Finding the Best Model for Digital Transformation

The post-pandemic supply chain downturn forced many customers and organizations to change their business routines. This shift is imperative for digital communication and providing an Omnichannel experience for customers. Many organizations have plans to speed up digital transformation, but digital transformations require more than just the push of a button. To achieve digital transformation, an organization needs to invest to be ahead of the curve. There are many cloud solutions available today, but only some will work for a given organization. This article will provide valuable insights into digital transformation solutions and methodologies. In the past couple of years, the world has changed significantly. These changes impact how people think, live, and perform daily life activities. The pandemic phase revealed valuable lessons for businesses. The downturns of the brick-and-mortar model proves it is imperative to provide an Omnichannel experience to the customer. In my experience, customers would like to perform the digital transformation of the landscape, but they are immediately reluctant as a gap exists between the downstream and upstream teams. There is always a conflict of opinion between the teams in an organization; upstream teams are more focused on opportunities and developing an organization's business model. Downstream teams are responsible for making sure that daily technical, operational, and customer-facing activities are given the most importance. But it is critical for any organization that Business, People, and Technology work together to help create a robust and future-proof technical strategy.

Unified Model

Enterprise Architects (EA) must be a gateway between business and technology. EAs must understand the current state of play, which will help in analyzing the gaps and designing the state of the landscape. The project team must implement BDAT methodologies, which is always the best way to create an organization’s centralized echo system. Any technical landscape needs seamless connectivity between the systems performing business transactions to avoid bottlenecks resulting in significant revenue loss. It does not matter if the customer is running cutting-edge technology with a poor integration landscape, then the ROI is fragile and bleak. Introducing a modern, unified, business-centric, and open platform that enables us to focus on solving business needs. It does this by running an enterprise-grade platform, helping to develop and rapidly deploy the application, and creating a personalized self-explanatory process and user experiences.

BTP Solutions

Robust and future-proof integration is critical in the technical landscape. It will help connect both SAP and non-SAP systems, perform day-to-day business transactions, reduce the bottleneck, and maintain and improve overall revenue. The foundation of a robust, digitally transformed SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) forms the core of the intelligent enterprise. This acts as a one-stop-shop solution. SAP BTP houses multiple categories of services that can work together toward designed architecture. The SAP BTP platform integration suites produce multiple solutions for Line of Business (LOB) and Industry. The integration suite has the following abilities that make it a market leader:

• Integration SaaS with integration pack to deliver a faster outcome
• Integration platform with simple consumption-based pricing model
• Integration platform supporting multiple hyperscalers for the convince of the customer
• Integration services to build a robust and straightforward use architecture

We will further understand the state-of-the-art technology SAP BTP and how it helped us resolve the complexity of one of the busiest sports venues in North America.

49ers Sports Venue Digitalization Project

The 49ers Executive Huddle was a strategic project sponsored by SAP. The NFL’s San Francisco 49ers organization wanted to build an Executive Huddle to showcase a solution for complete operations on game day. The idea was new, but accomplishing the realization took time and effort. The challenges uncovered during the project's discovery phase included the following:

• Scattered data from multiple non-SAP resources
• Manual data analysis and forecasting
• Difficulty managing, predicting, or forecasting fan expectations on the game day
• No real-time attention to operation during game day
• No real-time analytics on game day for operations
• No in-house data management
• Third-party data sources
• No holistic view of the data post-game day

Requirements

We took the following approach to perform technical and analytical analysis to recover critical aspects of the data. We realized that in this futuristic project, the leading pain point is data acquisition, so we need to leverage a technological platform that would have seamless plumbing between solutions and help design one centralized echo system.

• Understand the data pattern of multiple sources, as the customer did not own the data.
• Understand the parties involved in operations on game day to design an appropriate implementation approach.
• Understand the expectation on game day from data visualization in the executive huddle boardroom.
• Understand future aspects of this initiative's current, to-be, and future state. This information will help in designing future-proof architecture.
• Understand the technological options available for accomplishing the vision, as not every technology will suit each business case.

Solutions

Once we concluded the discovery and design phases, we zeroed in on the following SAP BTP technologies to build an Executive Huddle to process real-time data and visualize and support venue activities:

• API-first approach to retrieve the data from data sources
• Integration suite of SAP BTP to be used for data acquisition in real-time
• Cloud integration will load the data into the HANA database in the cloud
• Models will be developed using CDS views as per the business requirement
• SAP Analytics Cloud to be used to project the models on the digital platform during game day

Business Value Obtained Post Implementation

• Business strategy and analytics team with real-time data and visualizations spanning multiple data sources.
• Ability to track, sense, and respond in real-time during the gameday or event at the venue.
• Organization's award-winning stadium operations team to make more informed decisions, proactively address potential issues and seize opportunities during games and events, not days later.

The outcome of this project was to help the customer start the digital transformation journey by laying the foundation for a digital transformation journey containing modern architecture, easy-to-maintain echo system, and a future-proof integration landscape. Digital transformation is not a push of a button; it takes time and analysis to discover, plan, and execute by leveraging modern technologies to help develop tailor-made solutions for specific purposes.