SAP Enterprise Architecture Framework

Finance organizations in every industry are looking at re-thinking long-standing processes and business models to compete in a dynamic, connected world in which a traditional 30-day close no longer passes muster. A static finance function is too slow and too rigid to stay on top of constant innovations in cloud, mobile, social, big data, and real-time analytics. To harness innovation and bring it to the enterprise, companies are going digital. Read this special report to learn what companies are doing to make this transformative leap in the world of finance.

Companies in every industry face pressure to significantly improve how they interact with their customers, suppliers, and vendors in the design, production, and distribution of goods and services. This pressure is driven in large part by customer demands for personalized products, improved customer satisfaction, and immediate gratification. To meet these challenges, companies are adopting a digitized and extended supply chain model. Read this special report to learn how digitization in the supply chain connects people, products, and assets to upend traditional business models.

Every customer’s buying journey is unique and – thanks to smart devices and the Internet of Things – increasingly becoming more complex. To achieve true customer engagement and foster a dynamic relationship between consumer and vendor, companies must go beyond product ratings and provide the information needed for consumers to feel confident in their purchases. Companies are now looking to expand their website into an online community that houses relevant decision-making information, such as Q&As, blogs, and discussion boards, to keep customers happy and coming back for more. Read this special report to learn how SAP Jam, which began as an enterprise social network, has grown into a public, community-buying experience known as SAP Jam Communities.

Few technologies have garnered as much attention in recent years as the cloud. The concept of cloud computing has permeated the conversation in almost all areas of IT, and technology providers of all stripes claim that the cloud will empower transformative business capabilities. But like most technologies, these transformative capabilities can’t come about without an in-depth understanding of how to strategically adopt it. This special report collects a variety of articles on cloud computing and how to harness the technology, with topics that range from overviews on how to become a digital enterprise to concrete advice on how to choose the right provider. Explore the insights in this report to better navigate the hype surrounding cloud computing and to understand exactly what this technology can do for you.

We live in a mobile world, and businesses that don’t keep up with burgeoning mobility trends will quickly fall behind. But building a mobile strategy can be challenging. Whether you’re just starting out on your mobile journey or looking to integrate SAP systems with mobile capabilities, there are numerous scenarios to consider. This special report can help companies to navigate these scenarios by sharing insightful strategies for building a mobile initiative, building mobile-first business applications, and more.

No one can deny that choosing innovative IT solutions is imperative for organizations that want to move their business forward. Often, however, selecting and implementing these solutions is only half the battle. The time, effort, and financial investment that go into monitoring and maintaining them can put a burden on businesses. Fortunately, organizations don’t have to do it alone. This special report explores how businesses can invest in helpful software and the expertise of SAP partners to make their IT operations run more smoothly. Read on to learn how you can get the support you need to make the most of your SAP solutions.

From the top line to the bottom line, business is changing and the way organizations harness their business applications is driving this change. Organizations that wish to keep up with the competition need to leverage everything from advanced customer experience management to the Internet of Things (IoT) in order to stay innovative in a digital age. Fortunately, there are tools that organizations can use to make these advanced applications easier to use and easier to integrate with your existing SAP environment. Explore this special report to discover what SAP Solution Extensions are available to you and how these extensions can complement your business's capabilities and competitive edge.

Just one year ago, SAP S/4HANA changed enterprise technology. Now, the scope of its influence is only growing. With more lines of business covered in the capabilities and major updates to its performance, SAP S/4HANA is quickly becoming a powerful enabler of modernized digital business. This special report explores how SAP S/4HANA can change the way an organization runs its business from the supply chain to the Internet of Things (IoT) and beyond.

Hear from SAP leaders about the latest updates in functionality and how you can harness SAP S/4HANA in your organization. You will get insights into:

• The evolution of SAP S/4HANA
• The importance of the 1511 release to customers
• The significance of a flexible, digital core
• The latest innovations for supply chain, manufacturing, and PLM
• New processes, embedded analytics, and advanced global search for sourcing and procurement
• Extending SAP S/4HANA with SAP HANA Cloud Platform
• Creating business value from IoT data
• Navigating the SAP S/4HANA journey with SAP partners

Since its release, SAP HANA has taken the business technology world by storm. The innovation, agility, and speed that SAP HANA provides can dramatically increase a business’s success. However, the full extent of these benefits can only be realized when organizations truly know how to take advantage of the technology. This special report can help you become one of those organizations. Whether you’re just beginning to consider SAP HANA, a long-time user of the platform, or somewhere in-between, this report contains a broad range of valuable information that can help you enjoy all the benefits SAP HANA has to offer.

HR as we know it is fading away. Arriving in its wake is HR for the digital enterprise — a digitized approach that is simpler, more streamlined, and more empowering to users. New technologies are both the causes and the enablers of this digital transformation, and HR departments must have a thorough understanding of these technologies to adapt successfully to the digital age. This special report can help you begin to develop that understanding. Explore this collection of articles for insights on evolving your HR capabilities to meet the needs of modern businesses.

In the age of digital business, there is one asset that outstrips most others in its importance to the enterprise: data. Data is growing at unprecedented rates, and so is the range of technologies that can help you leverage this data. So how do you navigate your vast stores of data and use them to grow your business? This special report examines different strategies for using analytics technology in SAP environments to drive your business forward.

The digital age has brought a restructuring to the modern enterprise that changes how we govern data, handle access control, and mitigate risk. Strategies for managing governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) must be more comprehensive, more automated, and more effective. This special report can help you develop these strategies. In it, you’ll find articles on keeping up with changing sales tax regulations, applying proper data retention policies, avoiding common access control myths, and more. Explore this collection of articles for insight into GRC best practices for the digital age.

As the business landscape changes, there is one factor that remains the same – the importance of the finance department in ensuring business success. However, new tools and ways of doing business are upending traditional wisdom about how to run finance operations. These new approaches can lead to challenges, but — for the organization that is prepared — they can also lead to opportunities. Explore the collection of articles in this special report to discover what digital transformation means for finance in SAP landscapes and how to use it to your advantage. 

Digitization is reinventing how businesses operate — and redefining the concept of the supply chain. New technologies have changed how consumers order goods, how companies create them, and how they are connected. In this evolving economy of rapidly changing business needs, the supply chain is facing brand-new challenges that must be overcome, but bringing agility and simplicity to a constantly expanding supply chain is no easy task. This special report can help you face this challenge, with insightful articles on new tools and approaches you can use to modernize your supply chain. 

As the conversation around the cloud matures, old questions are being settled — few doubt the benefits of an enterprise cloud strategy, for instance. New questions are taking their place, however, such as how to find the hosting providers that will best support your strategy, to what extent that strategy should be hybrid, and where SAP S/4HANA fits in. In this special report, cloud experts address a range of factors that modern businesses have about the cloud. View this collection of articles to discover essential advice to optimizing your organization’s cloud strategy. 

The supply chain is changing in response to modern business demands, and an organization’s ERP system needs to support these changes. The latest release of SAP S/4HANA promises to do just that, with a range of advanced functionality for production planning, enterprise warehouse management, available-to-promise capabilities, and more. This exclusive special report contains an in-depth look at how SAP S/4HANA is meeting the needs of the modern supply chain, providing your organization with increased agility, faster order fulfillment, and the functionality you need to edge out the competition. 

Business planning teams are at the heart of what an organization does. Without them, businesses would not know how to grow, how to optimize their profits, or how to prepare for the future. But with changes in technology and a constantly shifting business landscape, business planning professionals need to do some preparation of their own. These special report articles provide a close look at how your business can enhance its business planning processes for the modern age. 

HR has always been about finding — and keeping — the right talent. While this goal hasn’t changed, the business landscape has changed dramatically, driven by digital technologies and modern user expectations. So what does this mean for HR organizations? This special report examines the ways in which innovations and expectations are changing HR, including how SAP SuccessFactors applications can enable diverse, engaged workforces and how a sustainable approach to HR provides organizations with the agility to adapt to rapidly evolving demands.

In a digital economy that runs on speed, agility, interconnectedness, and massive amounts of data, organizations are increasingly looking to the SAP HANA platform to provide the capabilities they need to navigate this demanding business environment. As with any change to your IT landscape, an SAP HANA implementation requires careful consideration and planning — how do you ensure that you’re on a path to success? This special report provides insight into how to lay the groundwork for a successful deployment of SAP HANA.

Companies of all sizes are confronting the problem of bimodal IT: keeping their current IT operations running while adopting innovative new technologies. This is the precise issue SAP’s Mike Flannagan, Senior VP of Analytics and SAP Leonardo, addresses in the Q&A that kicks off this special report. In addition to Flannagan’s insights, experts from SAP partners Lenovo and Protiviti provide their knowledge on analytics across integrated systems in IT operations as well as the importance of user adoption in maximizing a BI investment.

Cybersecurity is making headlines the world over, and is of fundamental concern to customers running SAP systems. SAP’s Kevin McCollom, Global VP of LoB Finance and the GRC Global Center of Excellence, details how the “three lines of defense” strategy provides an integrated GRC approach that helps customers stay safe inside and outside the organization. Also included in this special report are articles from SAP partners on GDPR, SoD risk analysis, the risks of relying solely on antivirus solutions, security features in SAP Solution Manager 7.2, and compliant identity management.

SAP customers have long been able to tailor SAP standard applications to their needs using various extension options, such as predefined extension points and modifications. SAP S/4HANA and the cloud, however, bring with them demands such as rapid onboarding and software update cycles, requiring a new framework for extending applications. This article introduces the extensibility framework delivered with SAP S/4HANA 1511 and 1610. It explains the different extensibility approaches and walks through an example of using in-app extensibility — an approach that enables users to add features to applications using intuitive, web-based tools, without diving into the full details of the underlying code.