How SAP BTP Empowers Business Capabilities & Drives Value Across the Enterprise

This blog is the second in a series dedicated to exploring the role of SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) from an Enterprise Architect’s perspective. The first blog in this series, titled Introduction: The Enterprise Architect’s Mandate in a Rapidly Evolving IT Landscape, set the stage for this series by giving an overview of how BTP impacts the dimensions of EA. 

This blog explores the concepts of BTP’s impact on Business Architecture.

Enterprise Architecture Through a Business Capability Lens

For Enterprise Architects (EAs), technology is not just about systems. It’s about how technology enables business capabilities. Every organization has a unique set of capabilities that drive its business. These capabilities are exercised daily, weekly, monthly, annually, or ad hoc to deliver value to customers or internal stakeholders. 

A core responsibility of EA teams is mapping their company’s business capabilities to technology platforms, ensuring that the business has the right mix of standard and custom capabilities to drive competitive advantage and, ultimately, success in their market.

Within SAP-driven organizations, business capabilities are often built and delivered through SAP applications like S/4HANA or ECC, Ariba, SuccessFactors, and Concur. However, not every enterprise requirement fits neatly within out-of-the-box SAP solutions. Many organizations have unique capabilities specific to their business that standard software does not support.

This is where SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) can fill in the gaps. BTP allows enterprises to extend SAP’s prebuilt capabilities or to develop their own corporate-specific capabilities, all while maintaining a clean core and ensuring long-term agility.

In this blog, we’ll explore how SAP BTP empowers business capabilities by:

  • Extending & enhancing standard SAP capabilities (e.g., adding functionality to complement standard processes in S/4HANA, Ariba, SuccessFactors, etc.)
  • Enabling corporate-specific business capabilities that do not exist in SAP’s standard applications
  • Ensuring business agility and future flexibility with a clean core strategy

Let’s take a closer look.

Extending Standard SAP Business Capabilities with BTP

SAP applications like S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, and Concur offer best-practice-driven, industry-standard capabilities. These capabilities are built into the product to meet the demonstrated needs of thousands of companies. This is inherently valuable, particularly for non-differentiating capabilities that are still critical for a company’s operations. However, businesses often require enhancements or tailored process extensions that align with their unique operational needs.

SAP BTP delivers a robust suite of tools and services to extend these standard applications without modifying the core, ensuring future upgradeability and long-term sustainability.

Use Cases for Extending SAP Business Capabilities with BTP

S/4HANA – Custom Workflow Automation

  • Use SAP Build Process Automation (BPA) to create custom approval workflows for finance, procurement, or HR processes. Your core capability is the process being executed (e.g., accounts payable processing). The custom extension is the sub-capability that enables flexible approvals by the business team executing the process.
  • Example: A company requires multi-level financial approvals that go beyond S/4HANA’s standard capabilities.

Ariba – Supplier Risk Scoring & AI Insights

  • Use SAP AI Core to analyze supplier performance trends and predict risk levels.
  • Example: A procurement team wants an AI-powered supplier risk dashboard that scores vendors based on historical data, payment reliability, and delivery performance. This capability in the Supplier Management area provides strategic value not offered by the core product.

SuccessFactors – Personalized Employee Learning Journeys

  • Use SAP Build to integrate external learning platforms and customize employee training paths.
  • Example: A global enterprise wants to align training with regional compliance requirements and career progression models beyond what standard SuccessFactors LMS offers.

Concur – Expense Reconciliation Automation

    • Use SAP Integration Suite to automate reconciliation between Concur and a company’s custom financial systems.
  • Example: A multinational company with multiple business units needs a customized expense allocation system that follows its corporate cost center structures. While expense allocation and reconciliation are common capabilities for most companies, the unique needs of an enterprise with multiple business units (perhaps with its own financial systems) might require a custom capability to meet its unique structure and circumstances.

SAP S/4HANA Procurement – Industry-Specific Customer Service Enhancements

  • Use SAP Build Work Zone and SAP Build Apps to build or extend self-service portals with customer-specific workflows.
  • Example: A telecommunications provider builds a self-service SIM card replacement process that integrates real-time inventory visibility from S/4HANA.

BTP enables targeted extensions to SAP-hosted business capabilities without customizating your core systems and incurring techical debt, ensuring your company can continuously innovate and deliver unique value while maintaining upgradeability.

Creating Corporate-Specific Business Capabilities with BTP

While SAP applications cover a wide range of business capabilities, every enterprise has unique operational processes, competitive differentiators, and corporate-specific needs that no standard software fully supports.

SAP BTP allows organizations to build entirely new, custom business capabilities without disrupting SAP’s core ERP and cloud applications.

When Should You Build Custom Business Capabilities?

A common evaluation and consideration that EA organizations take up is the question of when to seek standardized package solutions and when one might look to build and deploy something customized to solve a specific business problem. Below are some of the common decision points that might lead an enterprise to seek a customized solution:

  • Your business requires competitive differentiation not found in standard software.
  • You have unique processes or industry-specific workflows that SAP products or other packaged solutions do not fully address.
  • The scope and cost of an industry solution is beyond the scope of what is needed to support your company’s processes.
  • You need to digitally enable a process that is currently handled through manual workarounds, spreadsheets, or disconnected legacy tools.
  • You need to solve for functionality gaps between SAP and non-SAP applications.

Examples of Corporate-Specific Capabilities Built with BTP

Custom Asset Maintenance & Field Service Management

  • SAP Build Work Zone and Mobile Development Kit (MDK) allows a company to build field service apps that fully integrate with SAP Asset Management and S/4HANA.
  • Example: A manufacturing company builds a mobile app for maintenance workers, allowing offline job execution, digital checklists, and capture of customer signatures. This mobile capability enhances the higher level business capability of maintaing production equipment.

AI-Driven Demand Forecasting & Pricing Optimization

  • SAP AI Core and SAP Business Data Cloud enable custom Machine Learning (ML) models that enhance predictive decision-making beyond SAP standard analytics.
  • Example: A retailer creates AI-based dynamic pricing models that adjust product discounts based on real-time competitor trends.

Regulatory Compliance & ESG Reporting

  • SAP BTP Integration Suite and SAP Fiori Apps allow companies to automate compliance reporting for sustainability, environmental impact, or industry-specific regulations. These capabilities are critical for organizations in regulated industries and can often protect millions at risk for penalties or reputational damage.
  • Example: A pharmaceutical company builds a custom track-and-trace system for drug compliance, integrating data from SAP and external partners.

Fraud Detection in Financial Transactions

  • SAP HANA Cloud and SAP AI Services can identify suspicious financial transactions and trigger automated reviews.
  • Example: A banking institution builds an AI-powered fraud detection engine that monitors SAP S/4HANA transaction logs and flags anomalies in real time.

As this section demonstrates, BTP empowers companies to build completely new, custom capabilities, ensuring that their unique operational needs and industry differentiators are digitally enabled at scale.

Enabling Business Agility & Future-Proofing with a Clean Core Strategy

One of the enduring challenges with traditional ERP customizations is that they often create crippling technical debt, which ultimately inhibits upgrades and reduces system agility. Companies in this situation are limited in their ability to adopt the latest and greatest capabilities coming from the vendor in new releases. SAP BTP addresses this situation by adhering to a Clean Core strategy, enabling these custom capabilities or extensions to be built outside the core ERP, rather than modifying SAP applications directly.

Clean Core: Why It Matters

Clean core principles and practices ultimately help organizations using SAP solutions to obtain the most value from them. As companies evaluate their capability portfolios, health should be measured through dimensions such as value derived, cost of ownership, flexibility, scalability, and process alignment. Clean core practices enable these value drivers across many dimensions, such as:

  • Preserves SAP S/4HANA and cloud solution upgradeability, which helps keep the underlying solutions secure, performant, and aligned with best practices in the business processes supporting those capabilities.
  • Reduces long-term maintenance costs by lowering the cost of testing and maintenance of customized core components.
  • Accelerates the adoption of new SAP innovations by enabling upgrades to the latest releases and standardized integrations through prebuilt connectors and content packages, interfaces, and APIs that align with the core design.
  • Provides flexibility to integrate best-of-breed technologies for other capabilities through adherence to prebuilt connectors with other enterprise systems and standard data model and object alignment in the core systems.

How BTP Enables Clean Core Development

There are myriad ways that BTP enables clean core throughout the services embedded in the platform. Some examples include:

  • SAP Build Apps (Low-Code Development):  Quickly create and deploy custom applications without modifying SAP ERP directly.
  • SAP Integration Suite: Seamlessly connect SAP and non-SAP applications while keeping business logic separate.
  • SAP Business Rules Service: Centralize business rules outside of core SAP applications, ensuring flexibility in decision logic that can be consumed in workflows, API’s and other interactive interfaces.
  • SAP Event Mesh: Decouple applications with event-driven architecture, enabling real-time, scalable integrations.

SAP BTP enables business agility by allowing businesses to innovate in their capabilities while preserving the integrity of their core SAP capability sets.

Conclusion: The Business Capability Advantage of SAP BTP

Enterprise Architects play a critical role in enabling business capability-driven transformation. SAP BTP presents a compelling platform option in this transformation by providing the strategic foundation to:

✔ Extend & optimize standard SAP applications

✔ Develop unique, corporate-specific business capabilities

✔ Ensure long-term agility with a Clean Core Strategy

SAP BTP is not just a technical platform. It is a business transformation enabler through it’s impact on capability extension and innovation.. By embracing BTP’s full potential, EAs can unlock new value streams, improve efficiency of their capability deployment and execution, and enable their enterprise architecture to be relevant in SAP’s future evolution.

Next Up in the Series:

“Modernizing and Extending SAP Applications with BTP: Future-Proofing your SAP application investments”

  • How BTP enables app modernization
  • Strategies for UX Transformation
  • Leveraging SAP Build, Work Zone & AI for intelligent apps

Stay tuned!

Part one of this series can be found here.

Robb Neuenschwander is a seasoned technology leader with a proven record of driving innovation, strategy and business value. In his role as Principal Architect, Robb partners with Mindset's strategic clients to drive large-scale digital transformation efforts, at the intersection of business and technology strategy. He has a passion for building architectures that scale and enable strategic value and growth, leveraging leading innovation and technology solutions. He is also passionate about Mindset's core values and building capabilities and maturity in a rapidly growing organization.

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