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Key Takeaways
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- See why it’s so critical to effectively manage complex data flows across the SAP ecosystem and external platforms.
- Employ Automic Automation to establish true, intelligent business process orchestration across your complete hybrid landscape.
- Gain centralized visibility and control to eliminate transformation risk, ensure data reliability, and improve operational efficiency.
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In today's data-driven world, harnessing the power of data by converting it into knowledge is paramount. For organizations running SAP, this means effectively managing complex data flows not just within the expanding SAP ecosystem (including S/4HANA, RISE with SAP, and Business Technology Platform (BTP) services) but also integrating seamlessly with the growing landscape of external platforms. This includes cloud data platforms, analytics tools, and artificial intelligence (AI) including those of strategic partners like Databricks.
If you’re a VP of IT operations or an SAP Basis team manager, you understand the challenges. Data pipelines—the sequences that extract, transform, load (ETL), and finally analyze data—are becoming increasingly critical and complex. These pipelines often span legacy SAP systems, modern S/4HANA environments, and various BTP services. SAP systems provide native capabilities for integration, data management, and application development, including such tools as SAP Integration Suite and SAP Datasphere. They also run alongside the broadening landscape of cloud data platforms, and specialized ETL and extract, load, and transform (ELT) tools.
The orchestration gap in modern SAP data landscapes
Fragmented tools and manual handoffs create significant hurdles:
- Heterogeneous orchestration complexity: Individual platforms offer robust tools. For example, there are native SAP schedulers for core tasks, SAP BTP services (such as Integration Suite and Datasphere) for specific integration patterns or data transformations, and cloud platforms offer their native services. However, coordinating complex, end-to-end business processes that span all these diverse environments often introduces challenges. Reliably managing intricate dependencies and possible parameters between a S/4HANA job, a BTP integration flow, a Databricks notebook, and a file transfer require a unified orchestration approach that bridges these silos.
- Lack of end-to-end visibility: When a data load into your cloud data lake is delayed, is the bottleneck arising in the S/4HANA extraction job, a BTP transformation step, the network transfer, or the cloud platform's ingestion process? Without a unified view, troubleshooting becomes reactive firefighting. In the same way, if a data load fails, is it an issue with the source data or the processing – without knowing where the issue is exactly, root cause becomes a scavenger hunt.
- Complex dependency management: Data pipelines rely on precise sequencing. A Databricks job might need to wait for multiple SAP extraction jobs to be completed successfully and for a file to be transferred to cloud storage. Reliably managing these cross-system dependencies is a major challenge for teams relying on basic schedulers.
- Ensuring timeliness and reliability: Business intelligence, planning (such as with SAP IBP), and AI initiatives depend on timely, accurate data. Delays or failures in data pipelines directly impact business decisions and outcomes.
Automic Automation: Unifying your SAP data pipeline orchestration
Automic Automation extends beyond basic job scheduling to provide true, intelligent business process orchestration across your complete hybrid landscape. With Automic, you can facilitate a smoother transformation, maintain a clean core, achieve end-to-end visibility, and maximize resilience. Powered by AI, the solution acts as a central control plane, complementing your investments in SAP by seamlessly integrating and coordinating tasks across SAP instances, BTP services, and non-SAP platforms.
Automic Automation is available as a customer-managed solution and as a SaaS offering.
Featuring SAP-certified integrations for S/4HANA, RISE with SAP, and NetWeaver, alongside dedicated adapters and templates for BTP services (like DI, IBP, and Event Mesh), Automic provides the foundation for seamless interaction within the SAP world.
Crucially, Automic excels at bridging the gap to the non-SAP world:
- Cross-platform workflow design: Visually design, manage, and monitor data pipelines seamlessly connecting SAP tasks with steps on any other platform. This includes triggering and monitoring executions within SAP BTP (like Integration Suite flows or Datasphere processes) as part of a larger, unified workflow that might also involve cloud services (such as AWS, Azure, and GCP), data lakes (like Databricks and Snowflake), ETL/ELT tools, managed file transfer (MFT), and more.
- Rich integration ecosystem: Utilize pre-built integrations or leverage robust APIs to connect virtually any tool or platform. This includes certified integrations for core SAP systems and adapters/templates designed to interact smoothly with key SAP BTP services, ensuring BTP capabilities can be orchestrated as part of broader, end-to-end automation.
- Advanced dependency and event handling: Reliably manage complex sequences based on time, job status across systems, file arrivals (for example, in cloud storage), API calls, or messages (including Kafka and MQ), ensuring your pipeline runs accurately every time.
- Clean core enabler: Orchestrate intricate cross-system data flows externally, using certified SAP interfaces and triggering relevant SAP BTP integration services where appropriate. This approach minimizes the need for custom ABAP integration logic directly within S/4HANA, ensuring you preserve your clean core and simplify upgrades. At the same time, you can enable BTP services to handle their specialized integration tasks under Automic's end-to-end coordination.
- Error handling and data validation: Go beyond simple pass/fail. Automic can evaluate job outputs or log files to determine the true business outcome of a data step and trigger appropriate remediation or alerting actions.
Gain proactive resilience with Automation Analytics & Intelligence (AAI)
Featuring seamless integration with Automic Automation, AAI transforms data pipeline monitoring from reactive to proactive. The solution offers these capabilities:
- Predictive SLA management: Forecast potential delays across eco-systems and workflows in critical data delivery milestones before they have an impact on the business, allowing time for intervention. Also, understand if you are “back on track” if, for example, a Job runs faster than expected.
- Critical path analysis: Instantly identify bottlenecks and potential “hidden dependencies” within complex, multi-step data pipelines spanning SAP and non-SAP systems.
- Unified visibility: Gain a single-pane-of-glass view across the entire pipeline execution. Monitor progress and diagnose issues, whether a step is running in S/4HANA, executing within an SAP BTP service, processing data in a cloud platform like Databricks, or transferring files. Understand the complete flow, regardless of where each task runs.
- Faster root cause analysis: Quickly pinpoint the source of failures, drastically reducing mean time to repair (MTTR) for data-related incidents.
Example scenario: Order-to-cash analytics pipeline
Imagine needing daily order-to-cash data from S/4HANA, which needs to be analyzed in Databricks and visualized in SAP Analytics Cloud. Here’s how Broadcom solutions can help:
- Automic triggers and monitors the extraction job in S/4HANA.
- Upon successful completion, Automic initiates a secure file transfer of the data extract to cloud storage (such as Azure Data Lake Storage).
- Automic triggers a Databricks notebook to ingest, transform, and process the data from cloud storage.
- Once the Databricks job is completed successfully, Automic triggers the final data load/refresh in SAP Analytics Cloud, potentially leveraging a direct call or orchestrating a relevant BTP integration process.
- AAI monitors the entire end-to-end process, generating an alert if any step is running slower than usual and threatens the delivery deadline for the analytics dashboard.
Conclusion: Master your data flows, deliver business value
Modern SAP landscapes, leveraging powerful core systems like S/4HANA and flexible platforms like SAP BTP, offer immense potential. However, realizing this potential requires mastering the flow of data across these diverse systems.
Automic Automation, enhanced by AAI, provides the unified, AI-powered orchestration needed to manage data flow complexity across your entire technology stack—including coordinating seamlessly with your SAP BTP services. By centralizing control, ensuring visibility, enabling a clean core, and providing proactive insights, Automic helps you mitigate risk in SAP transformations, ensure data reliability, improve operational efficiency, and ultimately, realize greater business value from your critical SAP and non-SAP data assets. Available both on premises and as a flexible SaaS offering (Automic SaaS), the solution adapts to your operational strategy.
Ready to streamline your SAP data pipelines? Learn more about Intelligent Orchestration for SAP.
