There’s no denying SAP’s excellence as a central system of record. But it’s well known that delivering change to SAP is both extremely slow and prohibitively expensive. It’s also not a system that can manage your processes end-to-end throughout your enterprise. You need something more flexible and all-encompassing.
But don’t worry, there’s no need to throw out your ERP and start again. Thankfully you can extend SAP’s capabilities using a low-code platform.
Bizagi’s agile process layer wraps around your SAP application to connect SAP business transactions with other applications or processes and deliver real-time access to information directly from the process, or vice versa.
Here are five ways that using Bizagi to ‘wrap and extend’ SAP can benefit your business:
Whether updating a process or creating a new one, SAP users will often require information from external systems to be processed further in the ERP. The problem is, involving several systems puts the onus on users to update each one separately. This is very inefficient and error-prone and can have detrimental knock-on effects.
Using a single platform that acts as a process orchestrator, means you can point the modified process towards all its different data points without replicating the data itself. This results in seamless, fast integration without the need to rekey information. The business can then adapt quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively.
Global sportswear brand adidas connected its SAP to Bizagi to save time and improve efficiencies across its organization. In the finance department, the accounts payable process has been transformed so staff can execute multiple real-time transactions with speed and accuracy. The Purchase Order (PO) system has also been optimized: Bizagi automates the approval process after employees register a PO in SAP. This has eliminated around 1 million emails per year for the PO team.
“We connect a lot of systems together with Bizagi… it’s important to model the process first and then the online platform makes it more user friendly for our customers." - Senior Process Automation Manager, adidas
Lack of visibility into SAP’s data structures and sequences make it hard to make productive changes. This can lead to duplications and silos with undesirable bottom-line impacts.
As your business grows, your systems will expand. From legacy systems to SAP, SharePoint to apps, there are more systems to connect than ever before. Use a single platform to act as an orchestrator to connect people, applications, devices, and information across your organization.
Bizagi maintains seamless orchestration across your entire SAP landscape, encompassing multiple versions, deployment models (cloud and on-premises), and instances. Bizagi serves as the cohesive link, ensuring harmonious operations and visibility. This enables end-to-end visibility, so you have real-time insights into your processes, enabling better decision-making and optimization opportunities.
With a low-code platform, it’s far easier to create custom apps that support your business needs, rather than being constrained by SAP’s rigid parameters. Starting with process models and then using visual wizards with drag-and-drop features, it’s easy to enable flexible changes.
You can create apps for many different use cases, including finance apps to manage AP and AR processes, sales and marketing apps to create documents and manage pricing approvals with automatic SAP updates, or procurement apps to create, modify, and cancel PRs and POs. It can also be used in manufacturing to integrate order processes with production and inventory data in SAP.
Kyocera transformed their special pricing approval process, which was previously manual and paper-based giving no visibility of revenue or profit indicators. They created a central process for tender price approvals and integrated with SAP to provide actionable insights by generating KPI metrics in Bizagi. This reduced process time by 85% from 10 days, to 1.5 days and reduced employee time by 20 minutes per approval.
“The integration of Bizagi with our ERP system, SAP, was an emotional breakthrough for our organization. We’re going to continue to scale.” – Kyohei Shimada, Senior Manager, Technology Center
Find out more about how Kyocera maximized the value of their SAP solution with Bizagi in our webinar: Enhancing SPA with a Low-Code Platform, Featuring Kyocera
Constant regulatory changes, and even just keeping up with customer expectations means businesses, and their ERPs, need to be agile to keep your systems up to date. The ability to edit processes in Bizagi means you can quickly respond to any regulatory changes and keep your system secure and compliant.
With an agile process layer wrapped around your SAP application, you can gain connectivity and deliver real-time access to information directly from the process, or vice versa, meaning you’re always working with the most up to date information. This, in turn, helps you to deliver an exceptional customer experience, reduce costs, and optimizes business performance.
Additionally, by automating decisions within processes you can rest assured that your policies are compliant and support risk management and due diligence.
Today’s users want to be able to work on the go. So, mobile and cloud apps need to be connected as part of your infrastructure. ERP systems must be compatible with mobile use for tasks such as accessing expense information, updating customer records or viewing reports. Typically, SAP screens are very complex, slow and cumbersome, displaying information that is irrelevant to the task.
A low-code platform like Bizagi improves the user journey with optimal display on whichever device the user chooses, helping users to work from anywhere at any time. Additionally, the app only displays the necessary information to complete the task – an essential feature for time-pressed business users.
Combining your SAP investment with Bizagi can help improve the visibility, flexibility, agility, and control of your SAP processes. This ultimately helps deliver exceptional customer experience, reduce costs, and optimize business performance.
You can integrate either using the SAP Business Transformation Platform (BTP), a new connector that uses standardized communications via HTTPS using OData. Or alternatively, there is an SAP Connector in Bizagi that is purpose-built for legacy systems that seamlessly interfaces with SAP’s Business Application Programming (BAPI) functions.
Download our guide on Bizagi and SAP integration to find out more about how to enhance SAP’s value and maximize your ERP’s potential.
