Suite Qualities

What is the reason to define Suite Qualities?

Suite Qualities are defined to remove complexity, standardize and harmonize solutions and to make SAP Public Cloud solutions easy to deploy.

SAP’s integration notion comprises several Suite Qualities that contribute to a simplified integration experience and which deliver most and immediate value to our customers:

1.  Seamless user experience
2. One workflow inbox
3. End-to-End Business Blueprints
4. Aligned domain models
5. Consistent Security & Identity Management
6. Coordinated Lifecycle Management
7. Embedded Intelligence & Analytics

Seamless user experience

Seamless user experience comprises harmonized UIs across SAP’s cloud applications, based on Fiori design guidelines.

A different look and feel of user interfaces with, for instance, incoherent colors, icons, or widgets, but also different action placement or interaction behavior leads to interruptions during execution of business tasks. Things just don't feel like working with an integrated suite, but rather like jumping from one application to another. And even worse, things may behave differently. As a solution approach, development is done to provide exactly the opposite, a consistent user experience across the intelligent suite. On the right side, you see that after the application of coherent design guides, things look and behave no longer in a fragmented way. This makes working with the solutions much more comfortable and efficient.

One workflow inbox

One Inbox for a seamless and integrated user experience for customers who want a unified view of approvals across multiple applications for a smooth approvals process.

Without it, approval tasks are scattered across multiple inboxes as every application comes with its own one. This leads to a higher monitoring effort for users, unnecessary application switching and a potentially incoherent user experience. Also, it is more difficult to provide multimodal access for desktop and mobile front ends. There are higher development and modification costs as there is a lack of synergies for central enhancements. Finally, there are multiple integration and workflow interception points. The solution approach of the suite quality is the provisioning of a seamless and integrated user experience for customers with just one central place for all approval tasks. This central place serves as a direct starting point for further activities in individual applications and comes as an add-on to existing individual inbox that can also stay in place.

End-to-End Business Blueprints

End-to-End Business Blueprints support SAP to shares a reference architecture of which solutions are required to become an Intelligent Enterprise and the target state of enterprise architecture. Based on this information customers can map out their roadmap to adopt the solution and transition from the current solution landscape to their target.

Without these End-to-End Business Blueprints, there is limited visibility on the as-is and target state of enterprise architecture and integration points for end-to-end processes. Customers face a lack of a standardized description methodology and representation, as well as a missing well-known place to find the content they need. As a solution, the suite quality mandates the usage of a standardized methodology, namely the SAP Enterprise Architecture Methodology, and the SAP API Business Hub as the place to access the various diagrams that it provides. All four end-to-end processes from the integration strategy paper are covered with business scenario and value flow diagrams, scenario implementation blueprints, data flow diagrams, and software collaboration diagrams. These can interactively be navigated and drill downs can be done.

Aligned domain models

Aligned Domain Models helps to simplify the sharing and distribution of master data across the Intelligent Suite by harmonizing data models with common semantics. The goal is to reduce today’s replication and synchronization efforts for key master data objects, like g., employees, customers, orders, and move to data sharing via a central master data service that is based on aligned domain models.

Without these individual applications used their own individual master data attributes. No common set of attributes that they share is identified. This causes a number of costly and potentially error prone necessary mappings and point-to-point interactions for data exchange or synchronization. And there's no semantic harmonization, it is more difficult to navigate APIs for consumption and to do extensions. These challenges are addressed with the stepwise identification of common attributes and their relations. This work leads to the so-called SAP One Domain Model, or ODM for short.

1. Entities are described with the standardized core data service definition language and the models are exposed on the SAP API Business Hub;
2. The harmonization also allows to replace the individual point-to-point interactions between applications with a hub and spoke model with the newly developed;
3. SAP Cloud Platform Master Data Integration, or MDI for short, service. It uses the SAP One Domain Model as its exchange format;
4. Both the MDI service as well as the usage of the One Domain Model with SAP Graph to make API navigation and consumption more comfortable and to provide further means for extension are explained in two dedicated units that are part of week four of our course.

Consistent Security & Identity Management

Consistent Security & Identity Management provides uniform mechanisms to handle authentication, identity provisioning, and role provisioning.

Without its landscape- wide availability, users may have to sign on multiple times. With various heterogeneous authentication and identity management mechanisms in place, solutions are difficult to integrate and to extend. A solution approach with the suite quality fulfilled replaces this with a centrally administered user management and identity provisioning using standardized and well-established protocols like SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect. The SAP Cloud Platform identity authentication service, or IAS for short, is thoroughly used and provides openness for the integration with also third-party identity and access management solutions.

Coordinated Lifecycle Management

Coordinated Lifecycle Management simplifies the provisioning, configuration and monitoring steps for IT operators.

Coordinated Lifecycle Management comes with both the integration setup and the monitoring aspect. Without the quality, integration set up was to a large extent a manual process based on integration guides. This is error prone and comes and comes with a considerable individual and manual integration effort. The suite quality approach enhances this situation with powerful and standardized tooling, as well as pre-delivered content for integration automation. The SAP Cloud Integration Automation service, or CIAS for short, combines integration planning with guided workflows and automated execution capabilities. These get parameterized with customer-specific system information, such as, for instance, target URLs. It is also difficult to continuously monitor complex deployments, to identify problems and to react to these. The effort and expertise needed to do so result in a potentially longer time till issues are identified and fixed and a suboptimal usage of automation potential. With the suite quality fulfilled, the SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management, also known as CALM, provides an integrated monitoring experience. It makes use of respective enabling mechanisms in the covered products of the integrated suite and provides intuitive, interactive tooling for problem identification and reaction. It targets both cloud but also hybrid scenarios.

Embedded Intelligence & Analytics

Embedded Intelligence & Analytics helps to achieve higher business outcomes via embedded machine learning in SAP applications and improves decision making via cross-application insights enabled by SAP Analytics Cloud.

Without analytic capabilities as an embedded part of solutions, these capabilities need to be deployed and operated separately. That leads to a potentially higher cost and lower performance, and it gets more difficult to provide pre-built reporting and analytical insight as well as support for real-time decision making. The suite quality solution approach is the embedding of analytical capabilities within the applications of the intelligent suite, and this is actually done. As an example, SAP SuccessFactors people analytics now comes with SAP Analytics Cloud embedded. This enables a unified presentation layer, live data access, and intelligent joins across modules, as well as coherent, secure, and role-based access. When it comes to cross-product analytics, the problem is that analytic capabilities are scattered around individual solutions and are not exploiting the potential to combine data from multiple sources. This leads to a higher individual effort to bring data together, a lack of application -spanning insight along processes, and missing pre-delivered content and scenarios for complex business processes. The solution approach here is the usage and combination of data sources from various applications of the intelligent suite. It also makes use of the One Domain Model, or ODM for short, alignment outcomes.