Integrated Experience

The business landscape is driving companies to undergo SAP modernization. The 2027 deadline for users to move to SAP S/4HANA is rapidly approaching. However, while this is one major driving factor, organizations typically want to modernize their ERP systems in order to achieve some important benefits for their business. Some of the most commonly desired goals include:

• Improved reporting and visibility – Companies want to have more visibility not just into their business processes, but also into the data itself. They can achieve this through improved reporting when ERP systems work to provide easily accessed, crucial insights to ERP users.
• Operational efficiencies – By streamlining and enhancing ERP tools, companies can reduce the total cost of ownership. They can also help mission-critical systems run more smoothly.
• Increased competitiveness – Companies can become more competitive by harnessing data to provide decision-makers with key insights into operations.

It is important to keep in mind that SAP modernization is so much more than an SAP migration. By adopting a cloud-based system, companies have access to so many more insights and opportunities to transform their business to the next level. A cloud-based system is essential to stay competitive and give businesses the ability to establish an integrated experience. An integrated experience means getting rid of the disjointed experiences between ERP, HCM, supply chain, and other essential applications. By building a more streamlined process, organizations can expect to achieve the desired business outcomes that outdated applications had prevented them from realizing.

AtomSphere Platform

The key to achieving an integrated experience is pervasive connectivity—ensuring that all essential functions are linked. As it stands now, SAP systems can be siloed away from one another, unable to communicate and share essential insights that could be of tremendous benefit to your business. SAP users are familiar with Software-as-a-Service, but what about Integration-Platform-as-a-Service? This platform from tech pioneer Boomi connects everyone to everything through its AtomSphere Platform, a cloud-native offering that can eliminate the high cost and complexity of on-prem software maintenance while delivering the functionality that SAP users need. Some of the AtomSphere Platform’s benefits include:

• Flexibility
• Agility
• Design patterns
• Scalability
• High availability
• Built-in redundancy
• Automatic upgrades

Boomi brings together an extended SAP ecosystem solution set by integrating a whole host of third-party solutions to help companies achieve their desired business outcomes.

Five Pillars of SAP Modernization

Migrating SAP systems to the cloud is a complex process and cannot be achieved successfully with a simplistic approach. To enact all of the benefits of an SAP modernization, companies must take a holistic view of the modernization journey. Only by incorporating all key systems can users achieve pervasive connectivity. The Boomi approach to SAP modernization relies on five crucial pillars.

1. Cloud-First Migration

Cloud-first migration is a crucial first step in any SAP modernization journey. Taking a cloud-first migration approach means looking to cloud solutions as the first option when creating new processes or adapting old applications. Studies show that over half of SAP users are upgrading to SAP S/4HANA simply because of the 2027 deadline they must meet to update their SAP instances from legacy systems. But operating based on this reasoning alone can cause companies to miss out on some of the key benefits of a cloud-first migration, rather than just a lift-and-shift approach to moving over ERP systems. Some of these benefits include:

• Lower capital requirements to gain access to innovation
• Reduced operational and infrastructure expenses
• Upgrade with new functionality automatically
• Scale better, faster, and with more flexibility
• Dramatically shorter deployment times for better ROI

Boomi’s platform assists organizations as they migrate to the cloud, carrying over crucial systems and datasets in an orderly and controlled manner. It also prepares systems for cloud-to-cloud integration. This allows organizations to integrate systems across private, public, hybrid, and community clouds. With Boomi, you can meet requirements to deploy across multicloud environments as well as on-premises, while delivering low latency and high performance.

2. AI Analytics Focus

When users fully modernize their SAP systems, they gain access to a suite of AI and analytics that can maximize benefits to teams like finance, sales, marketing, supply chain, and more. This is done by connecting best-of-breed cloud-based analytics to the correct data sources. By providing AI applications with access to on-premise systems and data, businesses can more accurately predict outcomes and gain better operational insights. AI can diagnose inefficiencies and anticipate upcoming trends before humans are able to, which can result in reduced churn and better return on investment. Boomi utilizes an AI-first strategy to deliver shorter time to impact, going from data to offering noticeable improvements in 30 days. The platform uses AI to augment data engineering, machine learning, scenario planning, monitoring, and more. Boomi utilizes machine learning to cut down on integration development time and effort. This is done by automating the intersystem mappings of processes, operations, and attributes. The platform relies on crowdsourced knowledge from the prior developer who also used the platform. This provides your organization with terabytes of metadata. With this library of previous experience, Boomi can offer suggestions and best practices on how to complete configurations. Boomi also allows users to embed prebuilt integrations into their applications. Enabling citizen data for AI lets users configure their own integrations to extract the data they need.

3. Data Stewardship

Many of the key tenets of the five pillars of SAP modernization rely on harnessing the significant amount of data that can be found within SAP systems and their related third-party applications. Data must be stored, gathered, and cataloged correctly so organizations can leverage it to its fullest potential. This is where data stewardship comes in—ensuring that the quality and usability of all data is a paramount concern for IT teams. Though the massive volumes of data can be a massive boon to businesses, it can also result in some major headaches if not managed and governed properly from the outset. Operations, processes, and data are all spread across the many cloud components that make up an SAP landscape. This data requires visibility, and its usage and changes must be meticulously tracked in order to help companies manage TCO and enhance productivity in the cloud. One of the key facets of data stewardship is security. Boomi’s AtomSphere Platform has critical features to protect sensitive data and applications such as:

• Secure user sessions
• Encryption
• Flexible password strength policy
• Secure tenant isolation
• SAML 2.0 single-sign on
• Multi-factor authentication
• Weekly vulnerability checks
• Patch checks
• Ability to lock and terminate inactive user session

Amid an SAP modernization, businesses must also be sure that their systems are compliant. It can be difficult to keep track of the various data storage and regulations. Boomi AtomSphere is audited annually and meets several industry-leading compliance standards.

4. Improved Productivity and TCO

The whole point of an ERP system is to help companies run their business operations more efficiently and effectively. Moving away from legacy ERP systems to SAP S/4HANA can take any enterprise to the next level, as long as the ERP modernization is handled correctly. Boomi’s platform can help increase efficiency and performance by bringing together the finance, procurement, IT, and LoB teams, removing silos and allowing them to share information and help enterprises run more intelligently and efficiently while also driving down costs. SAP modernization can help drive down TCO by making planning and forecasting the future easier, giving a high-level view of business operations to help control costs, and providing companies with the flexibility they need to move to better billing models. Boomi can also lower TCO by basing its pricing on usage and use cases. It offers self-service, pay-as-you-go pricing so you do not have to pay for services you are not using. By leveraging automation and integration, Boomi’s AtomSphere Platform helps employees do what they do best while also driving down costs by eliminating essential work that can be time-consuming and error-prone.

5. Composable and Decomposable ERP

One of the buzzwords in the ERP space these days is “agility.” But what does that mean, and how does one achieve it? In order to have an agile ERP landscape, it is important to have composable and decomposable ERP. This means having systems that you can quickly break down and then build back up again at a moment’s notice. Amid a changing technological landscape, users need to be able to quickly roll out new applications in the cloud. Most enterprises have hundreds of applications, though only a small fraction of these applications are connected to one another. “The biggest challenge every business faces today is unifying their increasingly fragmented digital ecosystem so they can create the integrated experiences expected by customers, employees, and partners. Organizations that remove friction through fast, intelligent data discovery and cataloging, pervasive connectivity, process integration, and automating human workflows are the ones best positioned to thrive,” said Chris McNabb, Boomi’s CEO. Businesses that utilize the composable ERP strategy are able to quickly enact pervasive connectivity and enable low-code development of new applications at a pace that keeps them ahead of their competition. And with Boomi’s platform, users can maintain a master data hub to track usage across all application components.

Importance of an Extended Ecosystem

Connectivity in such an expansive ecosystem is key, so Boomi ensures that users have centralized integration management. The extended ecosystem features drag-and-drop integration development with no coding required. It also has any-to-any integration across cloud and on-premises systems. Boomi has proven connectivity to over 1,500 endpoints, including more than 200 applications. Even beyond the internal ecosystem, users can rely on the Boomi community’s crowdsourced knowledge. Users can also access connectors, widgets, and process maps to help maximize the benefits of the platform.

Automation

When modernizing SAP systems through Boomi’s end-to-end platform, users can automate common business processes like quote-to-cash, payroll, onboarding of customers and employees, supply chain status, and more. This automation can speed up the time it takes to handle some of these mundane tasks, significantly improving productivity. Automation cutting down on the time required to carry out essential basic business functions is an obvious benefit. Yet companies should also be sure to consider what other projects their employees can take on when time-consuming manual tasks are taken off of their plates. Workers are able to spend their time on more fulfilling and transformative business initiatives when modernized ERP systems automate a significant portion of their tasks. Automation can also save time by reducing the possibility of human error. Mistakes take significant time and effort to identify and rectify. This also comes at the expense of other potential projects that employees have to pause.

Conclusion

Businesses must take advantage of every technological capability they can get to stay competitive. ERP modernization is essential for organizations to enable improvements in their speed and time to value. Migrating to the cloud allows for companies to operate with more agility by reacting to shifting demands in the market. They can also access troves of data stored throughout the ERP landscape more quickly than ever before. Companies can maintain a competitive advantage when they harness the full potential of their SAP systems. Some organizations may think of ERP modernizations as just a box to check ahead of the 2027 deadline to move. But taking a simplistic approach to move to the cloud can lead to problems down the road. Being overly simplistic can also cause your enterprise to miss out on the significant benefits of a modernized SAP system that leverages integrated experiences. This is where Boomi’s AtomSphere Platform comes in. Boomi’s end-to-end intelligent integration platform allows businesses to take a holistic approach to SAP modernization. This way, companies can ensure that they finish their transformation journeys with a completely connected SAP ecosystem. This ecosystem allows them to leverage all of the benefits of the cloud, driven by Boomi’s five pillars of SAP modernization. These benefits include:

• Improved competitiveness through the use of AI and analytics
• Secured and compliant data
• Improved TCO and productivity
• Composable and decomposable ERP that allows for improved agility

When companies view SAP modernization as more than just an SAP migration, they can achieve their much greater time to value. Once attained, a modernized ERP system with an extended ecosystem of third-party solutions integrated seamlessly gives organizations the ability to achieve their desired business outcomes and obtain an advantage against the competition.