Accelerating Success with SAP BTP: Learnings from Implementation

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses are constantly seeking ways to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) has emerged as a powerful tool for organizations looking to integrate their processes, harness data, and drive digital transformation. SAP BTP provides a comprehensive suite of services and solutions that enable businesses to develop, manage, and deploy applications in the cloud, offering unparalleled flexibility and scalability.  

However, embarking on an SAP BTP project is not easy. These projects often involve complex integrations, significant data migrations, and the adoption of new technologies and methodologies. As such, they require meticulous planning, effective collaboration, and continuous learning to ensure success.  

Over the last few months, I have supported multiple customers who have undertaken SAP BTP projects, and each project has a unique set of experiences and lessons learned. This article delves into the lessons learned from these projects, providing insights and whether you are just starting your SAP BTP journey or looking to optimize an ongoing project, these lessons will help you navigate the complexities and achieve your desired outcomes.  

Keeping Up with New Releases and Features  

SAP continuously enhances BTP with updates, new services, and capabilities, making it difficult for organizations to stay on top of the latest innovations and incorporate them effectively into their solutions. Each new release often introduces additional features that may require reconfigurations, testing, and potential system changes. This can lead to project delays as teams must allocate resources to evaluate, integrate, and validate the new functionalities.  

For example, we created an SAP UI5 application which includes some new features and caused delays as the controls were not efficient and made the application noticeably slower due to increased rendering times. Consider new releases and features carefully as part of the project scope to avoid last-minute surprises. 

Defining and Managing SAP BTP Accounts for Optimal Governance  

The account setup is an important prerequisite for the SAP BTP implementation in several ways. 

A well-structured account setup allows organizations to scale their landscape efficiently, enabling multi-environment setups (e.g., Dev, QA, Prod) with controlled access.  

With a structured approach, businesses can allocate resources efficiently, monitor usage costs per subaccount, and avoid unnecessary expenditures. Customers can either use SAP Cloud ALM or a well-planned account hierarchy that provides clear governance and easier administration of services, users, and resources across multiple business units or projects. This also provides a centralized view of all subaccounts and deployed applications, enabling proactive monitoring, logging, and troubleshooting.  

For example, a global manufacturing company has deployed multiple applications on SAP BTP, however faced significant challenges managing entitlements and subscriptions across various subaccounts. They found it difficult to allocate resources efficiently, leading to underutilization of some services and overuse of others, resulting in unexpected costs and resource constraints. We had to correct the entire SAP BTP governance model so that they could fully utilize the platform.  

Creating a proper governance model at the start ensures future projects do not require changes in the SAP BTP governance model and helps understand the consumption cost. 

Implementation of Cloud Connector  

SAP Cloud Connector is a secure, efficient, and cost-effective way to bridge on-premises systems with SAP BTP, enabling real-time data access, hybrid cloud integration, and improved security while maintaining compliance and scalability. There are multiple points to consider in the implementation which can increase the project timelines if not considered. 

• Proactively plan for high availability and failover scenarios.  

• Regularly update and monitor SCC for security patches and performance improvements. 

• Establish clear network and firewall policies to avoid connectivity disruptions. 

• Implement structured logging and monitoring for quicker issue resolution.  

For example, during the HA testing of SAP platform it was found that the SAP BTP applications were not working as there was no HA setup of the Cloud Connector server. This could have led to huge monetary losses if have happened in the actual live scenario. 

Be sure you consider SAP Cloud Connector in the initial setup of the SAP BTP to connect with the on-premises systems  

Understand the Full Scope of SAP BTP Services  

One of the key lessons learned from SAP BTP implementations is the importance of understanding the entire ecosystem of services available for the development use case. SAP BTP is not just about integrating core systems like SAP S/4HANA; it encompasses a wide range of tools and services that can elevate business processes and drive greater value. Identifying the services late in the development not only increases the project timelines but also mean missing out on significant opportunities for automation, enhanced analytics, improved decision-making, and faster business outcomes. 

Taking the time to explore all SAP BTP services for the use case to unlock significant value and avoid project delays. 

Agile Methodology and Iterative Development  

SAP BTP is the unified, business centric, open data and development platform for the entire SAP ecosystem. With unrivaled development efficiency, SAP BTP will empower SAP developers, customers and partners alike to integrate, create value from data and extend in SAP landscapes. Using Agile Methodology and Iterative Development on SAP BTP, leveraging Design Thinking and wireframes, ensures user-centric solutions, flexibility, and faster time-to-market.  

This approach promotes continuous improvement, stakeholder engagement, and risk reduction, leading to more effective and adaptable outcomes. Some of the points to consider are as follows:  

• Use short sprints (2-3 weeks) to develop incremental features, ensuring the application meets user needs in a timely and adaptive manner. 

• Use Ideation and Prototyping to brainstorm solutions and develop low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes for early user feedback and to ensure consistent alignment with business objectives and user requirements.  

Focus on Security and Compliance Early  

SAP BTP provides a wide range of security features, including identity management, user authentication, role-based access control (RBAC), and data encryption. Configuring these features correctly can be complex, especially in large, heterogeneous environments. We must ensure that security and compliance are considered as part of the scope of the application development. There are multiple requirements such as Single Sign-On, data privacy regulations like GDPR, and secure connection between the systems. Consider that cloud Connector does not have built-in high availability (HA) features, meaning if the primary SCC instance fails, connectivity is lost. Organizations must manually configure redundancy using multiple SCC instances. Customers can use SAP Cloud ALM or can create a custom application to ensure proper logging and get notified in advance of any issues in the application.  

For example, a financial institution encountered issues when configuring X.509 certificates, causing authentication failures for API calls from SAP BTP to their on-premises SAP S/4HANA system. 

In conclusion, these real-world examples demonstrate how careful planning, agile development, and continuous improvement lead to successful SAP BTP implementations. By following these lessons learned, businesses can maximize the value of their SAP BTP investments, ensuring smoother transitions, greater user adoption, and long-term success.