SAP Business ByDesign 2023 year-end review and outlook 2024

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A new year started, and for many of us belonging to the ByD Community, 2023 was a year that will remain in our memories. I would therefore take the chance to look back and positively reflect on the uncertainties, expectations, and objectives we had at the beginning of the year, many of which may have been achieved in the meantime.

Personally, I moved to a new role in Product Management at the ByD Governance, in close cooperation with my team colleague Kristof Schneider. These changes were a result of the Cloud ERP Strategy announced back late of 2022.

The new phase of ByD starting in 2023 was introduced in a comprehensive overview by Rainer Zinow in his YouTube video. As he wisely said, based on the KPIs provided in the video, “the ByD ecosystem of customers and partners is fully vibrant.”

 Source: SAP Business ByDesign roadmap, November 2023.

• There are 16,022 productive companies with unique tax IDs operating in over 160 countries, an increase of 19% as compared to the previous year.
• There are 200 ISV partners using the ByD platform and third-party software providers, who have created and deployed approximately 12,900 add-ons on productive customers systems, indicating a 22% increase from the previous year.
• Usage and adoption of the platform continues to grow with 2.02 billion FIN documents posted, a 21% increase from the previous year, and a 10% increase in active users in the productive system.

Other metrics may apply to different areas (e.g., Product Support, Operations or Customer Engagement). But looking back, the very high renewal rate from the installed base in our ByD ecosystem or consistent system high availability of >99.95% month-on-month are another important cloud metrics to remind which show the maturity and relevance of this solution.

Last year, we at Product Management, also supported scheduled analyst calls. You may want to explore the results in Gartner magic quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service centric and Product centric enterprises or in Asia/Pacific SMB/Mid-Market ERP IDC MarketScape.

From a product development perspective, what would be some areas to highlight in 2023? How has the new paradigm about feature completeness influenced the development focus? What is the way forward expected in the upcoming releases?

Let me collate a few highlights from a Product Development perspective to go a level deeper on ByD highlights in 2023, which by purpose intends to match with general directions as disclosed in our roadmap:

Legal and Compliance: Mandatory enablement required for our customers to use the solution.

• GDPR compliance for Supplier (Natural Person)
• Enhancements to ISO countries and regions code list
• Legal changes to 21 localized countries by SAP
• Successful audits of SOC1, SOC2 & C5

Compliance with SAP’s standards and maintenance of existing strategic investments

• Point-to-point integration with SAP sustainability solution Sustainability Footprint Management (SAP SFM)
• Upgrade of SAP ByD Add-in for Microsoft Outlook integration
• New Horizon High-contrast theme (Black & White)
• Security enhancements for Mobile App, improvement open-source libraries or upgrade UI5 framework.
• Migration effort from Service Control Center (SCC) to SAP4ME or IRPA (Intelligent Robotic Process Automation) to BPA (Build Process Automation)

Intelligent Features

• New use cases (PO (purchase order) item delivery date prediction, CIV (Customer invoice) payment delay prediction) for Machine Learning cockpit
• New Support Assistant
• Enhanced outlier handling while building Machine Learning Cockpit models.

Usability / User Assistance / Learning Enablement

• Detailed documentation of personal administration web services
• SAP Business ByDesign Help Documentation Available in Korean language via Machine Learning Translati...
• openSAP course for Machine Learning Cockpit

Partner Enablement and Innovation: aiming to accelerate partner consumption of solution to integrate, and/or enhance.

• ODATA enablement / enhancements for Customer Invoice Request, Sales Order fields, Supplier invoice, Purchase order, Project, Project Stock Order
• PSM read or write enablement (of cash flow, expense receipt, CPIR, PO header price components, Employee Time Agreement, Goods and Activity Confirmation, payment control process, product tax declaration etc)
• Partners have started to adopt Intelligent Enterprise technology for digital assistants like (e.g., Automate GR/IR clearing, Supplier Invoice, Health Check, Revenue Recognition)

Country/Region specific features that meet business and legal requirements can be seen at help.sap.com

Now, let's discuss what is happening this year. We are committed to continuing the journey that began in 2023, focusing on the selective development of ByD and evaluating new business scenarios or services developed on BTP that can be utilized with ByD.

Examples such as Sustainability Footprint Management and the recently launched Digital Currency Hub serve as steppingstones for future innovations, including any IE technology (following the pattern roll out with IRPA in SAP Business ByDesign now ). These sorts of innovations may come from either the SAP SME organization or from our Partners developing on BTP.

Once any new add-on become generally available for consumption in any Cloud ERP application, we will internally evaluate and facilitate its adoption by our customers and partners. We may strive to ensuring that these BTP driven innovations are easily accessible and adopted by the SME market. To stay updated, please periodically check our ByD product roadmap throughout the year

We prioritize providing guidance and transparency regarding our efforts to update our SAP Business ByDesign public roadmap. This includes:

- Ensuring compliance with legal and compliance requirements in all releases.

- Following relevant SAP product standards and regulations.

- Strengthening the built-in capabilities that support an intelligent enterprise.

- Modernizing the user experience and user assistance.

- Offering SAP-delivered fast implementation templates to accelerate implementation and reduce costs.

- Collaborating with partners to deliver side-by-side innovations with SAP BTP, supported by a "golden path" guidebook and a reference application from SAP.

- Continuously enabling partners by opening the solution to develop new or enhance existing add-ons through features like the public solution model, OData services, or improvement requests.

If you're interested in knowing more and exchange about SAP ByDesign, take advantage of this blog and/or meet us at the SME Innovation Summit in APJ (V Krishna  Anaparthi); North America (Rainer Zinow); EMEA (Antonio Sanchez Coullaut and Kristof Schneider)

Stay connected!