ASUG’s SAP BTP findings reveal new pathways to ROI with Redwood

SAP users have been enthusiastically exploring what’s possible with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) for quite a few years. Its ability to support application development, automation, data and analytics and integration in a unified portfolio empowers all kinds of businesses as they modernize technologies and processes. 

The latest report from Americas’ SAP User Group (ASUG), ”How to Unlock the Value of SAP BTP,” reveals that “organizations are increasingly choosing to strategically leverage SAP BTP within SAP S/4HANA journeys.”

Notably, 55% of ASUG members now use SAP BTP, and 73% of SAP BTP users are leveraging it for an SAP S/4HANA transformation. These numbers demonstrate that SAP BTP is no longer just an optional add-on but a core component of modern SAP landscapes.

Because of its diverse capabilities, SAP BTP can introduce complexity and additional IT expertise or other resources for executing new innovations in your SAP environment. Even successful companies struggle to make the most of their technology, especially when it encompasses cloud apps and comprehensive solutions like SAP BTP. To truly harness its capabilities, you need a robust strategy for managing and orchestrating the innovations you’re creating across a diverse tech stack.

RunMyJobs by Redwood, the only workload automation (WLA) solution included in the RISE reference architecture, can help you achieve frictionless automation and orchestration across your business activities, applications and data management.

Here, we’ll review insights from the report about which SAP BTP functions ASUG members are prioritizing to help you draw inspiration and plan for using RunMyJobs to optimize all the great innovations you create in SAP BTP.

“Under the wider BTP umbrella, the most valuable technologies for organizations using the solution involve integration, analytics and process automation components.” 

p. 3, “How to Unlock the Value of SAP BTP”

Integration: Keeping your connections efficient and predictable

69% of SAP BTP users say integration is key.

But page 3 states, “While connecting business applications and data across the enterprise remains the top priority for survey respondents, fewer respondents were able to achieve this benefit compared to 2023.”

This discrepancy suggests you should look for easy integration as a core feature of any complementary solutions you select. RunMyJobs orchestrates complex integration workflows to achieve autonomous integration across SAP and non-SAP systems. Out-of-the-box, purpose-built connectors enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your customizations.

Let’s say you’re a global manufacturer managing complex supply chain and production processes. 

• You feed customer orders from a third-party CRM solution to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, triggering a series of interdependent processes spanning different solutions for procurement, production and logistics, all connected using SAP BTP Integration Suite.
• While these processes are connected, numerous tasks and activities must be completed to ensure smooth interaction across multiple applications.
• RunMyJobs complements SAP BTP Integration Suite by autonomously orchestrating the necessary steps to optimize integrations built in SAP BTP. It might trigger validations of your bill of materials (BOM) in SAP IBP, automate purchase orders being sent to suppliers via SAP Ariba and kick off notifications to your MES and logistics systems about production and delivery schedules.

Data fabrics: Supporting your key decisions

61% of SAP BTP users name analytics as a top-priority component.

Handling data efficiently and being able to utilize insights effectively is, understandably, a major concern for forward-thinking businesses amidst a cloud transformation. As the report states on page 4, “Data management will be crucial in fully unlocking the potential of SAP BTP.” 

Many SAP BTP users employ SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud to simplify data management. Yet, simultaneously using a legacy job scheduler will result in a vulnerable, ironically disconnected environment in which clean core strategies in your SAP S/4HANA system can be compromised.

RunMyJobs schedules, triggers and monitors sequential task chains required to move data across your entire tech stack into SAP BTP data management tools. In other words, your data flows — to and from SAP BTP solutions — are fast, consistent and accurate.

If you’re a retailer, you might use SAP Datasphere to extract, transform and load sales, customer and inventory data from Shopify into an SAP S/4HANA or SAP Analytics Cloud system. To execute this data flow, you must build, schedule, trigger and monitor many individual data movement tasks. Doing this manually is time-consuming and error-prone, but RunMyJobs’ WLA capabilities optimize the process.

Automation: Driving your mission-critical processes

55% of SAP BTP users are focusing on process automation.

It’s not surprising that SAP BTP users are increasingly focused on automation. SAP BTP can automate simple to moderately complex processes. This can relieve teams of the burden of repetitive tasks and activities. On page 5, the report acknowledges, “Embracing automation will drive efficiency.”

But if you’re extending your environment to the cloud, you’ll likely have to build a lot of custom automations. And holding onto a legacy scheduler will saddle you with the burden of maintaining, updating and QA’ing your scripts and fragile endpoints.

Enterprise WLA with RunMyJobs allows you to run and monitor large volumes of background jobs, transactions and highly complex, interdependent processes across your entire IT landscape. Not only can you automate, but you can visualize the process and quickly identify and resolve any errors or bottlenecks. For example, you can streamline the order-to-cash process — importing hundreds of thousands of sales orders at a time from your CRM to SAP S/4HANA for mass credit checks and invoice generation, then processing and matching customer payments. 

AI: Seizing new opportunities 

34% of SAP BTP users cite the importance and value of AI.

There’s no denying that AI needs to be part of the conversation, but as SAP and other technology providers rapidly upgrade their AI models and offerings, it will become more difficult to understand how to fit it into your everyday processes without introducing new frustrations or roadblocks. 

SAP’s AI strategy involves providing tools and services within SAP BTP to enable users to develop and integrate AI-driven features into SAP solutions. This includes access to pre-built AI models, development environments and integration with established AI frameworks.

As a leading automation company with 30 years of experience, Redwood Software takes a cautious and strategic approach to implementing the latest AI technology in sensitive scenarios. Through best-in-class automation practices, RunMyJobs ensures the continuous flow of information feeding SAP AI models is accurate, timely and unbiased across your data pipelines.

What’s your ROI for SAP BTP?

While more users say they can fully leverage SAP BTP solutions (46%) than in the previous year’s report, 33% still say “No.” Integration hurdles, inconsistent data flows, fragmented automation and uncertainty around emerging technologies such as AI can get in the way of extracting its full value. Without the right approach, you could miss out on many of SAP BTP’s advantages and finding its strengths to be sources of complexity instead.

To fully leverage SAP BTP, consider an enterprise-grade WLA platform designed for automating highly complex, end-to-end processes across multiple applications. These processes are long-running, handle high transaction and data volumes, operate on strict daily timelines and are mission-critical. Failure can put your entire business at risk. 

RunMyJobs can schedule those processes, such as data backups, batch processing, file transfers, workflow approvals, monitoring and more across many different transactions, systems and technologies.

Explore more about how to increase the long-term value of your SAP investment with an SAP-certified partner that co-innovates with SAP.