The following Amazon Web Services + ASUG Partner Insight was authored by Soulat Khan, WW Senior Manager, Partner Solution Architecture, SAP’s Technical Alliance and Innovation, Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, customers are embracing the RISE with SAP offering to drive innovation, agility, and competitiveness.
As organizations transition from traditional SAP landscapes to modern, cloud-based architectures, SAP developers are at the forefront of this transformation. Leveraging SAP ABAP expertise, their journey involves embracing clean core strategies, integrating seamlessly with cloud services, and building on their existing transactional knowledge to drive business value through innovation offered by SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).
Let's explore this journey in detail and dive into a few examples of how SAP developers can navigate the RISE era effectively.
Embracing SAP ABAP Expertise for Business Value with RISE
In the RISE era, SAP developers have the opportunity to evolve beyond their technical roles and become business experts. By gaining deep insights into their organizations’ industry-specific challenges, customer needs, and strategic objectives, SAP developers can contribute to driving company-wide business transformation and delivering value-added solutions with RISE.
As organizations transition to RISE, SAP developers are uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between technical requirements and business outcomes. By understanding business processes, industry trends, and customer pain points, SAP developers can design solutions that not only meet technical specifications but also deliver tangible business value. For example, by collaborating closely with business stakeholders and conducting workshops to understand their requirements, SAP developers can propose solution, leveraging services offered by SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)—combined with services offered by cloud providers like AWS—to drive revenue growth, cost savings, and customer satisfaction.
- Consider a manufacturing company, with a legacy SAP ERP system, that leverages its team of ABAP developers to optimize critical business processes, extending their predictive maintenance capability with mean time to failure (MTTF) of assets to their financial systems for automated parts order and delivery. By customizing SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) or SAP S/4HANA functionalities and developing tailored solutions using ABAP, the company successfully achieves a 30% reduction in MTTF in their manufacturing facility and a 20% increase in procurement efficiency, leading to significant cost savings and improved customer satisfaction.
This customization would historically take months of RICEF development, testing, and certification, before it would be promoted to a production ECC landscape to realize value. In today’s RISE environment, ABAP developers can leverage SAP’s event-to-business framework with BTP-integrated services like SAP Integration Suite, Advanced Event Mesh, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) like Amazon Monitron or the AWS SDK for SAP ABAP to effectively invoke device notifications, with a single line of code, in a matter of minutes. By leveraging cloud services, ABAP developers can implement predictive maintenance and MTTF asset management integration for their procurement process with a few lines of code, with no change to their SAP core function and with integration with their SAP Enterprise Asset Management system.
Transitioning to a Clean Core Strategy for Agility and Innovation
As companies embrace cloud-native services, SAP developers are tasked with transitioning to a clean core strategy, decoupling customizations from their core SAP system, and leveraging cloud native services for innovation and agility. By leveraging AWS for innovation and infrastructure, SAP developers can transition to clean core architectures seamlessly and leverage their business process insights to quickly deliver value to customers.
- Consider a retail giant that adopts a clean core strategy, migrating its custom-developed functionalities from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA Cloud with RISE. By leveraging RISE with SAP, SAP BTP for extensibility, and AWS services for business process innovation, the company achieves greater flexibility in providing product recommendation, scalability in processing petabytes of transactions, and agility in providing secured application services globally. This enables the company to focus on rapid prototyping of new features, seamless integration between SAP and non-SAP systems, and faster time-to-market by leveraging SAP BTP and AWS services, rather than writing custom code across their SAP landscape.
Driving Innovation Through Continuous Learning and Skill Development
Continuous learning is essential for SAP developers to stay relevant and effective in the RISE era. By upskilling in emerging technologies, cloud platforms, and development methodologies, SAP developers are unlocking new possibilities, driving new innovations, and delivering differentiated solutions to customers.
AWS partnered with SAP to offer a free, five-week, self-paced learning course on building resilient applications with SAP BTP and AWS services. This course has surpassed 10.4K learners to date (as of February 2024). You can sign up for this course on openSAP. The course also offers optional hands-on exercises for developers interesting in building out a few application scenarios to jumpstart their learning journey with SAP BTP and AWS.
In conclusion, as organizations embark on their digital transformation journey with RISE, SAP developers have a pivotal role to play in driving innovation, agility, and customer success. By embracing SAP ABAP expertise, transitioning to clean core architectures, investing in continuous learning, optimizing performance, and enabling seamless integration with both SAP and AWS services, developers can unlock new opportunities for business value creation and business as a whole in the RISE era.
SAP and AWS, the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, are teaming up to accelerate digital transformation for their customers. This collaboration builds on the success of the longstanding SAP and AWS partnership by bringing together the technology, solutions, and flexibility that customers need to help them succeed in the digital economy.
For more than 15 years, the companies have strengthened a strategic relationship to drive innovation and support customers’ journeys to becoming sustainable, intelligent enterprises. SAP is a signatory of Amazon’s Climate Pledge, committing to net-zero carbon, and has accelerated its sustainability commitment to 2030. With a partnership focused on transformation, innovation, and delivering for customers, AWS and SAP enter 2024 more ready than ever to help customers adopt cloud solutions that allow them to innovate faster and capitalize on digital disruptions within their industries.
Special thanks to Isaac Feldberg, Spencer Martenson, RJ Bibby, Ferry Mulyadi, and Sunny Patwari for their support in the publication of this blog.