·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite helps drive innovation by uniting core business applications, data, and AI capabilities
For businesses today, uncertainty isn’t the exception—it’s the environment in which they operate every day. From supply chain disruptions to shifting market conditions and evolving customer trends, businesses are constantly on their toes about what will happen next.
At , we continued to lay out the vision we’re bringing to life with ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite to help companies find confidence amid this uncertainty.
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite is a seamlessly integrated system of applications, data, and AI that can connect and optimize every part of your business, enabling smarter decisions, real-time insights, and intelligent automation. It’s delivered via ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite packages tailored to the needs of functions across the business and easily extended with modular add-ons.
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ CEO Christian Klein used the analogy of a flywheel in his to describe the power of applications, data, and AI coming together. The benefits of the ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite were presented in sessions throughout the event, including key topics like:
- Harmonized ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite user experience (UX)
- Seamless end-to-end processes
- Suite qualities
- Structured and guided transformation journeys
Businesses today need resilient processes running seamlessly across different lines of business. As we’ve seen time and again, point solutions can’t solve for the challenges and opportunities of today’s business world. This is why we’ve developed a seamless, integrated suite that can allow our customers to move faster, whether responding to a problem or ensuring readiness when opportunity knocks. Imagine if your key business processes like lead-to-cash or hire-to-retire were harmonized with seamless data flows. That’s key for staying ahead of the competition.
Harmonized user experience
An exceptional user experience within ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite is paramount for ensuring seamless interactions and heightened user engagement. By providing a harmonized, intuitive interface, ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite can enable users to navigate complex processes with ease, fostering a streamlined workflow that can enhance overall efficiency. The user-centric design places emphasis on simplicity, accessibility, and responsiveness, working to ensure that each module within the suite operates cohesively.
The UX highlights include personalized dashboards, real-time analytics, and adaptive design elements that can respond to user behavior, creating a more engaging and productive environment. Enhanced visualization tools and intuitive controls further facilitate quick decision-making and effective data management, positioning ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite as a robust platform for driving business success.
Check out from ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Sapphire, which goes into our strategy for delivering a consistent, integrated, suite-first experience across ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite.
At the same time, we are working to improve the experience, efficiency, and intelligence of individual ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ products and solutions.
An AI-assisted smart solution for situations in My Home is planned to be available in preview for beta testing with the August release of ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The sign up is already available .
Seamless, end-to-end processes
An essential part of business transformation lies in optimizing and automating end-to-end processes. As presented at , this is a major benefit of ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite, which covers the following key processes:
- Procure-to-pay
- Design-to-operate
- Hire-to-retire
- Lead-to-cash
- Record-to-report
Lead-to-cash, for example, is a process that directly impacts sales performance and involves several stakeholders across functions. In this process, critical information is added via lead generation and along the process into ordering and billing. Every break in this process directly impacts customer satisfaction and profitability.
With the help of embedded AI capabilities and the support of ·èÅÄ´«Ã½â€™s AI copilot Joule, companies can accelerate productivity and increase response times.
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite Experience and Seamless Business Processes
Suite qualities
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite offers qualities such as streamlined onboarding and provisioning, effective configuration, extensibility, and advanced analytics.
Provisioning helps ensure rapid deployment of applications, while configuration allows customization to meet specific business needs. Extensibility supports integration with other systems and applications, helping to enhance flexibility. Advanced analytics can provide real-time insights and predictive capabilities, empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions. These attributes can collectively drive efficiency, scalability, and security.
Extensibility and adaptability
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ systems are highly flexible and configurable, which is why they’re widely used across industries and regions. Robust extensibility features allow customers, partners, and ·èÅÄ´«Ã½’s own industry units to adapt and enhance the standard software to fit their unique requirements.
With ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite, extensions are created for end-to-end scenarios with minimal time to value (TTV), total cost of implementation (TCI), and total cost of ownership (TCO). This enables:
- Meta-data-driven, in-app extensions; full-stack, side-by-side extensions; and everything in between
- A range from self-service key-user extensions to partner-implemented and -provided extensions
Building on the foundation of a unified extensibility across ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Technology Platform (·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP)-based applications, a wizard for ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Fiori apps templates and partner-customer reference apps for ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BTP-based extensibility has been made available.
In addition, partners will have further options to help customers shorten the implementation time. Partners are enabled to package their own extensibility and deploy to multi-customer systems. ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ will also provide an option for partners to promote their own developments on ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Store for both in-stack and side-by-side extensibility. This can give customers even greater choice to address their business needs.
One further step toward extensions across the end-to-end scenarios of ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite is to offer partner and customers true, process-based extensibility, where, for example, field extensibility can be defined consistently along the lead-to-cash process. In this process, customer-specific information can be added at the field-level in lead generation and propagated through the process into ordering and billing.Â
Common services
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite comes with harmonized document management, which helps enable the sharing of documents and a seamless data flow between the various applications of end-to-end processes that involve various lines of business. The shared attachment service leverages a single UI, which helps further enhance the consistency of the business applications while increasing efficiency. A single service for document management can further reduce the TCO.
Another good example for a central shared service is an AI-based inbound document processing platform for all application scenarios in ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite. The application-specific consumption scenarios in lead-to-cash, for example, use the shared service of the ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Document AI solution for automated document inbound processing during the sales order fulfilment process.
Unlike point solutions, ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite helps with harmonizing fundamental compliance and security needs, which are required for audit readiness. The next-generation audit log service offers end users a consistent experience in viewing compliance and security audit log events across ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite offerings via a centralized audit log viewer. This highly structured approach of the audit log service can provide several advantages and can better meet compliance and security requirements.
Cross-product analytics
Data products and intelligent apps are core to the value proposition of (·èÅÄ´«Ã½ BDC). They leverage ·èÅÄ´«Ã½â€™s understanding of application data at the business process, industry vertical, and geographic level. They act as the one true source of ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ data for line-of-business applications, partners, and customers when working on application integration, AI, and analytics use cases.
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite will bring the experience to a new level, helping to ensure the needs of business users are addressed with intelligent apps for decision-making and actions. Intelligent apps—which are fed by various data products from relevant business domains—can provide comprehensive insight to the business user working in the context of end-to-end business process.
Seamless localization
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite helps ensure seamless localization along the end-to-end process scenarios of the packages, working to meet the unique needs and regulations of each country. These investments will continue across the entire suite, helping to ensure customer choice, regardless of where customers start their journey when opting for one of the packages.
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Activate supports your ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite transformation journey
·èÅÄ´«Ã½ offers proven methodologies to help facilitate business transformation to ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite, tailored for new customers via GROW with ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ and for existing ERP customers via RISE with ·èÅÄ´«Ã½.
These methodologies utilize composable ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Activate road maps for various deployment types, including implementation, adoption, conversion, transition, and upgrades. Thousands of ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ customers employ these road maps during the various stages of their adoption of ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite. The road maps are designed to assist customers in achieving their distinct transformation objectives. They help provide a clear starting point and can guide the project team towards the North Star destination of ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite.
Customers starting their journey to ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite can utilize a single road map or a combination of road maps covering the scope of their deployment to help guide the project team from receiving the initial environment, through the execution of fit-to-standard workshops, to successful go-live and adoption of innovations. This is enabled by the new capabilities for combining the ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Activate road maps into one cohesive project plan during the initial project setup in ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Cloud ALM.
Customers can leverage an integrated toolchain and well-defined quality checkpoints to help achieve the objectives of their unique journey. The integrated toolchain enables seamless execution with tools managing customers’ transformation, including ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Signavio solutions, ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Cloud ALM, and WalkMe solutions.
Get started now
Ready to dive deeper into the benefits of ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite? In this , you’ll get additional insights on how to leverage the benefits of ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite and what transitions could look like.
Want to learn more about ·èÅÄ´«Ã½ Business Suite? We’re offering a series of free webcasts, with content tracks tailored for different lines of business. !
Arpan Shah is SVP and head of Business Suite Product Management at ·èÅÄ´«Ã½.
