The GRC Monster Build

Governance, Risk and Compliance

App development in an ERP environment is more than colorful UI, user interface, and knowing table names. Every new Abap modification, every new SAP build app is a risk to the ERP system. Who monitors governance and compliance rules during the creative phase?

A classic SAP system consists of at least three hierarchy levels: Development, test and production system - and that's a good thing! First, development takes place, in the past with Abap and Java, in the future obviously with Build on BTP, the Business Technology Platform; then the transport into the test system takes place and a reality check is made with anonymized test data; if everything goes well, then the transport and the activation in the productive system take place. This decades-old roadmap has proven its worth. In the dawning build age, nothing is heard of it.

At this year's TechEd conference, SAP Build unveiled a new offering designed to leverage the expertise of those who know the business best: the people in the business departments. SAP Build is a low-code offering that leverages the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). It is designed to provide direct access to end-to-end processes and data. However, what SAP Chief Technology Officer Jürgen Müller did not reveal during his presentation of Build: where the employees from the specialist departments are to obtain the extensive BTP, process and data structure knowledge. BTP is a powerful and comprehensive platform in the S/4 Hana system.

The ability to develop ERP processes on this platform now, whether with Abap, Java or Build, probably didn't come naturally to every SAP end user. "SAP has introduced Build, a low-code offering designed to enable users with minimal technical knowledge to extend SAP enterprise applications, automate processes, and drag-and-drop web interfaces into a prototype," commented Jens Hungershausen, CEO, and Sebastian Westphal, Chief Technology Officer, of the German-speaking SAP User Group.

Consistency and redundancy

Quite obviously, two questions arise: How can Build on the BTP guarantee data consistency in the Hana database if almost anyone is allowed to modify and manipulate here? How to ensure that the neighbor does not implement the same idea just with a different UI? Build would have to have a very smart repository to alert in advance the creative users of redundancy and lack of consistency.

MS Power Apps

Microsoft has been trying to get into talks with SAP because extending the MS no-code/low-code system based on Azure and BTP would not only have been an easy way to go, but would also have brought SAP thousands of power experts at the same time. Why SAP has now built what feels like the 99th no-code/low-code application remains a mystery to many members of the SAP community. SAP has told Microsoft that the ERP group wants to try Build alone. From the users' point of view, a missed opportunity. Ms-Power is well established, available on Azure and thus it can be made S/4 compatible. It remains to be seen how quickly a Build community will develop on the BTP and what GRC monsters will emerge here.