As we await the next iteration of SAP BusinessObjects BI, we have a look at the reasons for migrating to the latest SAP BusinessObjects 4.3. Despite having a minor version number increment increase, this is without a doubt a major release of SAP BI. With a hybrid architecture, with a focus on cloud computing, SAP BI 4.3 offers a great solution for adopting Cloud technology for both new and existing users.

Analytics Hub

In the Central Management Console (CMC), SAP BI 4.3 shows a new button called Analytics Hub, which makes a local platform be configured to communicate with this meta-layer cloud-based device to serve content. The hub allows for corporate content in on-prem and cloud modules to be managed directly.

BI launch pad

The BI launch pad is now mandatory in version 4.3. Users will find a modernised aesthetic with easier navigation, SAP have also added scheduling to more destinations.

WebI data models

A new data modelling concept designed to get the cloud from local data and local front-end apps too.

Responsiveness

The front-end has been revamped, in HTML5, to provide a range of improvements to efficiency and functionality from any device. A fully responsive interface means an easier-to-use platform for those on mobile devices.

As digital innovation is crucial for modern businesses looking to succeed with SAP BOBJ BI. We’ve only covered a few of the new features, you can read more over on SAP.

Everything about the world of work is evolving. As offices made the shift to hybrid working and employees have focused on positive/progressive environments – it’s essential people partners and HR departments modernise, to allow for more time spent cultivating creativity and efficiency within the organisation.

That’s where SAP HR solutions come in, the following suite of tools are perfect for strengthening your team. To help give you the confidence to adopt SAP into your daily routine, we’ve put together a list of common use cases.

Streamlining HR operations with SAP SuccessFactors

With the help of SAP SuccessFactors, you can streamline HR operations for companies by offering a comprehensive range of solutions that assist with talent management, performance management, and employee engagement, enabling organisations to focus and optimise their processes to push for employee success.

Workforce planning with SAP analytics Cloud

SAP Analytics Cloud empowers HR departments with cutting edge analytical capabilities, enabling them to put data at the forefront of any decision and lay the foundations of effective workforce planning, insights, and instant reporting, ultimately leading to a more agile and proactive approach to HR.

Streamline HR Service Delivery

SAP Cloud Platform offers HR departments the flexibility to build custom applications, unify disparate systems, and automate HR processes, leading to improved service delivery, enhanced efficiency, and a seamless user experience for both employees and HR staff.

Using SAP HR solutions to enhance compliance

SAP Cloud Identity Access Governance helps HR departments ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and protects sensitive company data by managing user access, enforcing security policies, and providing comprehensive identity and access management solutions, ensuring the highest level of data security and integrity.

Staff augmentation has been one of the most popular outsourcing strategies for SAP projects for quite a while, and it’s no wonder why. For small or short term projects, SAP staff augmentation is an ideal solution for those looking to focus on both experience and affordability.

In this blog, we discuss some of the benefits of using staff augmentation for your next project, as well as some of our SAP service options.

What is SAP staff augmentation?

As the skills gap widens and more companies struggle to find highly skilled full-time employees, outsourcing IT talent has become the best way to fulfil project needs and meet goals.

Staff augmentation allows businesses to temporarily expand their teams with specialists that costs half the price and comes with the same amount of expertise.

Benefits of SAP staff augmentation

Cost-saving without affecting quality – sometimes you need an extra hand for a short period, weeks or months. In cases like this hiring temporary delivery staff via staff augmentation is more cost efficient than hiring full-time employees. It gives you top quality talent with fewer pennies spent on recruitment, overheads, and expenses.

Access to a pool of talent – No more months of training to get less skilled in-house staff up to speed with your companies needs. With staff augmentation, you get expertise delivered straight to your door.

Control and scalability – most software companies tend to scale up their operations to achieve more profitability. However, they can face a myriad of challenges like risks of failure and shortage of capital, especially when they opt for less traditional staffing methods.

In this sense, staff augmentation is the solution for SMEs that have constantly changing business requirements. It allows you to hire on a project basis only when you need it.

Temporarily enhance your delivery potential

Staff augmentation makes upsizing and downsizing easier, bringing in an element of flexibility to scale. Managing short term projects is easier when there is a pool of fresh and diverse resources, instead of constant cycles of hiring and replacing.

The key to staff augmentation

SAP S/4HANA is a leading, modern ERP system used by many organisations around the world. The S/4HANA platform is subscription-based, efficient at multi-tasking, able to automate many processes, and is easily accessed through multiple channels.

As you may already know, SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) support is due to cease in 2027. SAP users will be planning to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA very soon to ensure migration is seamless and painless.

For companies, data continuity will be important when migrating to SAP S/4HANA from SAP ECC, SAP R/3, or from a non-SAP ERP system. An iPaaS that natively works with SAP will be a useful tool. This is where Boomi aXis comes in.

What is Boomi aXis?

Boomi aXis brings enterprise-level, cloud-native iPaas to SAP customers. As the Boomi AtomSphere platform is low-code, teams will be able to build integrations much quicker than usual, at a lower cost. The Boomi SAP connector, aXis, is designed to be easy to use when unlocking SAP and non-SAP data.

Boomi aXis for SAP offers a low-ABAP code approach, event driven architectures (EDA), and the ability to expose custom SAP objects as RESTful API services. The advanced Boomi to SAP connector differs from other iPaaS solutions that integrate through SAP’s proprietary JCo middleware layer as it enables native integration with SAP ABAP stack. This results in lower development costs and more time savings by leveraging SAP’s security and event logic.

Benefits of Boomi aXis

• Officially SAP certified – Boomi holds the SAP certifications required for integration with SAP NetWeaver and SAP S/4HANA.
• Cut down on wasted time – Less ABAP Code results in simpler, faster, and easier to maintain integration and data pipelines
• No need for ABAP developers – traditionally expensive and difficult to find, the low-code platform helps avoid ABAP development
• Extract business data – easily populate external databases with your critical business data for self-service analytics and AI
• SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA – two systems can co-exist and reduce the risk of phased business process cut-over and data synchronisation
• Employ EDA-driven implementation – enable distributed applications with event driven integration to leverage your digital ecosystem investments
• Faster time-to-market and migration to S/4HANA – Eliminate the need for ABAP coding, while reusing legacy custom logic for faster migration

Read more about the features and prerequisites over on Boomi’s documentation page.

Designing a BI dashboard for your business can be challenging, but when you add a list of needs, KPIs and stakeholders to approve – it’s easy to see why companies opt for the quick fix.

When there’s no time to ask your users what works for them, you have to look for efficient, compelling, and easy-to-use optimisations that make the user’s life a little easier.

To help you guarantee usability in your SAP Analytics Cloud dashboards, we’veput together a list of tried and trusted tips that promise a positive user experience.

Keep the most critical KPIs in mind

If your business dashboard holds urgent or frequently used business data, ensure the highest priority information is placed at the top. In doing this, the user’s eyes will immediately fall on the information they need.

Similar to newspapers, the essential information should take pride at the top of the screen, with the less vital information placed below.

Organise your information in groups

Nothing is more frustrating than logging into a dashboard and being unable to understand what’s going on. Whether it’s from disorganised sections or simple visual overload, if the information isn’t organised in an accessible way, understanding the data will be impossible.

To ensure your dashboard presents your information right, group related data and create sections for each. Then label each one with a concise header.

If you have abundant data to present, create tabs to place information that isn’t logically connected to other groups.

Keep it simple

Dashboards help your data tell the right story, so keep it simple and easy to understand. If your users have to spend too much time understanding long labels or overly complex chart types, then something needs to change.

Keep your labels crisp, short, and sweet.

Software giant, SAP SE, has announced the next generation of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, now renamed as SAP Datasphere. SAP’s focus is on assisting enterprises to unify business data spread across disparate systems. With SAP Datasphere, users can pull data from SAP and non-SAP applications into a centralised integration point.

As with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, the solution is built on top of the SAP Business Technology Platform, providing top enterprise security and encryption capabilities. SAP is partnering with leading data analytics firms including Confluent Inc., DataRobot Inc., Collibra NV., and Databricks Inc. to bring even more functionalities to users.

SAP identified the main pain point many businesses are suffering from when trying to view their business data. They found that business have data spread across different platforms, vendors, on-prem systems, and cloud providers.

Traditionally, users were having to export the data from each source and bring it together in a single location. Inevitably, this method meant losing business context and wasting time on manual effort to recapture it. SAP Datasphere automates this manual process, giving companies an easy way to view data with business context and logic intact.

SAP Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer Julia White said, “Data management and analytics have become the defining resources of corporations. Achieving this seamless data access is hard.”

However, Julia added that SAP Datasphere is not just a rebrand of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, it has new capabilities such as data cataloguing to discover, manage, and govern data. Julia also noted more simplified data replication capabilities that enable data and its constant updates to be delivered in real time, and enhanced data modelling that preserves the business context of data from SAP applications.

SAP Datasphere is now available and existing SAP Data Warehouse Cloud customers will be upgraded to it immediately – there are no steps to take or migration required.

Modern companies are inundated with large quantities of business data with a need to categorise, analyse, and report to make the right business decisions. The challenge is even more complex when considering that data arrives from different sources that aren’t connected together. There is increasing difficulty in finding a suitable tool that can handle this mass of data that is intuitive and user-friendly for all staff.

This is why SAP Analytics Cloud was created. It serves as the all-in-one tool to bring together planning, predictive analysis, and business intelligence functions. With an easy-to-use interface, IT departments, decisions makers, and end users are able to navigate and use functionalities without difficulty.

The main functions of SAP Analytics Cloud include:

• Create BI reports and present them in customisable dashboards
• Predictive planning models and functionalities
• Connection to cloud and on-prem systems in hybrid scenarios
• Analytics Design tool for individual app development
• Digital Boardroom, interactive working with stories via various displays

App connection and interactions

Analytics Cloud is part of HANA Cloud Services, which includes SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud. Data Warehouse Cloud combines data from on-prem and cloud system in a cloud data warehouse. HANA Cloud is a cloud-native database for managing and operating high-performance applications. Depending on your company network, these can connect together using either Cloud Connector or SAC Agent.

Importantly, SAP Analytics Cloud is a component of other SAP applications such as SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. SAC can act as the central planning instance to bring together data sources and provide comprehensive planning. In addition, SAC includes an Excel add-in for users of Microsoft Office to perform ad-hoc analyses without prior knowledge of SAC.

Forecasting and planning calendar

SAC’s Predictive Engine technology allows users to define forecast scenarios with classification models, time series, and regression models.

Naturally, due to the nature of business planning, there will be several key contributors and end users producing and viewing the analyses. SAC has a planning calendar which can be used to organise and monitor every step of planning. General tasks, data lock tasks, and tasks based on characteristics can be set as task types. In the case of having contributors with varying degrees of responsibilities, a multipart structure can be set for creator, agent, and approver roles.

Several weeks ago, global ERP company, SAP, renamed their developer platform and packaged it with S/4HANA, its current gen in-memory application platform.

During the TechEd, CTO Juergen Mueller announced a replacement for Embedded Steampunk, a tool also known as SAP S/4HANA Cloud ABAP Environment. Crucially, this tool allows developers to build in the SAP’s ABAP language. You can watch the keynote highlights here.

SAP packages into S/4HANA

In 2021, SAP launched the platform for selected customers on RISE with SAP, the vendor’s lift-shift-and-transform partner plan. S/4HANA Cloud 2108 was also released for general availability in August 2021.

Additionally, now SAP packages this with S/4HANA Cloud and S/4HANA on-premises. Mueller said, “We took all the great experiences of Steampunk and put them into an ABAP Cloud.”

“ABAP cloud is designed for state-of-the-art stable and cloud-ready ABAP extensions for S/4HANA directly within the S/4HANA stack. It means using public SAP APIs to access S/4HANA data and functionalities.”

“[Using] public SAP extension points to objects, [but] modifications to SAP objects are no longer allowed. It means [developers] get strong tooling support in the IDE.”

Starting with a clean core

While developers could continue to use the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model, support for Dynpro or Web Dynpro would end.

However, SAP users have experienced difficulties in the past to move to S/4HANA because the customisations many spent years building on earlier editions cannot be carried over to the new environment. SAP says they must start with a clean core, adding any modifications as “extensions” in the new environment.

Though, Mueller says ABAP Cloud is “exciting because it enables customers to get to a clean core in a much simpler way.”

Lastly, SAP has also launched a new Cloud Application Programming (CAP) model for Java and JavaScript developers. Indeed, it includes libraries and tools for building enterprise-grade services and applications. Additional details of the announcements can be read here.

As SAP defines the future of it’s Analytics Strategy, there’s a clear wish to ensure the current SAP BOBJ Business Intelligence customers continue to be looked after for a bit longer yet. This means that SAP continues to add new enterprise reporting features to allow businesses to transition to the cloud at their own pace.

Up till recently, SAP had indicated that mainstream maintenance of v4.3 of SAP BOBJ would be ending in 2025. However, following the recent announcement by SAP, they will be releasing a further version, code named SAP BusinessObjects BI 2024, which will give users until 2027 to the transition.

Aimed at helping businesses shift from on-premise to the cloud, the software incorporates specific functionality to support hybrid deployment which will help companies transition to the cloud.

Enhancing business workflow

Since before the acquisition by SAP in 2007, BusinessObjects has been integral to many businesses’ day-to-day operations. However, user needs are always evolving and many if not most are preparing to move towards a cloud solution.

The news from SAP concerning Business Intelligence 2024 ensures that businesses have a bit more time to plan their BI roadmap to the cloud.

Ensuring best-value

To ensure best value for customers, SAP are focusing on the most popular core components of the SAP BusinessObjects, including:

• SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence
• SAP Business Objects Information Design Tool and single source .unx universes
• SAP Crystal Reports (on Windows only*)
• SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office
• SAP BO Business Intelligence platform

What’s next?

What will follow in 2027? SAP say they will provide clear use case migration paths for the components for which they plan the end of support after 2027. While the plan for after that is still uncertain, we can be sure that businesses have time to plan ahead