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Companies increasingly rely on cloud applications

The advantages are obvious: flexibility, better scalability, reduced IT administration effort and device- and location-independent access to IT resources - to name just a few. Accordingly, companies are increasingly migrating their core systems such as ERP to the cloud, i.e. S/4 Hana. However, especially when it comes to content management in the SAP universe, cloud use alone does not automatically mean the desired efficiency gains.

Overview in context

Attaching documents to an SAP object - this is a standard scenario. The challenge: maintaining an overview, because the documents are only visible in the respective context. For example, if you want to view all documents from different transactions of a certain customer, you have to switch back and forth between objects and transactions. Opening the documents is time-consuming and inefficient, and an overall view is hardly possible.

Document view

The goal must therefore be to obtain an easy-to-set-up context- or transaction-related document view that allows all documents related to a customer order, for example, to be viewed at a glance - from the initial inquiry to the invoice. These views must support the user and use case and can be individual in each organization.

This is where external cloud-based ECM and content services solutions come into play, bringing together content from a wide range of enterprise applications centrally. They enable transaction-based views, uniform storage of all documents and ongoing synchronization with SAP, as well as the assignment of metadata for efficient searching and contextualized display.

Search and find

For example, the products of a material group, all associated documents for an order number, or the technical drawings of a product group can be called up in one search process. From an admin point of view, it is particularly important to ensure that the functionality and synchronization of the content solutions are based on SAP standards. This means that no programming enhancements have to be made or transport packages imported. The typical configuration of a repository within S/4 or, depending on the operating mode, also the SAP Business Technology Platform is sufficient.

The challenge of cloud connectivity

Interfaces such as Archive Link or SAP HTTP Content Server and SAP DMS for connecting external content solutions to SAP no longer function in this form with S/4 Cloud. External solutions can therefore be connected to the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) using CMIS integration. In the future, many cloud applications, such as SuccessFactors or Ariba, will run via this platform. Initial solutions such as Alfresco from Hyland already offer this option. Cloud-first companies that already use SAP from the cloud or are planning a migration should therefore check which integration options existing solutions enable when developing their content management strategy. This is the only way to streamline workflows, handle and automate business processes efficiently, and get the most out of documents and the cloud.