Cracking the Code to SAP BTP Success: How the Discovery Center Drives Adoption

⇨ SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) provides a comprehensive solution for organizations to enhance innovation and streamline processes through integrated tools in data management, analytics, AI, application development, and automation.

⇨ Despite its potential, a significant portion of organizations (42%) do not utilize SAP BTP, with many mainly focusing on integration aspects and missing out on advanced features like SAP Datasphere and SAP Build Code.

⇨ The SAP Discovery Center serves as a vital resource for businesses to understand and adopt SAP BTP's extensive capabilities, enabling tailored solutions that enhance integration, application development, data analytics, automation, and AI-driven processes.

As companies embrace digital-first models, they face challenges like the need for rapid innovation and delivering seamless experiences for both customers and employees. SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) addresses these demands by offering a unified solution that combines data management, analytics, AI, application development, automation and process integration. SAP BTP empowers businesses to innovate by providing tools for personalized experiences, faster app development, and streamlined enterprise planning.

However, SAPinsider’s recent Data, Integration, and SAP BTP benchmark research report found that 42%  of organizations do not use SAP BTP in any capacity. Even those who do mostly use it for integrations (63%), miss out on many of its other features, for example, only 16% use SAP Datasphere and 20% use SAP Build Code.

To enable SAP customers to benefit and leverage SAP BTP’s capabilities, SAP established the SAP Discovery Center, a platform designed to enable businesses to explore SAP BTP’s capabilities, access use cases and review reference architectures. By providing these resources, the Discovery Center helps organizations accelerate their adoption of SAP BTP and make well-informed decisions tailored to their unique needs. While SAP BTP offers various capabilities that can enable organizations to integrate, extend and build their solutions, SAP Discovery Center provides guidance and resources to meet organization’s business needs through its missions and services, which enable organizations to explore and implement the right solutions on the SAP BTP across the following domains:

Integration: SAP BTP allows organizations to integrate data across business and create a single source of truth that enables accurate and efficient financial planning and reporting so that organizations can proactively carry out financial management. Case in point: Thames Water, a major utility provider, sought to automate core processes to enhance efficiency and improve service delivery. Facing challenges with on-premises tools that required specialized expertise, the company adopted SAP Build Process Automation, leveraging its no-code capabilities to simplify automation and integrate with existing SAP systems. Supported by Wipro and SAP experts, Thames Water deployed cloud-based automation to streamline tasks like mass customer communication, reduce errors, and free employees for value-added work. This initiative aligns with their “Simplify” program, ensuring clean IT operations, better governance, and readiness for future upgrades to SAP S/4HANA. By integrating tools like SAP Integration Suite and SAP Signavio Process Insights, Thames Water continues to explore further automation opportunities while evaluating generative AI for data preparation. This approach enhances efficiency, customer communication, and employee experience while enabling sustainable business growth.

Application Development: SAP BTP offers a range of development tools, for example, SAP Build Apps, a professional application development solution which empowers any users to build enterprise-grade apps with a drag-and drop capabilities, even if they do not have any coding skills. SAP Build Apps is a no-code tool that non-technical users can use to build high-quality applications for the enterprise. Case in point: TRUMPF Hüttinger, a leading global supplier of process power equipment, faced challenges with complex assembly instructions and inefficient information access during production. To address these issues, the company introduced a worker guidance app developed using SAP Build Apps on SAP BTP which centralized all necessary steps and information for workers on a single screen, significantly reducing the time needed to access and enter work order data. The app also incorporated “poka yoke” logic to minimize errors. The development, facilitated by SAP consultants, took only 10 days—a fraction of the time required for traditional coding—and integrated seamlessly with SAP ERP. This new app has drastically increased productivity and accuracy on the production floor and is set to expand across various locations, with further potential applications in logistics and order processing.

Data and Analytics: With SAP Datasphere and its open data ecosystem, organizations can build a business data fabric externally, build custom data models and functions in a separate layer, reducing the need to keep data within the core. Similarly, with SAP Analytics Cloud, organizations can offload analytics, reporting, and forecasting to an external layer, which reduces the need for complex customizations to the core SAP systems. SAP SAC allows users to run complex analysis, custom planning logic, and visualizations on the transactional data on a separate layer, which keeps core ERP system free of any integrations or custom codes. Case in point: Hershey aimed to modernize its ERP systems, streamline data replication, and standardize KPIs across its expanding business. By choosing SAP solutions, including SAP S/4HANA, SAP BTP, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP Fiori, and SAP Analytics Cloud, the company achieved seamless system integration, advanced data warehousing, and intuitive data management. Post-implementation, Hershey gained a unified platform for trusted data access, deeper business insights, strong data governance, and a clear roadmap for continuous innovation with quarterly updates.

Automation: With embedded AI, SAP BTP enables automation of key processes such as in invoice processing, expense management and reconciliation. This allows organizations to streamline processes, eliminate manual tasks and reduce errors for the finance team. Case in point: Chipone Technology, a high-tech company in Beijing, faced challenges managing a surge in semiconductor chip demand due to manual processing of varied and unstructured purchase orders, which caused delays and errors. By adopting SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Build Process Automation, the company automated sales order creation, leveraging OCR models and customized text recognition systems. This transformation led to a 90% reduction in order processing time (down to 5 minutes), 100% accuracy in purchase orders, and improved customer satisfaction. The automation freed staff from repetitive tasks, enabling them to focus on strategic activities like customer service and data analysis, supporting the company’s global growth ambitions.

Artificial Intelligence: SAP BTP offers AI services designed to bring flexible AI capabilities to various business processes. These services enable organizations to perform tasks like matching and categorizing data, automating the handling of large volumes of business documents, and efficiently managing incoming service requests. For example, SAP AI core service manages and run AI projects efficiently and handles the entire lifecycle of AI processes and offers access to generative AI features through the generative AI hub, making it easy to use and integrate advanced AI capabilities. Case in point: Team Liquid’s partnership with SAP showcases the transformative power of AI and data analytics in esports. By leveraging SAP’s AI-powered tools like the draft bot and scouting system, Team Liquid gains critical insights from vast datasets, enabling faster match preparation, optimized player performance, and objective talent identification. Competitive esports like League of Legends and Dota 2 demand deep data analysis to gain an edge, especially during the critical draft phase. Traditionally, this involved manual, time-consuming processes by coaches, limiting efficiency. Now, Team Liquid uses SAP’s AI-powered solutions to analyze over 6,000 professional matches and 1.6 million amateur games, factoring in frequent game updates. With SAP AI Core and SAP HANA Cloud, a generative AI model suggests optimal draft picks and bans, visualizes predictions, and calculates winning probabilities in real time. This streamlined approach allows Team Liquid to make smarter, faster decisions and improve overall performance.