System integration as an S/4 focus

The current mood is politically, socially and economically challenging. However, this has only marginally to do with the bad mood surrounding SAP, as can be seen from various media. However, the topic of integration is likely to be part of it. What are the backgrounds and contexts for this?

As already mentioned in the introduction, SAP's business strategy for the necessary company growth was primarily characterized by acquisitions of numerous cloud providers under the previous boss Bill McDermott. In this way, he also achieved his main goals: on the one hand, the positive capital market development of SAP on the stock exchange and, on the other hand, the optimization of his personal income. From today's perspective, however, this was too short-sighted. Some of the acquisitions were bad investments and the necessary technical integration on the SAP platform was missed for the strategically correct applications. This had a negative impact on the S/4 strategies "cloud only" or "cloud first".

A successful S/4 transformation for customers is directly related to integration, which simply did not exist in the usual form. SAP only became aware of this undesirable development when Christian Klein took over the management of the group. The necessary integration of the cloud products thus became the main task, which cost too much time and money and still does. This important but late realization has also had a highly negative impact on the capital market. The issue of integration simply cannot be sold as a great vision. By "cleaning up without visions," Christian Klein is currently coming under quite a bit of pressure.

After the background, however, there are also some practical tips for the many ongoing transformation projects as far as integration is concerned. For most existing customers, S/4 projects are implemented with a hybrid application landscape, i.e., on-premises systems with cloud solutions. The focus here is on SAP's own numerous cloud solutions with the new S/4 technology. The focus here is not on integration, but on the timely availability of the necessary functions in accordance with the roadmaps in coordination with the project plan.

The integration problems mentioned are primarily caused by the large acquisitions such as Ariba, Fieldglass, Concur and SuccessFactors. While these would make sense from a business perspective, they have different development technologies. This makes functional integration into the SAP core systems a mammoth task. Despite SAP's best efforts, the uniform interface remains a pipe dream. When introducing these solutions, an up-to-date inventory should be made in advance. On the one hand, of course, with SAP directly, but on the other hand, for quality assurance purposes, also with corresponding reference customers and the DSAG working groups.

Another extensive but underestimated integration topic is in-house developments. There are several issues to deal with here. To begin with, all in-house developments, such as reports and programs, should be checked to see if they are necessary. After all, many are no longer used after system changes or personnel changes. SAP operations has appropriate analysis tools available for this purpose. The necessary in-house developments should be converted to the new S/4 technology in good time. This phase can and should be started even before the S/4 project launch, because the changeover involves a lot of time.

In a further step, a fit-gap analysis must be carried out to determine which in-house developments can be replaced by the new S/4 applications in the standard. Finally, the technical integration of the in-house developments into the cloud solutions must also be ensured.