How to scale successfully on SAP BTP – Cloud Center of Excellence at Gebr. Heinemann
Like many other SAP customers, our customer Gebr. Heinemann is currently in the middle of an S4/Hana transformation. During this process, several existing applications have emerged that need to be rethought in the cloud world. That calls for the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), as a platform for innovation alongside the SAP Core. These new applications will be developed here.
Discovery Workshop: What can the SAP BTP do for Gebr. Heinemann?
There are countless possibilities on SAP BTP. Do you take your first steps with a use case? Or do you start with the overall housekeeping to ensure a clean basis first? Gebr. Heinemann relies on sovanta’s SAP BTP expertise to ensure that no time is lost and that the best direction is taken straight away. As a member of the SAP AppHaus Network, sovanta follows the human-centered approach to innovation, by starting the project with a workshop format to identify the real needs and pains of the end users, i.e. the IT department first. And there is of course no better place to kick off a project like this than the sovanta AppHaus Hamburg, right in the heart of Hafen City.
The Roadmap towards a Cloud Center of Excellence
With the help of sovanta’s BTP experts, a sovanta Design Thinking Coach leads the workshop with the Gebr. Heinemann team working on the BTP – from HR/IT & Data Experts to Cloud Architects. One thing quickly becomes clear: a clean basis in the form of a Cloud Center of Excellence is needed to get started with all subsequent projects on SAP BTP. A Roadmap is drawn up together, to determine which elements of the BTP should be gradually discussed and challenged in twelve intensive work sessions. This way, Gebr. Heinemann follows the sovanta offer “SAP BTP CoE Starter” and approaches all challenges one after the other in a structured program with the support of the sovanta experts.
The pillars of the Cloud Center of Excellence
The goal for Gebr. Heinemann is set: They want to combine their expertise and establish clear responsibility in a Cloud Center of Excellence. Structures and specifications need to be defined and implemented. A BTP CoE contains the following five elements:
- Leadership: Leadership within the organization on all BTP topics
- Best Practices: Development and rollout of proven methods and procedures
- Research: Research of new functions, trends, use cases and recommendations
- Support: Support for other departments and colleagues
- Training: Training and professional development of other departments and teams
Review of the Account Model & standardization for optimal use and controlling
The SAP BTP is already being used in twelve projects at Gebr. Heinemann with a monthly CPEA consumption of 40,000 credits. First, the team looks at the account structure. How many Global Accounts exist, and are all of them needed? We check within the relevant Global Accounts whether the customer is already using a best practice pattern, or which system is used to create sub-accounts. The result: the number of Global Accounts has been reduced from seven to two. A guide has been created on how to create sub-accounts for projects or shared services to start straight away with a clean structure. The guide covers individual use cases, optimizes account creation and enables future automated processes. At the same time, hierarchical structures and rules regarding naming them are defined to ensure readability and scalability – all while taking organizational structures and financial aspects into account, of course.
How does the control of authorization for the platform and the applications work?
The next step focuses on the responsibilities of individual services such as API Management, central HANA Cloud DB or Cloud Integration as well as on the appropriate authorization concept. The path leads to SAP Identity Services, Entra ID and role-based authorization. The connection to central identity and access management makes it possible to centrally manage the assignment of authorizations and on- and off-boarding. It also answers the question of how to connect individual systems such as SuccessFactors, SAC and others. Further along the roadmap, the BTP experts present the application Runtimes and evaluate the optimal use for the customer. Cloud Foundry, Kyma or ABAP Environment – which Runtime should Gebr. Heinemann use when? Here, Kyma is defined as the primary runtime for cloud native solutions, but the importance of Cloud Foundry for SAP solutions such as the SAP Integration Suite or SAP Data Intelligence is also clarified.
A true milestone: the exchange always includes Cloud ALM for monitoring the system landscape and the central question of how to replace SOLMAN with Cloud ALM? In this regard, the sovanta BTP experts also intensively exchanged ideas with the SAP product team in order to clearly demonstrate to Gebr. Heinemann the possibilities and where the concept reaches its limits. And, of course, the customers feedback also helps the SAP product team to prioritize the backlog.
This what the future looks like for Gebr. Heinemann on SAP BTP
As part of the CoE Starter, all relevant topics relating to automation, platform management, monitoring and quality assurance are gradually discussed with the BTP experts from sovanta and the best practices for Gebr. Heinemann are developed in a kind of Think Tank. All unanswered questions relating to BTP are answered, documented and finally put into practice – first manually and then automatically after an initial review. Whether Advanced Event Mesh, Terraform for BTP or the use of the AI Core, with the SAP BTP CCoE, the team at Gebr. Heinemann should have all the right answers to the question “How do we do this on SAP BTP?”.
Would you like to know more about BTP CoE?
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Photo source: Gebr. Heinemann Mediathek
