more systems and data are networked as part of digitization, the corresponding automation platform should be as open as possible and enable SAP systems to be networked with non-SAP systems in order to overcome silo boundaries. After all, this is the only way to ensure smooth processes and transparency throughout the company.