- SAP Managed Tags
A Wave of Modern Digital Workplace
In today's business landscape, digitalization and innovation pose significant challenges for companies. To meet the ever-evolving needs of customers, businesses must swiftly adopt cloud solutions. However, progress is often hindered by limited resources and the complexities of maintaining IT infrastructures with multiple applications. To overcome these challenges, companies need to adopt digital processes, reduce technological obstacles, and empower both experts and citizen developers to drive innovation.
This blog post will explore how SAP Build Workzone empowers companies to unleash the full potential of their central digital workplace, creating a more connected and efficient ecosystem for suppliers.
Background & Business Challenges
Customer is committed to becoming an Intelligent Enterprise by leveraging the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). To achieve this, they are dedicated to modernizing and replacing outdated business processes, empowering IT professionals and business users with tools to efficiently create engaging business sites for employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. A suitable replacement for the current landscape of supplier resources and applications is imperative. The scattered information throughout the enterprise lacks a centralized access point, causing inefficiencies in navigating through numerous disconnected systems. Decentralized content creation further hinders the development of flexible business sites and pages. The customer’s objective is to boost user productivity and engagement through interactive workspaces, forums, and knowledge-based articles. By centralizing information and facilitating efficient content creation, the company aims to create a seamless and productive environment for all users.
Customer's Vision to Elevate Supplier Engagement
The vision for the Supplier Portal is the ultimate centralized platform for Vendors/Suppliers and external partners. The aim is to provide easy access to all necessary resources in one location, including the Supplier Handbook, Supplier Resources, Proxied Applications, Contingent Worker Resources, and the option to access the Restricted Supplier Portal content. The customer worked with the SAP MaxAttention team to create a Digital Workplace that is agile and consistent with SAP's user experience. In this process, the team incorporated the latest innovations of BTP to provide a better user experience and easier content management. After a successful proof-of-concept, the team confidently deployed the updated content for productive usage through internal and external user onboarding processes
SAP MaxAttention Engagement
The success of this project is a true testament to SAP MaxAttention’s expertise and commitment to delivering exceptional results. During this engagement, SAP MaxAttention team worked along with SAP Build Work Zone Product Development and the customer’s CoE teams. This collaboration resulted in quick ROI and increased value by maximizing existing SAP solutions, specifically in the space of SAP Build subscription. SAP Build is powered by SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) which enables business experts to easily create and augment enterprise applications, automate tedious processes, and design engaging business sites by using visual tools and a rich set of services and pre-built content. SAP Build capabilities include:
- SAP Build Code – SAP Build Code provides generative AI-based code development with Joule copilot, optimized for Java and JavaScript application development. It offers a turn-key environment for coding, testing, integrations, and application lifecycle management.
- SAP Build Apps – Evolution of AppGyver to build mobile and web applications with a pixel-perfect design using the drag-and-drop functionality and a rich component library.
- SAP Build Process Automation – Offers task and process automation leveraging robotic process automation (RPA) bots, workflows, forms, embedded artificial intelligence (AI), business rules, and decisions.
- SAP Build Work Zone – Allows the creation of enterprise-grade custom business sites using new capabilities such as a flexible page builder and context-aware integrated UI cards.
Architecture
Below is the architecture of the digital Supplier Portal in SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition.
Delivery Scope
Setup of SAP Build Work Zone
For the platform preparation, we started with onboarding activities in SAP BTP, for example, Sub-account setup, setting up SAML Trust with PingIDP for authentication, user management & provisioning, and authorization management, data privacy, workspace setup to configure areas and workspace.
Building a Central Entry Point (Home Page)
The company's home page has been redesigned and now serves as the landing page for the website, featuring protected content. The customer team has been given the authority to distinguish between the administrative aspects of the SAP Build Work Zone landing page and to use pre-built templates and layouts to implement best practices. The objective is to differentiate between the usage of different widgets and to decide whether to build a Workspace or leave the content on the Home Page.
Supplier Handbook
Supplier Handbook workspace hosts a collection of key resources and assets (e.g., revision-controlled documents) used by customer’s Vendors/Suppliers. Private workspace access is only for onboard suppliers. Some of the key requirements were to have an intuitive user experience, manage contents and their versions, and send communication to the stakeholders whenever changes are made to the contents.
Supplier Resources
Supplier Resources is a public workspace that hosts a collection of resources and assets needed for supplier onboarding. The customer’s prospective and established suppliers can find all the publicly available documents, process documentation, and answers to frequently asked questions related to the customer’s Account Payable, Invoicing Process, etc. This workspace also provides an entry point to the Supplier Handbook that provides access to protected resources.
Just-In-Time Reports Integration via SAP Build Process Automation
One of the requirements of the project is to enable vendors to view stocking reports in real-time. To achieve this, we leveraged SAP Build Process Automation. SAP Build Process Automation is a citizen developer solution to adapt, improve, and innovate business processes with no-code workflow management and robotic process automation capabilities.
Using this tool, we developed unattended BOT to publish reports from BI and S/4HANA. On a periodical basis, automatic synch between the FTP and the SAP Build Work Zone is triggered. This business requirement was prototyped using SAP Build Work Zone OData API. The below diagrams illustrate the technical architecture of the solution.
Supplier Registration Forms
To fulfill the need for supplier diversity, the existing registration form for suppliers to request access to a private workspace contains various form controls. The form includes multipage reports, and dynamic content, and retains automatic answers to meet the key requirements.
Outcomes
Empowered Business Users with Enterprise-Grade Business Sites
SAP Build Work Zone advanced edition enables business users to boost productivity and engagement by creating digital workplace solutions. This platform provides a central entry point for accessing business processes, applications, communication, and information from any device.
Business Value:
- Improve productivity by accessing apps, processes, and information all in one place.
- Experience a seamlessly integrated environment across SAP and third-party apps to accommodate collaboration tools and integrated information
- With SAP Build Work Zone as a collaboration platform, users will have all the resources needed to make informed decisions faster
- Say goodbye to clunky workflows, and hello to a world of efficient business apps, reports, and information that promote collaboration and drive success
Key Milestones:
- Project Duration: < 4 months
- Unified and Intelligent work experience by providing central access to apps, tasks, notifications, information, and communication.
- Optimize Business Processes with employees, partners, customers & suppliers.
- Reduce TCO by leveraging existing investments in the SAP Business Technology Platform and harmonization of existing systems and repositories.
- Integrated collaboration capabilities that can be extended to other business processes
- Seamless SAP and third-party apps integration
- Establish Central Inbox
Following are some of the business KPIs:
Contact persons:
SAP MaxAttention CoE: Kiran Kola, Rohit Dwivedi
SAP Product Management: Florian Buech
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