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SAP Advantages
Some of the principal advantages of SAP include the following:
Data Centralisation
SAP centralizes data from various business processes and functions in one place. Business departments and divisions can communicate data and information more easily as a result. This makes it possible for departments like finance, inventories, production, as well as human resources to obtain information from those other departments and effectively convey their own departments' needs. This increases general effectiveness by lowering errors and communication delays. Any company's ability to succeed depends on efficient communication across all of its sections. SAP, another enterprise resource planning program, facilitates this information sharing and collaboration.
Automation
SAP automates workflows and streamlines processes. According to the authorized and rejected rules, the system automatically flows data from operations, including account management, order management, as well as vendor management. Employees can concentrate on more productive work because the ERP system handles the menial jobs. Organizations become more effective as a result.
Accessibility
SAP can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. SAP ERP is highly flexible and easily accessible because of this. Numerous SAP functions and applications are available as mobile-based apps. All popular operating systems, including Windows, Android, Linux, iPhones, as well as Mac, are compatible with SAP. You can use any device and access the ERP from anywhere. Best-in-class security features from SAP guarantee that any organization's critical information is safeguarded even when accessed through mobile apps.
Globalization
Numerous different geographic areas are supported by SAP. All of the world's major currencies are supported by the enterprise tool SAP, which is why multinational corporations find it highly helpful.
Visualization
SAP's dashboards and reports functionality allow you to view all important data points in a simple-to-understand format in real time. Charts and graphs are much easier to comprehend and navigate than large data files. This facilitates speedy decision-making and aids in your comprehension of the pertinent problems and procedures.
Overall Revenue Growth
SAP's features make it easier to streamline processes, allow employees to focus on more important tasks, and give a complete view of operations that allows you to assess problems quickly. This efficiency increases the organization's overall revenue as well as profit.
SAP Core Banking Migration into AWS
Recently, the core banking platform for the Financial and Banking Service division (BFS) was migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This article gives background information, lessons learned, and the strategy used.
In an effort to enhance its transaction as well as mortgage banking offerings, BFS started a strategic project in 2014. It also unveiled a brand-new SAP core banking platform. This approach was used in Sydney's geographically dispersed data centers and has been a cornerstone of the core banking system that has fueled the expansion.
The award-winning e/m banking products' crucial platform for BFS, SAP, connects with numerous internal systems and runs continuously around the clock. BFS previously stated that by 2022, all workloads would be moved to the cloud. An effort to move SAP to AWS, the hyper-scale public cloud provider of Cloud computing services, started in 2020, building on the company's prior successes and experience in transferring critical workloads to the cloud.
It was crucial to move this crucial platform from SAP to AWS in order to conform with Australian legislative requirements for software like SAP that is used by financial institutions, as well as the supportability standards of each of the vendors (SAP, Red Hat, and Oracle).
Several years ago, the corporation started moving apps to the cloud. It uses an internal tool to ensure the solutions it provides on AWS meet its regulatory standards. Build an SAP platform using AWS using this tool. Software-defined templates, which serve as descriptions of the infrastructure and the deployment of applications, are used to offer automation.
Continuous Delivery (CD) in AWS CloudFormation processes these templates, enriches them as necessary, and then interprets the results for the pipeline. Immutable installations are used, which benefit from cloud capacity-on-demand. It redeploys all resources required to support an application stack and removes any infrastructure components instead of altering an existing deployment.
1) Architecture
SAP
BFS implements SAP modules in various settings. Multiple systems are present in each environment. An SAP Central Services layer, as well as SAP application servers, make up the environment's system. There is a database Tier as well. BFS is a full-featured SAP solution that integrates several systems in various settings.
AWS Architecture -- The Application Layer
Every system has an SAP Application layer that includes the following:
- ASCS (ABAP SAP Central Services): Enqueue Server and Message Server are both parts of ABAP SAP Central Services.
- ERS (Enqueue Replication Service). The Enqueue Replication Service maintains copies and application state locks. In the event that central services need to be restarted or fail, the lock table can indeed be utilized to restore the state.
- SAP Web Dispatcher: The SAP Web Dispatcher routes each HTTP(S) request to the SAP NetWeaver Application Server.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. with SAP Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which includes the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Hi Availability Add-on, is used with ASCS/ERS & Web dispatcher on EC2 instances.
- SAP NetWeaver Application Servers. Oracle Linux Amazon Machine Image and EC2 instances operate the application servers.
Infrastructure-wise, every SAP application is the same and includes various AWS components to complete the stack.
AWS Architecture -- Database Layer
We could not use AWS RDS to satisfy our need for a vendor-certified solution. SAP has not certified it. Because our old SAP solution used the Oracle Real Application Cluster, we decided to implement Oracle 19c (non-CDB) and Oracle Data Guard using Fast Failover on EC2. SAP does not, however, support RAC. Depending on the degree of importance of the SAP environment and the prerequisites for software licenses, the solution can be customized via code. In addition, it may support various patterns, including:
- Standalone
- Primary, one backup, and Data Guard turned on. FSFO (two observers) (two observers).
- Primary, two standby, and FSFO, along with Data Guard (three observers) (two primaries).
This implementation can be turned into a configuration that combines multiple components with AWS services. It is designed for the SAP Oracle database. It enables seamless automatic failovers, then would the infrastructure fail, nearly zero outage blue or green deployments, and the ability to automate the building of diverse patterns.
Blue/Green Deployments
You can develop AWS infrastructure stacks that can support a whole SAP system with just one click if you use infrastructure as code as well as our architectural pattern. Typically, it takes under an hour. In order to support a blue/green database deployment architecture, we leverage Oracle Data Guard and AWS components. It enables rolling code change maintenance, a method Oracle database administrators are accustomed to using when installing Oracle patches.
By doing so, you can roll out standby instances first and make sure the Data Guard broker setup is restored. The primary role can then be moved to the new build at that point. If a problem with rolling standby occurs, it is safe to roll back an instance to the prior version while keeping the primary database operational. Similar steps are taken by us for our ASCS/ERS HA components. We are able to start a new node as well as failover resources onto it once the HA pair has been established.
Requirements For Network Connectivity
AWS workloads use network micro-segmentation and adhere to security best practices. Our SAP implementation reflects this as well. It can be difficult to meet the connectivity needs of large SAP installations with numerous EC2 instances. On some ports, there are numerous flows between various systems and settings. Code was used to implement these flows, which are dynamically changed in response to environmental changes.
2) Database
Oracle Database Upgrade
The most recent, operationally supported versions of SAP were running on-premises in source database configurations. Oracle 19c for Oracle Enterprise Linux and SAP Supported EC2 instance types are the databases that AWS targets. For SAP AWS deployments, this setup is supported. We can employ more sophisticated features, including Data Guard as well as Fast-Start Failing over, with this version. The compliance and vulnerability criteria for the on-premise infrastructure are addressed in these target versions.
Automated SAP Bundle Passing For Oracle DB. (SBP).
Straight Oracle database patch applications and sporadic interim patches are not supported by SAP. Patches are available from SAP for the Oracle database. These updates are referred to as SAP Bundle Updates or (SBP). They are a group of Oracle CPUs and a number of temporary patches which have been approved and examined by SAP.
The database software automatically implements the SBP process. Using Data Guard, this is accomplished in a rolling manner with nearly no downtime. The technique of stack rolling forward and backward is supported while rolling back an SBP. With the help of the blue/green deployment strategy, we can automatically apply SBP and operating system fixes. As a result, there is consistency throughout the estate, and less manual work is required.
Oracle Data Guard
Three configuration choices are available for Oracle Data Guard, each with a different emphasis on data security, system availability, as well as database performance. Out of the three possibilities, Maximum Availability was selected. Maximum availability, the middle ground, offers the highest level of data security without compromising the overall availability of something like the primary database, despite the fact that database performance but also zero data loss are crucial business needs.
In normal operations, unless connectivity to the primary database is lost, the standby will always be in sync with it. The primary will continue to function until standby connectivity is established again. While connectivity between the standby and primary systems is being restored, the banking system will be able to provide services to customers.
Our system includes observers with Fast Start Failover (FSFO), which enables auto-failover in the event of infrastructure breakdown. Monitoring availability and assessing whether fast-start failovers are required are the responsibilities of the master observer. If so, they will carry one out. If the master observer is not available, the secondary observer can be set up to automatically assume the master position.
Multiple Configurations/Observers
Data Guard is designed to meet different requirements for database availability and software licensing costs. With this flexibility, it is possible to create a wide range of combinations for the quantity and position of observers as well as databases inside a single construction.
They could be dispersed throughout several availability zones. To handle outages up until two of the three AWS accessible zones, three database instances but also three observers are required. Depending somewhat on SAP requirements and indeed the functional role within the stack, the as SAP software solutions uses a number of AWS EC2 instance types for business model.
Migration With Minimal Downtime
The SAP platform provides BFS clients with 24/7 banking capabilities. So as to have as little of an effect on our clients as possible, the outage window was very brief. The existing on-premise system, which has been made up of numerous production databases and many terabytes of data, required the development of novel migration strategies. Different data migration techniques were developed using parallel environments for various systems. Data migration was one of the many components of the end-to-end migration that had to be done during the go-live window.
After the data has been successfully transferred, the vast majority of SAP-integrated internal systems will need to be moved from their on-premise environments to the AWS environment. An alias for AWS environments was updated with a straightforward DNS modification. As a result, there was no need to change any downstream systems, and we could simply roll back if necessary.
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How our Financial Services App was Integrated with SAP Data and Services
Design Process
The Evangelist team created our newest financial service consumer application using affinity diagrams. Diagrams of affinities have a significant role in our worldview. The previous post, How we constructed an IOT app integrated with Blockchain in only ten days, contains more information about how we use them. We could start creating Lo-fi pencil sketches of either the pages but also interactions once the concepts and use cases had been developed.
Using post-it notes and drawings, low-tech or "Lo-fi" prototyping is a simple and inexpensive approach to testing app ideas. We finally settled on the user interaction after a number of iterations, at which point we started creating the backlog with user stories for the app.
The Functionality
During the design phase, we determined the following four areas that the app should cover:
- Managing accounts and transactions
- Paying and viewing bills
- Feedback
- Transferring money.
With excellent UX and cutting-edge technology, each of these areas might be enhanced. Finding the appropriate SAP services and products that would help us realize our goal was the next step. We also started planning the sprint. With the SAP Cloud Platform, we started.
SAP Cloud Platform
For application development, we wished to utilize SAP Cloud Platform, SAP's platform-as-a-service. For us to quickly and effectively create our financial service application using our current SAP system, it was important to be able to expand both on-premises and cloud apps.
SAP API Business Hub
We intended to demonstrate how real-time SAP data could be combined with business data throughout the development. Using SAP API Business Hub was the most effective technique to demonstrate connectedness, according to our thorough research. Developers can utilize the SAP API Business Hub to browse, test, and leverage all SAP APIs, as well as a few partner APIs to build interfaces. A variety of APIs, such as those for picture recognition, sentiment analysis, success factors, as well as S/4HANA, are available through SAP API Business Hub.
Collecting Feedback Using a "Rate us" Feature
Applications that interact with customers need to be able to get immediate input from them. For this client experience, tone analysis, as well as sentiment analysis, were applied. Language analysis, called sentiment analysis, can identify the tones of communication in written texts. In order to comprehend messages and engage with customers on a large scale, we can also utilize a tone analyzer. The sentiment analysis within our app was created using SAP HANA Text Analysis.
The Mapper, REST Connector, and Mapper were used to initially construct an integration to the SAP Service. The request may be mapped easily, as can the service response. Simply copy and paste the service's JSON response payload into our JSON translator. In our app, this automatically generates a JSON structure.
When interacting with the data after the structure has been constructed, we map this one to our data model. We chose our JSON Structure and constructed an import mapping that maps it to our data model. The service must then be called. Company microflows as well as a native REST action are used to accomplish this.
In just three steps, we can create an SAP service integration:
- Please insert the text you wish to analyze into the microflow as a parameter.
- Request something from the service.
- Return the call response for usage in our process.
Process automation can increase operational effectiveness and customer satisfaction.
We can now construct the logic to automatically respond to clients depending on their feelings since the service has returned the raw data or Big data cloud services. We developed a workflow method that directs dissatisfied consumers to either robotically automated services or rather customer support agents in order to fix their issues swiftly.
Accounts
A financial app must allow you to view and quickly navigate your accounts. This contains specifics like how much money you have in each account, recent transactions, as well as how effectively you're managing your income and expenses. We prioritized the account information in order to make the app simple to use and comprehend. The software provides users with a concise summary of their financial affairs and loads rapidly. Additionally, it has helpful patterns and icons that aid in easy identification.
One application model is used for both the hybrid phone and the fully responsive web. This allows for a low-code skill set to handle multiple forms. We were able to do this in order to reduce development costs, quicken iterations, and meet consumer requests across several channels. The web-based modeling tool developed by CISIN was used to construct our user experience.
Numerous businesses make significant investments in developing internal Record-Keeping Systems. All the information needed to create an app is located here. Customers may find it challenging to get this data. By combining business and SAP, you can develop highly integrated solutions for a variety of channels in half the time it takes with conventional coding techniques. We used the S/4HANA Financing Cash APIs from SAP API Business Hub to display the current balances but also transactions.
To add more information and value, particularly for B2C users, we included the option for users to plot the location of transactions on a Google Map and a straightforward split of the function of the bill among friends and colleagues.
Managing Bills
Without the capability to view payments and make them, a financial services app is lacking. Users can examine bills in our summary billing section and pay them with a credit card rather than an account transfer.
Giving up cash is not always easy, especially when there are bills to pay. For the purpose of accelerating the payment process, we developed a new widget that works with Cards. IO. A nice library for credit card scanning is Card. IO. When you pay for things, you won't need to enter your card information because the scan's details are retained.
Currency Conversion and Transfers
It is typical to convert transactions across currencies and transfer money between accounts. To meet this need, we turned to the currency conversion API in SAP S/4HANA Finance. It has many features that allow for the retrieval and management of real-time currency exchange rates.
Accessibility: A Solution
The majority of people instinctively consider how technology improves user experiences. They consider conventional digital platforms like smartphones, tablets, and desktops. Future applications will need to provide different user interfaces using composite application models in addition to simple forms. For users with special needs, such as those who have vision impairments, this is especially crucial. Thanks to AI (artificial intelligence), bots, or remote assistants like Alexa, we can now engage with user interfaces via voice or chat. With the soon-to-be-released Amazon Alexa Connector, we did just that. Users may now voice-only search for something and return bill statuses thanks to a brand-new talent.
Read More: Top Reasons Why SAP Consulting Solution Is Right for Business Enterprises
SAP in the Workplace
Worldwide, a large number of organizations use SAP ERP. Your ability to apply for jobs and possibly advance in your company with the use of this expertise. You can become an SAP expert in your area of work and be able to lead. Following are a few fields and occupations where SAP ERP is employed, along with the modules and features that each one provides.
Management of Human Resources
Human resource managers can manage the HR department with the help of SAP ERP. With SAP ERP, you can monitor all employee information from the time they submit their application for employment until they leave. Following are a few SAP HR modules:
- Organizational Management: Plans can be made for workflow management using this module.
- Personnel Management: This module can be used to record important information about employees. The date of hire, the employee's personal information, or payroll information may be included.
- Personal Development: You can use this module to help your company's employees grow. Employee retention rates might go up, and turnover rates can go down with skill development.
- Time Management: You can monitor each employee's attendance with this module. Their plans, shifts, and absences are all included in this material.
- Payroll: Processing employee payments, exclusions, and benefits, including salary, taxes, and corporate contributions, is possible with the help of this module.
Management of Projects
SAP provides project managers with a range of tools that allow them to manage projects from their inception to completion. SAP provides the following project management modules:
- This Module is for Project Initiation: Features for managing project preparation and launch are included in this module. With the aid of this module, you can work on tasks like outlining the project and creating the job breakdown structure. You can also control network activities, project creation overall, and milestones.
- Project Planning Module: Cost planning, material as well as revenue planning, production scheduling, manpower planning, scheduling, as well as workforce planning are some of the capabilities offered by this module.
- Project Execution Module: This module offers tools for managing a project's implementation and monitoring. You may manage the receiving of goods, the entry of timesheets, the distribution of items, confirmations, billing, as well as progress analysis with the help of this module.
- Project Closing Module: This module provides features related to closing a project.
Warehouse Management
SAP provides warehouse managers with many tools that will help them manage their warehouses successfully. These SAP warehouse management modules are listed below:
- Inbound Processing Management: By providing capabilities like data validation for shipping alerts as well as acceptance of production receipts, SAP makes it simple to handle inbound processes.
- Outbound Processing Management: Warehouse managers can schedule packaging and delivery using this module, as well as choose a stock based on criteria.
- Operations and Storage Management: Warehouse managers can more effectively manage their internal processes with the help of this module. Cycle counting, physical inventories, stock visibility, and handling equipment status are some of these procedures.
- Cross-Functional Management Features: Features including batch management, dock appointment scheduling, and serial number management are offered by this module. Processing for traceability is also provided.
Management of Customer Relationships
A variety of technologies are available for SAP CRM experts to combine and automate client interactions. Customer service, sales, as well as marketing are some of these instruments. These are the CRM module's salient characteristics.
- Sales CRM: With the help of features including AI-powered guided sales, recommendations for sales strategy content, and personalized quotations, you can offer excellent customer service help in this module. It also consists of real-time quota and plan modeling, dispute management platforms, complaint management platforms, and revenue, billing, and invoicing management.
- Marketing CRM: Features like consumer behavior analytics and seamless customer experience creation are offered by this module. Additionally, it enables multi-dimensional analysis and team cooperation.
- Customer Service CRM: This module assists customer service managers and representatives in providing great customer service. Features including customer insights, service interaction history issue optimization, and on-demand network connection are offered by this module. Additionally, it enables conversation transferring, discussions with AI assistance, and conversation transferring.
- Commerce CRM: Features including component integration, order administration, and industry-specific capabilities are offered by this module. Additionally, it enables platform expansion and open commerce procedures.
Accounting and Financial Management
SAP provides a complete accounting and financial management system. These are just a few features of this system.
- Financial Planning and Analysis: This module includes functions including forecasting, budgeting, performance management, financial planning, reporting, analytics, and strategic planning.
- Accounting and Tax Management: This module includes functions including regulation compliance, reporting, disclosure, and reconciliation.
- Treasury and Cash Management: Corporate treasury, cash management, and cash flow forecasting are characteristics of this program.
- Accounts Payable and Receivable: This system provides modules for billing, invoice administration, risk management, and credit evaluation.
What We've Learned
To satisfy vendor demands, we launched a number of new technologies. New operating systems, feature updates, and other features were among them. Each of these needed numerous security checks and an SAP development company. These increased our project's complexity and duration. We discovered that we should deploy resources and launch these initiatives earlier. We finished it using AWS architects who were aligned with the SAP Lens and the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
This also provided us with insightful Feedback on our design and procedures. The project began in February 2020. The COVID-19 epidemic only lasted a short while. However, it had minimal impact on our project as we completed almost all of it remotely. The company provided support and guidance throughout this period. Colleagues who provided tools and remote access solutions made it possible for us to work from a distance.
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Summary
The SAP Core Banking platform of BFS Group has been successfully moved from old hardware to AWS. With little downtime and difficult changes, this was accomplished. The data center has been operational for several months, with the legacy infrastructure removed.
BFS has indeed been able to benefit from the advantages of the cloud by providing this delivery. By doing so, we may enhance capacity, alter components, and quickly rebuild environments. Additionally, we may reduce manual duties and raise our risk and safety quotient.
The platform now has more flexibility thanks to the AWS transfer, and the company is now better equipped to respond to shifting market dynamics.
