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I’ve had the honor of going to many SAP Sapphire editions in the past already. But 2024 was a very special one for me. It was the first time I went to Orlando in my new role as Head of Product Management of Application Development, Automation, and Integration on SAP BTP. From attending the ASUG Pre-Conference on Monday, June 3rd to Day 3 of Sapphire on June 6th, the week was full of buzzing customer conversations and amazing feedback to our announcements. Let me give you a recap of the new functionalities we unveiled in Orlando and share my personal take aways with you.
If you missed it on June 4th, Christian Klein kicked off SAP Sapphire with an upbeat keynote that highlighted the company’s latest business AI innovations. Indeed, Christian outlined how AI will deliver real business benefits for different corporate functions. Christian also explained how SAP developers have transformed SAP’s portfolio “from an ERP system that enabled transactions in real time, to a system with modular applications and embedded AI so that you can run intelligent, connected, and sustainable enterprises.”
Later that day, in his Innovation Keynote, Juergen Mueller unveiled a lot of new capabilities in SAP BTP, designed to simplify and accelerate Application Development, Automation and Integration, in the context of extending SAP ERP in compliance with our Clean Core strategy.
The demo presented by Cecilia Huergo during the keynote showcased an end-to-end example of creating an extension for S/4HANA Cloud, from process analysis to process improvement with automation leveraging SAP Build, SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX:
Let me summarize the many improvements that we put in our solutions on SAP BTP regarding Application Development, Automation and Integration.
Clean core advancements with Joule for SAP Build Code & ABAP Cloud
SAP’s Clean Core strategy for your ERP brings the stability of standardization with the flexibility to innovate: indeed, by standardizing the processes and data underlying ERP operations, your business can benefit from more best practices and customize what it needs to differentiate itself. Following Clean Core strategy, you will
- Reach new levels of IT efficiency and mitigate risks to the business
- Execute decision-making and actions better with improved data quality
- Accelerate innovation with regular upgrades and powerful development tools
With the new capabilities we added in SAP Build Code, SAP developers will be able to
- Use Gen AI to generate code optimized for SAP development
- Automatically create data models, sample data, unit tests and SAP Fiori elements apps. Enhance & explain existing SAPUI5 code.
- Accelerate development with guided experiences and templates
The added value we bring for SAP developers is huge. Indeed, they can leverage AI to
- generate CAP projects and SAP Fiori element apps directly from business requirement documents
- write freestyle SAPUI5 code
- generate ABAP Cloud projects
You can read more on this topic in Alessandro Biagi’s blog post “Develop with Joule in SAP Build Code”, in Oliver Graeff’s “Joule for freestyle SAPUI5 development in SAP Build Code”, and also in “SAP Fiori tools 2403 introduces Gen AI capability and more”.
With these latest additions, SAP Build Code is now optimized for Java, JavaScript and ABAP application development, boosting developers with generative AI-based code development with Joule copilot.
Direct access to SAP Build from S/4HANA Cloud
Our aim is to provide a contextualized experience when creating extensions for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, satisfying needs of both key users and professional developers, in order to offer extensibility use cases based on user needs and expertise, and make extensibility more accessible to inexperienced users, all of this backed by user research.
To be more precise, we will bring:
- A wizard for bootstrapping the creation of side-by-side extension on SAP Line-of-Business applications, starting with S/4HANA Cloud
- Direct integration of SAP S/4HANA with SAP Build
This integrated SAP Build experience will enable key users and developers access SAP Build directly from SAP S/4HANA Cloud to automate processes, build applications and extensions, and create digital workspaces faster, right from where it is needed in the exact context of their ERP.
We plan to make this available in Q3 2024 in SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud, 2025 in SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud.
SAP Build is the go-to extension layer for Joule
This new feature will enable our customers to extend Joule by creating custom skills as actions using advance GenAI capabilities. You will be able to use the existing SAP Build design time to create Joule extensibility, to add custom skills that can enhance Joule by leveraging:
- SAP and non-SAP data sources
- Document grounding
- GenAI capabilities
- SAP Build content artifacts
Here, our plan is to make this available for Early Adopters around SAP TechEd season in Q4 2024. You can watch the demo of Joule extensibility with SAP Build during Juergen Mueller's Innovation Keynote:
Stay tuned for more!
Generate models, automations, workflows and integration flows using natural language
SAP Build Process Automation will as well be enriched with Joule. Our GenAI-based copilot will allow you to
- Accelerate process automation scenarios development via generative AI powered process artifacts generation
- Raise efficiency with AI-driven recommendations within your automations
- Generate integration flows by leveraging generative AI and Unified Customer Landscape
- Utilize AI & machine learning to detect anomalies
- Generate recommended process models and process performance indicators
With Artifacts Generation and Modification, business experts will be able to describe a process in natural language, interact and iterate to finalize desired process flow and Joule will generate the process, including automations, forms and decisions (business policies) that fits their requirement.
Recommendations and Validation will allow Joule to provide content recommendation from process description, selecting pre-built content from the store. It will also perform gap analysis with real-time identification of gaps before the artifacts generation.
Summarization will let Joule create a short or comprehensive description of complex historical or newly generated complex artifacts, for instance the summary of a complex decision table. You will be able to share or save the description along with the artifact.
These improvements have been designed in the context of our Enterprise Automation initiative: indeed, our aim is to future proof your journey to become an intelligent enterprise running business processes automated end-to-end.
Continued SAP Process Orchestration move support
2 months ago, I wrote a blog post explaining why you should migrate from on-premise SAP PI/PO to the Cloud with SAP Integration Suite. To further support this migration, we have made comprehensive announcements:
- Migration factory, including free 2-3 weeks service
- Asset interoperability, allowing to reuse mappings, data types, and message types
- Automated migration and assessment tools
- Regression test tools by partners INT4 and Figaf
- Digital badge for Partners
- Migration guide for SAP Process Orchestration
For more information on how to smoothly transition to the cloud from SAP Process Orchestration, making the move to a modernized integration landscape with SAP Integration Suite, please visit our dedicated Transition to Cloud product page.
Guided experiences in SAP Build Work Zone
Navigating complex business processes can leading to inefficiencies or mistakes and generate user frustration. To address these challenges, both SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition, and SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone are now offering a differentiated capability called guided experiences. This enables business users to simplify complex business processes into self-service journeys that are easy to follow and execute.
In SAP Build Work Zone, you will benefit of a wide set of guided experiences, that will allow you to easily and seamlessly
- Create a Guided Process as new artefact in SAP Build Process Automation
- Add (parallel) stages and steps with Work Zone (widgets, cards…) as step UI
- Select the Guided Process as template for wizard layout (new) or create empty one (existing)
- Add wizard layout to any work page, and widgets and UI cards to each step
- Save user progress on Work Zone for gradual completion
To deep dive on this topic, read this blog post from Lucinda Huang: “What’s new with SAP Build Work Zone guided experiences”.
My key personal take aways
For me, it has been a very energizing event… and to be honest with you, also a bit tiring: I had so many meetings across the huge show floor that I have walked about 10 km per day 3 days in a row, which is excellent for my health! 😉
More seriously, as I said in the beginning, I attended a few SAP Sapphire editions already, and I’m still happy to measure how engaged our partners and customers are. But this year I’ve been impressed to see the knowledge they already have on SAP BTP in general and on our solutions for application development, automation and integration in particular. Very few people were coming to our booth to ask “What is SAP Build exactly?”. At the contrary, right after Juergen Mueller’s keynote, customers rushed to our booth, explaining that they were already using SAP Build, or SAP Integration Suite, and wanted to know more on the innovations we presented, when exactly they are planned in our road map etc.
Some customers, partners and even analysts have told me that they now fully understand that we had a long term plan: to launch SAP Intelligent RPA 5 years ago, then to merge RPA and BPM tools in a comprehensive process automation solution, then to bring low-code experience to create SAP Build, then to extend it to pro-code development with SAP Build Code, and in the near future to also cover ABAP… and all of this now powered by generative AI with Joule!
As said the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, "life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards". And for sure we will continue moving forward to bring you the best solutions on SAP BTP to extend and integrate your SAP ERP and LoB applications.
Stay innovation ready with SAP BTP!
You can measure how fast SAP BTP is evolving to bring you the most efficient tools for supporting your innovation endeavors. Now more than ever, you can count on SAP to help you creating new extensions, applications, process automations, business sites, and to better integrate the diverse components of your IT landscape. Read all news in the official SAP Sapphire 2024 News Guide.
