SAP Intelligent Enterprise Framework: Overview and Business Value

(Update December 2021)

The first version of the SAP Intelligent Enterprise vision dates back to 2018, and the framework included three components: the intelligent suite, the digital platform, and the intelligent technologies:

SAP Strategy: Deliver the Intelligent Enterprise (Source: SAP)

In its new expanded form, the SAP Intelligent Enterprise Framework was presented at SAPPHIRE NOW 2020. The figure below shows the new Intelligent Enterprise solution portfolio and how the individual parts come together. It now consists of the following components: Business Network, End-to-End Processes (E2E), Experience Management, Intelligent Suite, Industry Cloud, Sustainability Management, Business Technology Platform and Infrastructure.

Intelligent Enterprise Framework 2021 (Source: SAP)

The best-managed companies are smart companies, according to SAP. They apply advanced technologies and best practices within agile, integrated business processes. This helps make them resilient, successful, and sustainable.

Let’s take a closer look at the individual components.

The Business Network

The business network consists of cloud and network solutions for procurement (SAP Ariba), travel management (SAP Concur), third-party workforce management (SAP Fieldglass), logistics (SAP Logistics Business Network), asset management (SAP Asset Intelligence Network), collaborative project management (Project Intelligence Network), and collaborative product development (SAP Intelligent Product Design), among others.

The business network solutions help you digitize cross-enterprise business processes across ecosystems and support collaboration with partners and suppliers to build flexible value chains and services.

The End-to-End Processes

The Intelligent Enterprise Framework covers all E2E processes. Their structure has been significantly simplified and now consists of four main processes:

Lead-to-Cash: Processes around the customer
Recruit-to-Retire: Processes related to employees
Design-to-Operate: All product lifecycle processes
Source-to-Pay: Processes related to finance and purchasing

In some cases, the E2E processes span several SAP solutions. In this case, the individual solutions are interconnected via preconfigured SAP standard interfaces.

SAP now offers a holistic suite of flexible process transformation solutions for customers to transform their business processes end to end with the addition of Signavio. It includes business process design, benchmarking, gap analysis, improvement and process change management. Signavio’s products become part of SAP’s business process intelligence portfolio and complement SAP’s holistic process transformation portfolio.
Business process intelligence (BPI) from SAP and Signavio Solution Extensions by SAP helps organizations of all sizes drive strategic transformation and reinvent customer experiences.

The Intelligent Suite

The intelligent suite helps you manage every part of the business: people, customers, products, expenses, finance, and IT. With embedded analytics, it provides a 360-degree view of the business, SAP says. Behind the intelligent suite is essentially the SAP S/4HANA or SAP S/4HANA Cloud system.

The intelligent suite is an integrated system consisting of modular business applications. Features of the intelligent suite are:

Harmonized user interface and system behavior
Centralized task management (workflow)
End-to-end reference processes (blueprints)
Centralized identity management
Harmonized lifecycle management for applications
Embedded cross-application analytics

The Industry Cloud

SAP’s new industry cloud provides vertical solutions from SAP and from partners to cover industry-specific requirements and to be able to react faster to changes in the markets.

The industry cloud has a modular structure. The individual applications can be explored and purchased in the SAP App Center. The plan is to provide solutions for a total of 25 industries.

The Business Technology Platform

Business Technology Platform (Source: SAP)

The Business Technology Platform provides tools for data management and analytics and supports application development and the integration of applications within the SAP portfolio and non-SAP applications. It does not matter whether the application is a cloud or on-premises application.

Furthermore, smart technologies such as AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things, RPA are provided to drive innovation. You can find more on the topic of „Intelligent Technologies in the SAP S/4HANA Context“ in our intelligent enterprise blog series.

The Experience Management

The tools from Experience Management help evaluate customer, partner and employee experiences along the value chain. This enables you to better understand your stakeholders, what they want and how they feel when they use your products or services. This is critical to making the right business decisions.

Sustainability Management

Ensuring agility and resilience in times of climate change, amid pandemics and unforeseen disruptions is top of mind for many companies. Sustainability plays an important role in this. Doing business sustainably means creating positive economic, environmental, and social impacts.

SAP solutions for sustainability help you understand and influence the impact of your actions on people and the environment.

Infrastructure

SAP is going to open the way for customers and partners to get the benefits of SAP Business Technology Platform on their cloud infrastructure of choice. That goal was and is to leverage the investment of SAP cloud infrastructure partners (hyperscalers) and serve customers and partners with more flexibility (cloud vendor of choice and larger network of available regions), reliability (use of hyperscaler infrastructures and their capabilities), and agility (broader range of development services and supported development paradigms).

More About the Intelligent Enterprise

Are You Interested in Knowing More?

Take a look at our „Intelligent Enterprise“ blog series: