AI and SAP solutions: Why should small companies step up the game

The unbiased look on SAP.

For managing customer relationships, solutions powered by SAP have been and are the most popular and promising ones for many years. But, the majority of both owners and users are still in the dark about the real possibilities of SAP which, indeed, remains unused and unknown. Why so, and why is nobody talking about it?

Being a part of the SAP crew for over 15 years, I’m still concerned about one thing: what we actually use is just the tip of the iceberg. The one who set all the development movement is the sector of big enterprises developing SAP, but what we have is just making us all sleepy, and be satisfied with primitive functions.

What if I say that everything can be different?

Time to think broader, use SAP differently

First, I have to say I’m no way intended to criticize SAP, or convince everyone of its ineffectiveness. It’s actually a great opportunity, and perhaps the most powerful one existed in the market today for transforming businesses and enterprises in a simple way. The central goal of this article is about another thing — helping SAP customers realize their full potential.

Let’s summarize SAP first. As mentioned earlier it is a leader in enterprise application software. Case in point: SAP has more than 440,000 customers in 190 countries. Its assets for 2019 are €60.229 billion. These make SAP ranks almost equally with the world tech giants like Google and Amazon, which is a really tremendous fact. But, do these figures correspond fully to the real capabilities?

Against the backdrop of the current technological leapfrog, for instance of AI, SAP should have shown us a completely different picture. Solutions presented now are working but they are limited. I guess, the vast majority of them are more about money laundering rather than growth and technological flexibility, which is so needed right now.

AI + SAP: On the market in brief

We have SAP HANA based on AI, which is great for sure, but not so as it may be. Let’s summarize SAP S4 Hana capabilities build on AI and machine learning:

Starting from SAP S / 4HANA 1709, SAP started to use such functions as SAP Leonardo Machine Learning — it is a predictive analytics function that has been added to SAP S / 4HANA 1709. In particular, the SAP Cash Application appeared, which learns to find the coincidence of parameters in the financial database of the company in order to automatically connect accounts with incoming payments. This creates more efficient general service centers and allows financiers to engage in strategic functions.

Another thing was initiated in the 1805 release of S/4 HANA Cloud, it was 12 “AI-powered scenarios,” or prepackaged workflows to take over manual tasks. These scenarios revolved around things like sales forecasting, quotation conversion, procurement, contracts, and supply chain. In subsequent versions, all these features are preserved and as for me, I have absolutely no complaints about these applications.

All these are actually good, but I think it is only a small part of opportunities that AI can give for SAP customers to cover all day-to-day processes of an enterprise and process users’ data.

Flexibility means the transformation: what we can do

Every company has access to virtually limitless resources. In the absence of worthy technological solutions, it’s time to invent your own. Being flexible and able to create new things is the key to transformation, and here are some ways for this:

1. Extract new insights from data. SAP is amassing huge numbers of data if more precisely, these figures are about 300 million thousand. Hiring professional data scientists, we can extract carious insight from data gatherers from customers and employees using SAP.
2. Implement new technologies. New technologies keep emerging, and the pace of change is getting faster. What’s SAP can use? DARQ technologies include Distributed ledger technology (DLT), AI, extended reality (XR), and quantum computing (QC). These things used alone or combined can drive the most value from adoption through innovative delivery systems (such as drones), and easy payment gateways, and more.
3. Add more AI solutions. For SAP, AI can solve a variety of problems without the use of hand-coded software containing detailed instructions. Robotics and autonomous vehicles, computer vision, — we can use all these things to make quick decisions, automate tasks, and create a positive user experience.
4. Develop more Data Attribute Recommendations. AI can help automate the processes of classifying entities by recommending categories and sub-categories such as products, stores, and users into multiple classes, using free text, numbers, and categories as input. It is especially useful for all kinds of predicting procedures like material classes, issues hierarchies, and more.
5. Service Ticket Intelligence. This one technology can automatically categorize and propose solutions based on previous experience of working with similar cases. Such an application comes in handy when there is a need to set the IT, HR, and customer support, establish procedures of making social media posts and more.
6. Document Information Extraction. It is used when applying several ML-models to digitize unstructured business documents through extracting structured information and matching it with needed data.
7. Make integration simpler. True or not, but I often come across predictions that major global consultancies for the transition to Hana are booked until 2025. All this is undoubtedly good, but for those who still manage their data with the old ERP / ECC 6.0, it will be impossible to switch to S4 Hana. AI, in turn, promises to resolve this issue, because there are already SAP partners facilitating the process of migration.

This list covers not all the possibilities you can use and adapt to your business, this is just what I managed to find, you can find other ways as well. The only limit is your imagination and disbelief that all this is possible.

Why should we Kill a Goliath: Time for small but flexible

We used to think that only large companies and famous corporations have the greatest success. We believe that power is in the hands of those with the greatest influence, resources, and well-known titles. In fact, all this has long been a stereotype, because now is the time when startups and micro-organizations can give us much more.

Startups’ business model differs from corporations' ones, and here is where the greatest advantage hides. Given the great competition in the market, a small startup has to do a lot, focusing solely on the end result and the benefits it will bring to the user. As a result, innovations are born.

A new project must propose not just a solution, but a better solution than the existing ones, and impress an audience with both affordability and usability. This approach creates an atmosphere where only the most flexible and effective survive, those who confront all possible risks, who can change their strategies to adjust and see their weaknesses and improve.

Large companies are more about statics and a certain system. But today, just like David needs to kill Goliath, only in technological context: small companies have more flexibility and passion for innovations to gain a decisive victory over big enterprises. The chance for small companies to succeed is high.

Now, there is an opportunity to think differently. Developing SAP within your project may be the right step not only to excel with your ideas but to improve the general infrastructure of SAP. Microservices can take the future of SAP into their hands and thus challenge the global giant. And if there is such an opportunity, then why not use it?

If you have some thoughts, ideas, or just the desire to discuss everything, leave the response below, or ping me anytime.

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