Refreshment cure for SAP ERP or S/4HANA

It is well known that the SAP standard cannot serve all business processes without gaps. It is also known that the integration of new, standardized function extensions can outlast many an IT administrator. What is needed, therefore, are up-to-date solutions that are 100 percent compatible with SAP and can be integrated smoothly into existing IT landscapes. I'm not talking about the famous "egg-sucking" solution, but rather smart and efficient helpers that can perfectly map a very specific process.

New meets old

You can see what it comes down to: Apps! Long since commonplace for smartphone users, these handy little helpers are slowly gaining acceptance in the world of SAP ERP and S/4HANA. Okay, in our part of the universe they are called add-ons and are usually more complex. But the captivating basic idea remains the same: a small program that is up-to-date in terms of programming, perfectly fulfills a certain task and thus extends the functional scope of the overall system. Thanks to the appropriate logging, required compliance specifications can also be met. Instead of extending one's own ERP through laborious, non-compliant additional programming, add-ons offer themselves as compatible, professional solutions. Development by professional SAP partners such as Snap guarantees reliability and support - in addition, products such as the add-ons in the SnapWare family have already proven themselves in practice many times over. By merging SAP App Center (for partner solutions) and SAP Store (for SAP solutions), some solutions can now also be found via the new digital marketplace.

In any case, there is no shortage of possible applications: the SnapWare portfolio alone now includes more than thirty specialized best-practice solutions for maintenance, productivity, healthcare and finance. Sometimes these have emerged as a professional response to regulatory requirements (UID number verification, e-invoices, electronic cash registers, mobile payment terminals) or have developed from specific customer issues (master data cockpit, article data master, CRM connector, issue reporter, solutions for automated digital signatures).

Advantage through sharing

Thanks to good networking with ongoing feedback from practical application, the add-ons are also getting better and better. Here, we at Snap take a successful special path, which we call solidarity-based development: Innovations through investments within the community benefit everyone. So if customers don't insist on exclusive solutions, improvements - such as the implementation of new interfaces with Fiori - flow into the next release and are then available to all users. A head start through sharing!

In any case, the add-on fresh cell cure not only makes current technological possibilities usable, with the small helpers requirements such as the extension of already existing solutions with mobile application possibilities can also be realized promptly. And all this with the certainty that the programs are always 100 percent compatible with SAP ERP systems, follow SAP's development cycles and are maintained accordingly.

For good reason, many companies are still waiting to convert to S/4 or transform their processes to the cloud. With add-ons, the advantages of these technological changes can be exploited at an early stage without having to convert the entire system immediately. For example, the first process solutions can already run on the SAP Business Technology Platform as add-ons and provide new application options and experience values in the sandbox, as it were.

My conclusion: With the help of add-ons, well-established ERP systems can be "pimped". Modern technological solutions can thus be used, even if the overall system is not quite up to date. Thanks to programming and servicing by professional SAP partners, users can access already proven process solutions. And this in the certainty that these will also be usable in the future and will keep up with (future) legal requirements as well as technological developments from SAP.