Keynote: Meeting Today’s Challenges and Tomorrow’s Opportunities with SAP Technology

Hello and welcome to SAP TechEd Day 2. I hope you're enjoying the conference, you make use of all the learning opportunities and interact with our experts. I was super excited when I learned how many registrations we have from all over the world. Actually, this TechEd is the largest SAP technology event ever and there are many SAP colleagues involved as well to deliver this program. And I want to thank them and I want to thank you for joining us again. After a deep dive into the SAP Business Tec

hnology Platform yesterday, we'll take a slightly different perspective in today's keynote. Today, we will show you how the SAP Business Technology Platform empowers many players in the SAP ecosystem. And for that let me share a short personal story because actually my second touchpoint with SAP was during an internship while I was studying at an SAP partner. I always worked when I was studying and in 2005 I was recruited by an SAP consulting firm. I was immediately made responsible to help them

get a particular SAP certification. And that certification was super important for them because with the certificate they could reach an entirely new customer segment. So, I needed to learn a lot. I worked a lot, even slept in the office from time to time. And in the end, we got it done with the great help of SAP colleagues who then certified their partner. And that time was when I learned how important a great collaboration between SAP and the ecosystem is. So, to show you some examples where

our technology is used in the SAP ecosystem, we invited great partners, customers, SAP experts for a chat in this nice virtual living room. You might have seen it yesterday and I would like to highlight it again. We want to become even more developer friendly by providing you the tools that you need - whether it's about integration, extensibility or to make sense of the diverse data in your company. Developers throughout the SAP ecosystem no matter in what role, no matter which skill set, even i

f you cannot code, you can use the technologies of the SAP Business Technology Platform. Let's have a look at what this can mean for our community. And for that I have invited Thomas Jung, He is heading Developer Advocacy at SAP, and Jhodel Cailan, he is a Technical Architect at an SAP partner. Hey Jhodel, hey Thomas, nice to meet you! Hi Juergen, pleasure to be here. - Yes, thanks for having us. - Welcome to this virtual living room. Jhodel, yesterday I talked about different developer personas

and we had a session with Thomas as well. And in reality, many different personas actually live in one person. And you are such a person. Would you mind sharing a little bit of your background? What have you done in the past? What are you doing now? - In my developer journey, I've been in all sorts of developer personas. I started with ABAP, then moved to UI5 and then HANA. Revolving around web and mobile app development. As an SAP partner I can see myself being able to help SAP customers make

sense of the wide range of SAP Cloud Platform offerings and identify what would be best suited for their business needs. Nowadays, I'm more interested in developing applications on SAP Cloud Platform as a side-by-side extension or SAP's Cloud and on-premise solutions. And in particular, I'm using SAP Cloud Application Programming Model, also known as CAP, to develop these app extensions. Jhodel, this is great to hear. Thanks for sharing that. And we had a discussion last week already and I follo

wed your contributions in the SAP Community. I think you're a role model. Thank you very much. And also, thanks to all the SAP mentors out there and everyone contributing to the SAP Community. Thomas, in your role of course you interact a lot with the community. So, do you see these kind of transitions often? Yes, it's quite common. We see developers coming from different backgrounds and experiences and all needing to converge in the SAP space. This was actually a topic of the developer keynote

here at TechEd, where we saw a traditional ABAB developer, a former ABAP developer who had made the switch over to the Cloud Application Programming Model and a pure Cloud Native developer who came from outside the SAP ecosystem. And all three of these developers were working together on a single project. And what we see is that developers want to continue to be productive and reuse their existing skill set but bring that into the cloud in a very comfortable manner. So, in the end it's all about

growing your skill set and adding to that developer toolbox without having to start all over. And that's true regardless of whatever your starting point is. It's not just about ABAP developers moving to the cloud but it could be just as is real for Kubernetes developers who maybe aren't as familiar with traditional SAP applications but they need to also bring their development skill set into our ecosystem as well. Very true. Thanks for sharing that, Thomas. Jhodel, you mentioned you're using th

e SAP Cloud Platform Application Programming Model, CAP. Can you share a little bit, how does it help you achieve more for your customers? And Thomas, please also chime in. - Sure, we have built solution extensions for customers in the past. This is running on SAP HANA on-premise and now we have rebuilt this solution extension using CAP Model. The strategy behind this is to build custom applications that will run on SAP Cloud Platform in order to benefit from ease of deployment and scalability a

nd also to keep the custom applications separate from the customer's S/4HANA on-premise system. We chose to use the CAP Model because it helps us to build cloud applications quickly and it comes with enterprise qualities out-of-the-box. And in order to build the applications we use SAP Business Application Studio. That way we instantly get all the required tools needed for both frontend and backend applications development. I think you have prepared something here, so let's show that. For the i

ndividual developer, Business Application Studio also gives you the freedom to use graphical wizards, editors, or use the command line for example when creating a new project as you can see here. Obviously, it doesn't stop at creating a project. For example, if you modify or create new CDS models in your CAP development project, developers have the choice to use the text editor or the graphical CBS editor. For frontend applications, we use Fiori elements using Fiori tools. Let me jump in here to

comment on how to create frontend applications with the Business Application Studio. The Business Application Studio also supports developers in quickly creating frontends. Wizards and templates help to kick-start frontend development. And that's what you're seeing here. Of course, this is just a simple UI but Jhodel as a pro can push things even further. Absolutely right. Thanks for mentioning that, Thomas. This is what you can achieve if you invest a little bit more time to make the templates

look nice. I did this because I want to show how far you can go using Fiori elements without writing a single line of code. So, to summarize, for specific use cases the Cloud Application Programming Model brings the best concepts of ABAP that allow developers to focus on their business logic and not all the underlying technological details. But he does this on a foundation of Java and JavaScript and it also allows us to target multiple runtimes: Cloud Foundry, Kyma and even serverless. Thank yo

u so much, Jhodel and Thomas. I could actually listen to that all day long. And I just want to add one more thing, as we talked about multiple runtimes in general and also our SAP Cloud Platform, Cloud Foundry environment in particular. Let me highlight one additional very important topic for the SAP ecosystem here. I already addressed that last year at SAP TechEd and it's still valid. And this means that your investments in Cloud Foundry are safe. So as long as we support S/4HANA we will also s

upport Cloud Foundry or a similar future runtime. We want to give you the choice of runtime. Thomas mentioned it and in the end it's this diversity of runtimes and cross-consumable services with containerization that will give you the freedom and openness to evolve from where you need to be today to where you need to be in the future. The business value of our services like Workflow Management, Identity Management defines our platform and not a specific runtime. But let's get back to Thomas and

Jhodel. Thomas, we talked about certain new features in the Business Application Studio and I know you want to share something with the community. So, when talking to the community, one of the first things that they usually ask us about is when the HANA tools are going to come to the Business Application Studio. And particularly for those developers that combine the Cloud Application Programming Model and HANA native development they've really been looking for these tools. And in fact, that's wh

at we're seeing right now is actually the graphical calculation view editor embedded inside the Business Application Studio. This is all functionality that's coming very soon for customers. And then finally we even see the calculation view and other HANA artifacts being deployed into the HANA database. Thanks for sharing that, Thomas. As you can see, with the Business Technology Platform we are integrating our technologies with each other. For example you saw how we are embedding our SAP HANA to

ols into the Business Application Studio. Thank you, Jhodel. Thank you, Thomas. It was great having you here. - Thanks, Juergen, for inviting us. Take good care. - Thanks. It's been great fun. We just saw how an individual developer in the SAP ecosystem uses our technology and as part of our evolved company strategy we are putting more emphasis on industry specific solutions. Let's now take a broader view on how our partners can build on the Business Technology Platform to support their customer

s across all industries. And what is important here is, we cannot and we do not want to build all those modular cloud solutions for the 25 industries that we serve ourselves. Up to 80 percent of SAP Industry Cloud solutions will come from partners. So, we will divide and conquer in a very transparent way. All solutions are building on the capabilities of the SAP Business Technology Platform. We are currently carrying out transformation projects with partners like Bosch, Honeywell or Siemens. The

y are all key players in their industries and we combine their industry knowledge with our competencies to deliver end-to-end business processes in order to solve customer challenges together. And let's discuss an example of how our Industry Cloud solutions will help customers in one particular industry - retail. I invited guests today to learn more about the retail industry and how retail needs to change. And also, the role of the Business Technology Platform. So, we have Marco Schaefer here, h

e is VP of Merchandizing and the POS systems at EDEKA DIGITAL and Joern Keller from SAP, heading our Consumer Industries. Hey Marco, hey Joern. - Hello Juergen. Hello Juergen. - Good to have you in my virtual living room. Welcome. Joern, maybe we'll start with you. What are your observations in the retail industry? Sure, so if you look at the process of shopping in-store today is not catering to the new normal anymore. Shopper traffic has moved significantly from store to online and consumers wa

nt a seamless experience there, including seamless checkout or curbside pickup scenarios. I can totally agree with that. Marco, as a grocery retailer yourself, what is you experience? Yeah, as a grocery retailer in Germany of course we have seen an increasing demand in e-commerce but as well digitization in our mainly brick and mortar business in recent years. As well we have seen a lot of progress in cloud platforms and technologies to process mass data and apply AI capabilities like voice and

image recognition. But COVID-19 has been even more of a boot camp for digitization for us here in the digital living room and especially for all consumers and therefore, for the retail industry as well. However, at the beginning of COVID-19 our focus was on supplying the population with goods and ensuring the availability of products; not only the well-known toilet papers from the news. Yeah, I can still imagine and remember that and imagine what kind of work you must have done. So, thanks to yo

u and all other retailers to keeping us supplied. SAP is also moving fast and we are among many other things developing the Industry Cloud for Retail. Joern, you want to share a little bit what we are doing there? And Marco, please feel free to chime in. Sure of course. I mean what we see today is really that the consumer interaction from a sales, fulfillment and return channel perspective need to be combined and understood properly in any combination: store, distribution center or any other. An

d as part of the Industry Cloud for Retail we are focused on building a new order management system to really handle all those interactions as a single source and allow that transparency. And based on those scenarios then we can build additional solutions and applications such as "Buy Online and Pickup in the Store" or any other omnichannel scenarios such as "Buy in Store and Return Online". Exactly, personally that's what consumers are increasingly demanding. In grocery, at least a click and co

llect scenario is the most important one. Especially with special products that are not usually in the store assortment, for example exclusive meat. In addition, we also have to think about how to support the employees in the store better than today. In the EDEKA Group we have 380,000 employees. As IT we have to offer the best solution for our employees for efficient processes and user satisfaction. True, and that's exactly why we are also supporting such key in-store scenarios such as intellige

nt personnel planning to really make sure you have the right staff in the store at a right point in time. And then for those we also offer dynamic task management to really enable the store managers as well as the employees to optimize their task and really run efficient operations. And then one example for sure is our in-store inventory tracking. We make sure that we know what merchandise for what channel is available at what space and then can be picked efficiently by the store employees. Joer

n, you are building the Industry Cloud for Retail in a cloud-native way leveraging a lot of the Business Technology Platform. We are at TechEd. So, let us talk technology a little bit. - Absolutely. That's why we're here. So, with our new cloud native architecture we leverage the SAP Business Technology Platform as a foundation. We can scale quickly and be more agile and with the four market areas and capabilities the Business Technology Platform is offering, this helps us on many different laye

rs. Let me give you an example. For instance, with Project “Gardener”, our Industry Cloud for Retail and the Industry Cloud for Consumer Products can be deployed on all major hyperscale providers. Plus, for sure also our converged cloud from SAP. And then in the database and in the data management area my Consumer Industries Cloud unit is planning the early adoption of HANA Cloud and we will leverage in particular the paradigm of the compute and storage separation for maximum scalability of thes

e computational workloads where we involve in-memory algorithms. I'm already looking forward to that. One of the first use cases of HANA was also in retail and now I'm happy to see that when you go live and you also use HANA Cloud that customers will leverage that and can benefit from it. What about analytics? - Yeah exactly. These analytical scenarios which you're touching on, they're important in combination with HANA. And there we have quite some interesting ones such as demand modeling, dema

nd forecasting which then support our supply chain planning. And this has not been important only now during COVID-19 times but also before. And as you just mentioned, Juergen, the Business Technology Platform for sure we have these advanced scenarios on analytics side but there are also a lot of basic services or foundational services we're going to use such as identity and authentication, tenant lifecycle management, and auditing. These are things that really help us to kick start our new appl

ication development. And then on top of that for sure the new UX offered by Business Technology Platform with a freestyle Fiori framework will give us the maximum flexibility and speed. That is very good and I'm really happy that you push this through and completely build in this cloud-native way fully on the Business Technology Platform. I'm missing one thing though, Joern. This is extensibility because customers will want to extend. How do you do that? - Absolutely. And I think this is really

key. And what we're doing there, we're leveraging Project Kyma as an extension runtime. So, this one will really allow us to offer extensions of our cloud applications for customer specific Extensions,such as Marco is doing. But then also for partners to help co-innovate on our platform and help co-innovate our application portfolio to really drive new innovative scenarios such as camera-based systems for in-store execution compliance checks and the like. I'm glad that you also mentioned partner

s because that will require a good and strong ecosystem. Marco, feedback from your side. Is that what you need? Juergen, I agree. Joern, I think these services are moving in the right direction to bring benefits to organizations and from a retailer perspective they are leading to new or improved services for the consumer. For us as a key customer the integration of these services in our SAP landscape is also very important and we need the flexibility to customize these services on the platform t

o fit our business model. So, in principle of course a good time to market is absolute necessary and the key. And therefore I'm also very excited to see the latest technology here at SAP TechEd. - That's very good to hear. Marco, thank you for the collaboration. Thank you for the co-innovation that we are doing together. And it's great to see, Marco, you and Joern participating here at TechEd. Thank you very much. Take good care. Thanks, Juergen. Take care. - Thank you, Juergen. So, what you hav

e just heard in this chat with Marco and Joern is an example of how Industry Cloud solutions built on SAP technology will help companies to quickly adapt to changing market requirements. No matter whether they are in retail or whether they are in any other industry. And what Joern and team did internally can be done by every developer who has specific knowledge in an industry using the Business Technology Platform. If you want to learn more join the session DEV109 "Build Industry Cloud Solution

s on SAP Cloud Platform". And also, we published something. So, if you want to learn more what it means for you as a developer or an architect or as a partner, check out the "Architecture and Development Guide for Industry Cloud Solutions". It was just released yesterday in time for TechEd. And in this guide, you get information and recommendations how you can build your own Industry Cloud solutions on the Business Technology Platform. A couple of minutes ago you heard Marco from EDEKA talk abou

t how applying AI capabilities in the retail area is a very hot topic. And AI is not just a really hot topic in retail. So, let me highlight an area of the Business Technology Platform that we didn't cover in my first keynote yesterday: Intelligent Technologies. SAP invests heavily in embedding AI technologies natively into our Intelligent Suite applications with a clear goal to deliver unique end-to-end intelligent business processes to our customers. Of course, you can get AI components like L

ego blocks somewhere else but the important part is to close the loop and you apply it to your company's problems. Besides embedding AI into our applications, this is what we do, you can also use our technologies, machine learning content and tools to build your own intelligent solutions. To show you how our ecosystem is using AI let me ask Fei and Brian to join me here. Fei is our Global Head of Artificial Intelligence and Fei and I, we are very happy to have Brian Monteiro with us. Brian is th

e Chief Analytics Officer at Inspired Intellect. Brian, Fei, good to have you. Thank you, Juergen. Thank you for having us here. I certainly appreciate the opportunity, Juergen. And it's great to see you again, Fei. I know the two of you met at a hackathon around AI and SAP technologies for AI. Maybe, Brian, you share a little bit about your work and AI in the enterprise. Sure, happy to do that, Juergen. It may help to start with a little bit of background here. So Inspired Intellect is a part o

f the Adi group of enterprises. And along with the other businesses in the Adi group, we focus on end-to-end data management, analytics and application development services to support enterprises in their digital transformation journey. Our clients engage with us through our portfolio of offerings that span from advisory to design, build and deployment and includes sustaining operations through managed services. And through our relationships with market leaders like yourself, like SAP, we're abl

e to bring robust, scalable enterprise grade offerings to our clients. Thank you, Brian. Just like you, I have also an AI background. I have worked in AI for many, many years. So, I'm very, very curious to learn a little bit more about how you use intelligent technologies in your company. Happy to share that with you, Fei. So, while working with clients and industries that have a very heavy dependence on the supply chain we very quickly realized that the order fulfillment process was where we co

uld have the greatest impact with machine learning. And our offering here which I'm going to share a little more details about optimizes the order fulfillment process. It employs data and analytics products from SAP to surface insights around supplier risk, product inventory and stock replenishment decisions while having material impact on the downstream revenue recognition and service level experience. Both for B2B as well as B2C enterprises. As a result, we have shown improvements across the e

nd-to-end supply chain from operational cost reductions and risk management to revenue recognition and service level experience. That sounds very good, Brian. How come you chose SAP technologies from the Business Technology Platform in order to do that for your customers? The answer is really quite simple. We wanted to help our customers make use of their data and create value from it rapidly. And the keyword there is rapid value creation. And that's why we used a combination of technologies fro

m SAP Business Technology Platform. We wanted to use the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and the SAP Data Intelligence products. They have allowed us to exploit these data assets resident in the enterprise business applications to platforms like SAP, and build on the strengths of each other to recognize and realize that economic value and in addition the out-of-the-box integrations enabled the end-to-end data analytics lifecycle from data management and business value discovery to operationalizing mach

ine learning and the automation of business processes. That makes a lot of sense to me, Brian. We talk a lot about extensions and you just explained how the order fulfillment process was your anchor to extend that SAP process. So, Fei and Brian, you both have a lot of experience deploying AI into practice as well. So, why don't the two of you share more use cases and how businesses can make use of those use cases? Yeah, Juergen and Brian, as you know we observe that the advances in AI over the l

ast decade were primarily leveraging in the B2C consumer space. But we also see and also we are very excited to see, they are more and more realizing the enterprise context. We at SAP, we strive to enable and to accelerate the adoption of AI to create business value together with our ecosystem. Therefore, we combine machine learning, enterprise knowledge from available information in our ERP systems, and also take the human machine collaboration into account. I completely agree with that, Fei. I

t's amazing how AI and ML is transforming the B2B space as well. At Inspired Intellect we have a lot of experience with these types of applications and we've been involved with applications across the spectrum from routing optimization to bid price optimization, vendor and supplier risk management as well as streaming data and unstructured data analytics with text and image data. So, the opportunity is really wide open within the B2B space. - Thank you, Brian. And as Juergen mentioned in the beg

inning, a key pillar of our AI strategy is to infuse AI into our SAP applications and within our applications we focus on areas which AI really can contribute to the values. AI enables automation, recommendation, on-demand monitoring, optimization, planning of business processes and operations that ultimately lead to cost savings and efficiency for our customers. And the example for this are on the one hand, Brian has just explained us, the partner solutions, on the other hand, our customers and

ecosystem can observe and discover already that AI capabilities can be found directly within our LOB solutions. And how can we achieve it? We achieve it by applying a holistic approach, namely our SAP AI factory strategy covering the entire development process from ideation to productization, Go-to-Market and continuous improvement. - Fei and Brian as well, that's great to hear. Fei, IDC recently published a study on SAP's AI strategy. Can you give us some background of that study? Happy to sha

re. Our AI strategy was recently confirmed by a study done by IDC. The results are built on top of real-case studies from customer reviews and interviews. As per the customer interviews as part of this research paper and also the associated IDC MarketScapes, SAP is considered as a leading industry vendor in the breadth of the embedded AI features and the functions deployed across all lines-of-business applications. And this makes us really very proud. That's great to hear, Fei. And yes, we are p

roud about that. What actually made me even happier was last week I talked to that IDC analyst and she was so excited because she talked to so many SAP customers and those customers were sharing so many relevant business outcomes with her. Thanks to SAP's AI capabilities embedded within our solutions and end-to-end processes but also how we do that with GDPR compliance, with an AI ethics board in place etc. Brian and Fei, thank you so much for joining me here at TechEd. Our time has come here as

one group. We have to continue the keynote. I really appreciated having you here. Thank you so much. - Thank you, Juergen. Thank you for the opportunity as well, Juergen. If you are curious to find out more about our AI strategy and the AI Factory approach Fei mentioned, check out Fei's strategy talk (ST116). Now let's come to the last section of this keynote and this is to everyone in the ecosystem who wants to get stuff done but cannot code or is not deep into AI or wants to get stuff done ve

ry efficiently. And this is the case for most knowledge workers. Often IT does not have time for you when you just want to improve a process a little bit. We want to empower you as well, with new or enhanced tools without the need to write any code. So, let's take a look at the business process automation capabilities that the SAP Business Technology Platform offers. How often have you encountered processes that start with receiving a semi-structured data such as an e-mail with an invoice, a spr

eadsheet with part numbers or a PDF containing some kind of specification. After doing the same for the 10th time a pro-code developer would seek to automate that process. But what do you do if you cannot code? Or you don't have the time? I told you we want to empower all developer personas. And the next demo shows how we help you improve business processes in your company thanks to our tight integration of a couple of SAP offerings. And how all of that comes together, for that I invite Diana he

re into this virtual living room to explain us how that works. Thank you, Juergen. In the next demo I'm going to show you how process analysis and process automation are no longer limited to the professional developer. With the combined offering of BSR on Spotlight, SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management, SAP Ruum and SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, we have an amazing combined offering to drive automation with a no-code experience on the SAP Business Technology Platform. Let's dive r

ight into it. I'm looking at the performance of CAPEX reports in my BSR on Spotlight. A CAPEX or capital expenditure happens every time a company invests into new fixed assets that could be new equipment or investing into repairing or upgrading existing equipment. I can see in my report that our Russian factory is doing an amazing job. They have a 94 percent automation rate but our colleagues in the Netherlands sadly have only a zero percent automation rate. That means that every time they buy a

new machine or invest into upgrading or repairing an existing one they run an entirely manual process. I want to show you now how we can build a fully automated CAPEX process replacing all those manual steps without writing a single line of code. First, I build a bot that collects the data from the specification PDF of the machine. In this example it's a back gauge motor. Every time the bot collects this data a CAPEX workflow on SAP Cloud Platform is started. This is what my process looks like

with a bot as a trigger followed by many approvals. Now I've learned from my Dutch colleagues that there's always a problem with deriving the sustainability data for the machines. There's always a lengthy back and forth between the requester, the finance department, the technical director and the sustainability expert. You can imagine that it's quite a mess. Now, instead of having that lengthy undocumented ping pong through e-mail, let's insert this collaborative step right into our process. I'm

simply going to build a form in SAP Ruum where the technical director, the funds department and the requester can work together and insert the data directly in the process. Thanks to our system connector in SAP Ruum, I can integrate the form with their CAPEX workflow with just a few clicks. And now let's add this collaborative step to a CAPEX workflow. And now every time the CAPEX request runs through, the technical director is informed and instead of only approving and rejecting the request, s

he can assign her experts and they can work with the requester to derive the needed data and insert it directly in the process. And finally, let's add another bot that's going to distribute all the inserted values into our asset management and procurement system. And that was it. I've built a fully automated process across different applications without writing a single line of code. Imagine you had that speed and that no-code experience for all your fuzzy manual processes that could be employee

onboarding, that could be adding new material numbers to your ERP or invoice approvals. And with that back to you, Juergen. - That was great to see. Diana identified a troublesome process, she understood the root cause, she adapted that process only in a few minutes. No code required. So, watch out for other sessions featuring SAP Intelligent RPA, SAP Ruum and SAP Workflow Management. So, today we heard many different perspectives from the SAP ecosystem. Let me quickly summarize what we have ta

lked about. First of all, I had a great conversation with Thomas and Jhodel about development today and how many personas actually can be represented by one person. And Jhodel is a great example, coming from the ABAP world, he always stayed curious about learning different things and is now not only interested in application development but also in cloud-native development. Then, I talked to Joern and Marco how the SAP Business Technology Platform powers the Industry Cloud. And together with our

partners we provide industry specific solutions. Also, when we talked about intelligent technologies with a focus on AI where Fei and I had a great conversation with Brian about combining AI with business processes. And lastly, you just saw that, we showed Diana demonstrating and process improvements and automation capabilities of our Business Technology Platform. To conclude, make sure that you download our News Guide if you haven't done so already, to have all the TechEd announcements at your

fingertips and to register for SAP Learning Hub event edition for TechEd - for free. I would be happy to see all of you being active in our community to discuss with others, share your success stories and your expertise. I hope you enjoyed my Day 2 keynote here to kick the second day of SAP TechEd off. With that I want to thank you for your time. I wish you all the best. Have a great TechEd.