Companies around the globe are increasingly turning to cloud-based SAP systems. Though the 2027 deadline to shift to SAP S/4HANA from legacy systems is looming, the potential benefits of such a move remain a key driving factor. One of the primary benefits that businesses can harness in an SAP modernization is a focus on AI analytics. Companies can apply artificial intelligence to their data to diagnose inefficiencies and suggest corrective actions, provide operational insights and enhance ROI. Artificial intelligence can enhance every facet of a business and should be a primary focus when moving to the cloud. 

Five Pillars 

More and more major companies are turning to Boomi for its Integration-Platform-as-a-Service offering. Boomi’s solution links all parts of the organization through its AtomSphere platform, a cloud-native offering that breaks down silos and ensures all essential functions are unified. A primary benefit is that this platform can reduce the cost of on-prem software maintenance while providing improved functionality.  Boomi’s proven approach to digital transformation relies on five crucial pillars. AI analytics serves as perhaps the most important one. There is a more in-depth discussion of those pillars here, but these are the other four in brief: 

1. Cloud-First Migration

Companies should take care that their migration to SAP S/4HANA follows a cloud-first approach. This means looking to cloud solutions as the first option when creating new processes or adapting old applications. This strategy ensures that SAP modernization takes place in an orderly and controlled manner, setting up organizations for long-term success. AI can also play a role in migrations by identifying the high-value datasets that should be moved while sifting out data that will not be useful.

2. Data Stewardship

Organizations must gather, store, and catalog their data to leverage it to its fullest potential. IT teams are responsible for maintaining the quality and usability of data.  This is also the facet of a digital transformation where compliance and security come into play. Amid an SAP modernization, businesses must also be sure that their systems are compliant with all regulations. This also addresses any security concerns. Properly stored data is more difficult for hackers and other bad actors to exploit. 

3. Improved Productivity and TCO

Upgrading an ERP system helps companies run their business operations more efficiently and effectively. By providing greater visibility into costs, a modernized SAP system can reduce overall total cost of ownership. Boomi’s platform can also help increase efficiency and performance. It does this by bringing together the finance, procurement, IT, and LoB teams, removing silos and allowing them to share information.  

4. Composable and Decomposable ERP

ERP users need to be able to quickly roll out new applications in the cloud. Companies should ensure that when initially setting up new ERP systems, that those systems can be quickly adapted. This requires ERP landscapes that can be broken down and built back up in a short amount of time. This allows businesses to remain agile without skipping a beat. 

AI as the Central Pillar 

When companies rely on Boomi’s Five Pillars approach for SAP modernization, they unlock the full potential of the cloud and open up an integrated experience. An integrated experience means that all essential functions are connected and can work together. This dissolves silos from all corners of an ERP ecosystem—including third-party solutions—and provides organizations with key insights they could not otherwise access.  AI is crucial to the other four pillars. It will continue to provide significant value long after the move to the cloud is completed. AI can also help expedite the digital transformation journey by streamlining data processes. 

Companies Must Work Smarter 

Artificial intelligence is an essential component of any modern company’s technological ecosystem. Organizations have more options than ever before to harness AI to generate crucial insights into their operations.  In the ongoing mission to work smarter, companies are constantly accumulating vast lakes of data. But not all information is created equal. While some data is flat-out useless, other datasets may be too messy or scattered for anyone to extract any meaningful insights from them.  Companies must find a way to process and analyze their data quickly enough that any insights they extract can still be useful in gaining a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace. 

Data Preparation 

At this point, business leaders may be asking themselves, “How can one pillar impact so many areas of a company?” The answer is data. Data impacts every aspect of a business by providing insights into all business processes.   Aible can be used as a case study to demonstrate how Boomi connects AI analytics capabilities to all corners of your technological ecosystem. Aible provides three major key use cases: 

1. Is my data even worth analyzing? 

Many organizations store large amounts of data in vast data lakes. While having data is important, it is just as important to know whether that data can be used to extrapolate actionable insights that provide real business value. Once Boomi links AI capabilities with these data lakes, Aible can be used to determine whether the data a company has is worth collecting, what data needs to be improved, and what can be deleted.  

2. Augmented analytics capabilities 

Once you ensure that your company’s data is of high enough quality, Aible will ask millions of questions of your data and think of every possible hypothesis you could have tested. After asking these questions, Aible will quickly test the hypotheses in parallel to generate insights by identifying patterns in your data. The data can be accessed in an automatically generated dashboard or in a set of key insights that users can engage with.  

3. Optimizing insights

In addition to analytics, Aible provides an augmented data science and machine learning capability. Aible can automatically sift through data to give you a look at the potential costs, benefits, and risks through AI-driven insights. It can understand the benefit of a correct prediction, the cost of an incorrect prediction, what kind of capacity business constraints you might have, and providing an actual value to the insights. This data will be pulled from all corners of your organization to provide insights into all business processes.  By using AI to evaluate data and optimize insights, the AI analytics pillar of SAP modernization supports the data stewardship pillar, allowing businesses to focus only on information they know will be helpful to their larger goals. 

Analytics Backbone 

AI does not work in a vacuum—it is only as good as the data and systems that it has access to. Yet, most organizations have their ERP systems and their analytical systems separated. Boomi’s AtomSphere platform allows AI solutions providers like Aible to connect its capabilities with an entire enterprise landscape, giving Aible access to the data it needs to extract insights.   If you think of your enterprise like the human body, not having a robust AI is like having arms and legs but missing the brain and the backbone.  “Without Boomi, Aible is just a brain and a backbone, but that doesn’t have the sensors and actuators. So now you’ve got to figure out how you're going to get the data in and how you're going to get the insights back into the system. Boomi brings in the sensors and actuators. We bring in the central nervous system,” said Arijit Sengupta, founder and CEO of Aible. 

Performance Areas 

Though the uses of AI analytics are virtually limitless, the value added typically comes back to one key KPI—improving competitiveness. These crucial insights help in the following business verticals: 

• Financial planning and forecasting 
• Sales and marketing planning 
• Trade promotions
• Supply chain and logistics planning
• And many more

By tying together these systems with a “brain and a backbone” like Aible, Boomi allows a business to function like a healthy human body, with all systems working in concert to meet common goals. With all systems linked, it is much easier to add in and remove third-party applications. This ease helps organizations achieve a truly composable and decomposable ERP. 

User-Friendliness 

AI provides users with options to reduce costs and inefficiencies. But one hidden benefit is how AI analytics reduces stress workers feel when tasked with generating insights by hand.   AI is able to lighten the load of various teams—analysts, data scientists, IT workers, and more. The race to create the best predictive model can add unnecessary strain onto teams that are already busy. This can cause more problems than solutions.  “Everybody’s being asked to do more with less. Now how do you do more with less in this economic condition? In the hiring market, it’s you either try to work harder and you burn out people and then your best people actually start leaving anyway, so you actually make the problem worse for yourself,” said Sengupta.  Boomi also makes AI even more user-friendly by modernizing reporting. It pulls insights into one dashboard to provide more real-time and high-value views into your business. 

Time to Value 

The quality of the AI-driven insights are important to businesses. Equally important is how quickly those insights are delivered. When ERP systems are divorced from analytical systems, companies often have to offload their data into a separate warehouse. Then, to make the data useful, it needs to be cleaned and transformed before it can be analyzed. This process can take weeks, if not months. By this point, the data may not even be relevant or helpful anymore.  Aible and Boomi work together to provide “today’s insights today.” This means offering insights within a month—well within the timeframe in which the information gleaned is still able to make an impact for organizations in a rapidly changing business environment.  “Every transaction goes into Aible Sense. We are able to go in and automatically analyze it and show you key insights from your data today. This is all done without you having to go in and figure out how to take the system data from SAP and put it into a data warehouse,” said Sengupta.  “If you tell a person taking the order that he has to look up inventory and figure out what the inventory will be two months from now when this order will have to be shipped, that's an impossible task you're giving the human. But the AI system can figure that out extremely easily and inform the human at the right moment in the system that they're already working in, ‘Hey, you might want to consider this fact as you take this action.’"  These insights can outstrip what a human worker would be able to come up with, providing significant value. When data is scattered across all parts of the ERP landscape, these insights are difficult to come by. But when Boomi connects all aspects of the enterprise, it allows Aible to make use of all different systems. That way, it can provide you with a complete picture of your opportunities and shortcomings. 

Sustainability 

Growing revenue and optimizing business processes are, of course, paramount for any company. However, now organizations are increasingly turning their focus to ensuring that they are working sustainably as well as profitably.  The issue of sustainability is becoming a serious sticking point for many in the tech industry. AI and analytics are among the highest users of new server capacity. This usage requires a tremendous amount of energy. The cost and environmental impact of running servers can stack up significantly. Especially when you consider that, in most cases, servers are running constantly.  “A data science team will bring up a server for nine months, load up the data in it, and keep it running while they’re working on the project. And that server is running that whole time because of course people don’t want to bring up the server and then when they go out for coffee, shut down the server, and then bring up the server again once they're done with coffee,” said Sengupta.  However, this does not have to be the case. Boomi users can rely on a serverless approach through partners like Aible. In this approach, servers are not running unless they are actively doing model training.   “In the Aible case, it would maybe a few hours of server consumption across the nine months. You’re only paying for it when it’s absolutely needed. All other times, the servers are not being used. Whereas for any of our competitors who are not serverless for model training, and very few are, you are basically keeping servers running whether or not you're doing any training or not,” said Sengupta.  In addition to being sustainable, this option is also more affordable. A serverless approach can result in three to four times lower total cost of ownership. That translates to three to four times lower energy use, through decreased server usage. 

In Conclusion 

Every company is trying to gain a leg up on the competition. Working smarter requires a new way of approaching business practices, and AI can provide that new perspective. However, simply adopting any AI solution does not automatically guarantee results. Companies must ensure their AI analytics partner can deliver insights that lead to real business transformation.  Boomi works with AI partners like Aible to extend AI reach to all parts of your ERP landscape. Factoring in AI solutions at the outset of a digital transformation project is crucial. This will ensure that the other four major pillars—cloud-first migration, data stewardship, TCO and improved productivity, and composable and decomposable ERP—are all achieved.