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Key Takeaways
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- See how SAP S/4HANA or RISE with SAP must integrate seamlessly with a complex ecosystem.
- Find out how relying solely on fragmented scripting approaches leads to visibility gaps, brittle integrations, and more.
- Employ Automic Automation to achieve end-to-end orchestration across SAP and non-SAP environments and boost resilience.
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The journey to SAP S/4HANA or RISE with SAP represents a significant strategic step, promising enhanced agility, real-time insights, and a modernized core for your business. You've planned the SAP aspects meticulously. But are you prepared for the often-underestimated challenge lurking beyond the core SAP system: the hybrid cloud wall?
For most organizations, the new S/4HANA or RISE environment doesn't exist in isolation. It must integrate seamlessly with a complex tapestry of existing systems:
- Legacy SAP ECC instances running critical processes.
- On-premises data centers.
- Kubernetes.
- Private clouds.
- Multiple public cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
- Vital non-SAP applications, including CRM, supply chain, data warehouses, data lakes and lake houses, and, not to forget, possibly mainframes.
- SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) services.
Transformations often encounter turbulence in supporting this hodgepodge of an ecosystem. The unforeseen complexity of orchestrating business processes that span this hybrid landscape can quickly derail timelines, inflate budgets, and introduce significant operational risk.
Why native tools and basic schedulers fall short
While SAP provides tools for managing tasks within its environment, they often struggle when processes cross system boundaries into the more expansive hybrid estate.
Relying solely on native schedulers or fragmented scripting approaches leads to common frustrations:
- Visibility gaps: It is difficult to track an end-to-end process (like order-to-cash or procure-to-pay workflows) when it involves steps in S/4HANA, a cloud data platform, and an on-premises fulfillment system.
- Brittle integrations: Custom scripts and point-to-point integrations are hard to maintain, prone to breaking during upgrades, and lack sophisticated error handling.
- Manual handoffs: Delays and errors creep in when human intervention or fixed time buffers are required to bridge automation gaps between different systems or platforms.
- Clean core compromises: When faced with complex, cross-system workflow requirements, teams may be pressured to build intricate custom ABAP code within the S/4HANA core, negating the benefits of a clean core strategy and hindering future agility.
- Transformation roadblocks: Re-engineering tangled integrations become a significant hurdle, slowing the adoption of S/4HANA or RISE and delaying value realization.
Simply put, managing SAP jobs isn't enough. You need to orchestrate business processes across your entire complex hybrid ecosystem.
Automic Automation: The intelligent orchestration bridge
Automic Automation provides the essential bridge needed to establish end-to-end orchestration across your hybrid environments. Automic is available both as a customer-managed solution (for on-premises or cloud deployment) and as a comprehensive SaaS offering (Automic SaaS). For nearly three decades, Automic has been proven to excel in managing complex workloads within large-scale SAP environments. The solution is aligned with the intricacies of SAP, but critically, the platform is designed for the entire enterprise, not just the SAP silo.
Powered by AI, Automic acts as a central nervous system for your hybrid IT landscape, providing robust security and offering these capabilities:
- Certified, seamless SAP integration: Automic boasts official SAP certifications for integrating RISE with SAP, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP NetWeaver. It ensures robust, supported, and adaptable connectivity to your core SAP systems, including managing SAP variants dynamically, monitoring parent/child relationships, and intercepting jobs. It also provides deep integration with the wider SAP ecosystem, including SAP BTP, Business Intelligence (BI), Data Intelligence (DI), Integrated Business Planning (IBP), and more.
- True hybrid cloud orchestration: With Automic, you can go beyond SAP-centric scheduling. From a central console, you can design, manage, and monitor complex workflows that seamlessly connect your S/4HANA or RISE environment with any other system—including non-SAP applications, mainframes, cloud-native services (including AWS Lambda and Azure Functions), data pipelines (such as Databricks), Kubernetes clusters, and legacy infrastructure.
- Enabling a clean core strategy: This is crucial. Automic allows you to externalize complex, cross-system logic and integrations. Instead of embedding brittle custom code within SAP, you orchestrate these interactions outside the core using SAP's certified APIs (like BAPIs and RFCs). This keeps your S/4HANA core clean, simplifies upgrades, reduces technical debt, and maximizes the value of SAP, regardless of deployment in RISE, GROW or on-premises.
- Eliminate transformation risk: Automic's modular design allows you to automate processes involving your current ECC system and then adapt and reuse that automation logic as you transition workloads to S/4HANA or RISE, whether on-premises or in the cloud. This phased approach ensures business continuity and significantly reduces integration workload during the transition.
- Boost resilience with Automation Analytics & Intelligence (AAI): AAI is seamlessly integrated with Automic, adding a crucial layer of operational and business insights. Move beyond reactive firefighting with predictive SLA management—so you can identify potential breaches before they occur and also understand if you are back on track. The solution offers dynamic critical path analysis, enabling fast pinpointing of bottlenecks across complex hybrid workflows. Harness intelligent remediation capabilities and gain deep visibility into process execution, ensuring your critical SAP-dependent processes remain resilient during and after the transition.
Beyond scheduling: Achieving true business agility
The goal of your S/4HANA or RISE initiative isn’t just a technical upgrade; it's about generating business value. Automic Automation enables value by offering these advantages:
- Accelerate business cycles: Speed up critical processes, like billing or supply chain logistics, that depend on multiple systems interacting reliably.
- Reduce operational costs: Minimize manual effort, consolidate disparate tools, and reduce errors associated with complex integrations.
- Improve compliance and auditability: Establish centralized control and comprehensive audit trails, simplifying governance across your hybrid landscape.
- Boost agility: Respond faster to business needs by integrating SAP with modern tools and platforms, and enabling easy modification or extension of workflows.
Don't let integration complexity stall your SAP transformation
Your move to S/4HANA or RISE is too important to be jeopardized by the hybrid cloud wall. Native tools alone are insufficient for the complex, interconnected reality of modern enterprise IT. With Automic, you can bridge the gap.
Automic enables you to streamline transformation, maintain a clean core, achieve end-to-end visibility, and boost resilience across your entire SAP and non-SAP landscape. Plus, Automic is available as a customer-managed solution (for on-premises or cloud deployment) and as a SaaS offering.
Ready to break through the wall?
If you're ready to move beyond basic job scheduling and unlock true business agility for your S/4HANA or RISE transformation, we've got you covered. Our new eBook, Mastering Your SAP Landscape: Intelligent Orchestration For SAP, shows you how unified, intelligent orchestration across the entire business process chain can make all the difference.
