Accelerate transformation with SAP S4/HANA and SAP BTP integration

Navigating disruption with a powerful ERP core

Despite rapidly evolving customer demands, many organizations still rely on the legacy SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) platform, which is approaching its end of support in 2027 (with an option to extend support till 2030). They need to make a critical decision now — to migrate from ECC to future-ready SAP S/4HANA. This migration can help organizations become "cloud-first" and unlock the flexibility needed to thrive in today's dynamic business environment.

Excessive customizations in legacy SAP ECC pose a challenge for organizations. Initially, they served specific needs, but they have become a burden over time. Each software upgrade requires extensive testing and maintenance, hampering agility and stifling innovation. To overcome this, organizations should aim for a clean ERP core with minimal customization and maximum flexibility.

The powerful combination of SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) empowers organizations to break free from the limitations of legacy systems, streamline operations and enhance scalability. With a clean core and maximum flexibility, organizations can swiftly adapt to changing market dynamics, seamlessly integrate new technologies and unlock new avenues for innovation.

Propel your journey to SAP S/4HANA with SAP BTP

SAP S/4HANA not only keeps the ERP core clean but also pairs with SAP BTP to enhance the flexibility of your SAP landscape. This significantly reduces back-end customizations while opening up new opportunities to empower employees, delight customers and engage partners. By extending, integrating, and innovating with business data, organizations can leverage SAP BTP as a central and open platform for the entire SAP ecosystem. SAP BTP strategically combines a comprehensive suite of solutions, both on-premises and in the cloud, across the following key areas:

Databases and data management: BTP empowers organizations with a diverse range of data management tools and services, enabling them to capture, govern and optimize core data for superior business outcomes. It helps organizations manage data across various environments, eliminating redundancy, enhancing data quality, and ensuring compliance with data regulations.

Analytics: SAP BTP offers advanced analytics, data management and integration solutions to harness underutilized data, enabling real-time decision-making. SAP Data Intelligence Cloud provides a unified platform for managing data pipelines and integrating diverse data sources and systems. SAP Datasphere simplifies data warehousing by converging data from SAP and third-party environments into a fully managed cloud environment. SAP Analytics Cloud is a comprehensive solution for business intelligence, planning and predictive analytics, including reporting, forecasting and risk control.

Application development and integration: With SAP BTP, organizations can streamline application development, extension, and integration. It connects data, processes, and devices, propelling development, scaling up business intelligence and ensuring flawless operations in hybrid S/4HANA environments. SAP Build Process Automation offers citizen developers low-code/no-code capabilities to improve business processes. By integrating on-premise and cloud-based processes, applications, events, and data with the help of SAP Integration Suite, organizations can optimize development lifecycle, while achieving faster time to market.

Intelligent technologies: Together, SAP S/4HANA’s intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning with BTP's integration capabilities empower you to simplify complex processes, improve business outcomes and stay ahead of the curve in a competitive industry with the help of reusable services. SAP Analytics Cloud incorporates GenAI capabilities with Joule Copilot, automating reporting, uncovering insights, and creating business plans.

Approach to harness the benefits of SAP S/4HANA in synergy with SAP BTP

SAP has identified the following three-step approach to transform legacy ECC operations by combining the power of SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP. 

1. Prepare. Set the stage for a game-changing enterprise transformation in this phase. Decide whether to adopt an enterprise-wide approach or leverage existing assets/ownership to jumpstart the process. Utilize your enterprise data catalog to identify process/capability ownership to be prioritized for transformation. Classify them as foundational, core, or strategic and define their specific objectives. Leverage the analytical capabilities of SAP BTP to identify crucial key performance indicators (KPIs). It is imperative to capitalize on these insights and embrace BTP services to drive the acceleration of S/4HANA adoption.
2. Adopt. While adopting BTP and SAP S/4HANA, keep in mind known technical principles such as adopting SAP standards, keeping the core clean and extending for innovation. There are three common approaches to adopting BTP services: (1) Subscribe to BTP's SaaS service, while mapping capabilities to your functional requirements, (2) Adopt a lift-and-shift approach by migrating custom code with a preferred runtime, reducing technical debt using custom code extension services of BTP, (3) Extend and innovate by developing solutions to enhance and automate processes. At this stage, it is crucial to prioritize data exchanges across S/4HANA, BTP and other apps with a common data model.
3.  Manage. Prepare your team to deliver on S/4HANA and SAP BTP as enterprise users now want a consumer-grade experience like web apps, mobile apps, and more data. Revamp your team structure to integrate UX developers, full-stack developers, integration developers and analytics developers. Empower them as agile teams, embracing the DevOps methodology to build, run and scale efficiently. Additionally, equip your team with essential security and administration capabilities, such as SAP S/4HANA, BW/4HANA and BTP accounts and services.

Based on its interviews with several organizations using SAP BTP to integrate, extend and innovate with their SAP S/4HANA Cloud ERP systems, IDC projects that organizations will realize benefits worth more than six times their investment costs in SAP BTP with SAP S/4HANA Cloud (average three-year ROI of 514%). NTT DATA clients have streamlined business processes with internal and external stakeholders resulting in significant improvement and cost optimizations.

Reach out to our SAP services experts to help you assess where you are in bringing out the best for your business with SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP.