Scroll Top

BlockChain – “Net Positive for the Industry” Say SAP

TAKE NOTE (Insights into SAP solutions and Emerging Technology)

Every business is based on transactions. But these transactions are often routed through third-party intermediaries like banks, lawyers, and brokers – which can make processing time-consuming and expensive. Blockchain technology has the potential to reduce the role of middlemen, dramatically speeding up multi-participant transactions and lowering costs, while ensuring all parties are protected. People, businesses, machines, and algorithms would be free to transact and communicate with one another in a friction-less way. This is the promise of blockchain.

Blockchain is not a zero-sum game and its implementation across various sectors is going to be an overall positive for businesses, German software company SAP’s chief strategy officer said Wednesday.

Deepak Krishnamurthy spoke to CNBC on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Dalian, where he said blockchain will complement SAP’s supply chain business.

“We believe blockchain will complement our supply chain. We have the largest supply chain product in the enterprise software industry, so having blockchain supply chains connect with SAP supply chains is going to be value-creating for our customers,” he said.

Earlier this year, SAP launched a Blockchain-as-a-Service offering as part of its Leonardo product line, which integrates and runs breakthrough technologies in the cloud. “The policy is to continue driving organic growth. We have innovations in artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, Internet of Things around the SAP Leonardo platform. That’s what’s going to be the focus,” he said.

UNDER DEVELOPMENT(Information for ABAP Developers)

SAP Screen Personas : Get Up and Running Quickly Using These Steps

Why SAP needs a NEW UX Strategy

The SAP business software has evolved over the years to facilitate a wide range of business processes across multiple industries. In order to accommodate it’s diverse user base, SAP has constructed highly modular and increasingly complex transactions to fulfill the many varying business scenarios. This has presented a problem where, regardless of a user’s job functions, all users are presented with the same transaction screens. This often creates a scenario where users are presented with more tabs, fields, and screens than are required for their day to day activities. This not only has an impact on the number of errors inputted, but it also increases the training time required to acquaint new employees with the system.

Realizing this problem, SAP has reinvented the overall UX (user experience) across the suite of SAP systems. For new applications, SAP has created the Fiori UX as its modernized, cross-platform user interface. For existing applications, SAP has created the Screen Personas framework which allows users to personalize the existing SAP experience. Over the next few blogs we will introduce the Screen Personas framework (SAP Screen Personas 3.0 in particular)  and give a basic overview on how users utilize this framework themselves.

What is SAP Screen Personas?

SAP Screen Personas is a UI framework that allows existing SAP GUI transactions to be “modified”, permitting users to add, edit, or remove screen objects to be better suit their business functions. New versions of transactions created within SAP Screen Personas are known as a Flavors, and each transaction can have multiple Flavors to suit different user’s needs. A Flavor can be thought of as an overlay on top of the standard existing transaction screens. Flavors have access to all fields on the standard SAP screen and can pick which fields and tabs to display and how to display them. Flavors can also generate additional fields and display them statically or dynamically using scripting. Users have the option of creating new Flavors from scratch or downloading an existing Flavor from SAP’s online Flavor gallery.

Creating a Personas Dashboard from Scratch

Next, we will design a mock scenario where we will create specialized Flavors for a mock Sales Specialist user. During this scenario, we will explore the basics of creating a new Flavor Dashboard. Afterwards, we’ll walk through how to simplify the Sales Order Create transaction.

Read More


Q&A (Post your questions and get the answers you need)

Q. While this isn’t exactly a SAP ABAP question, with the new trend of BlockChain as a Service being thrown around this year at Sapphire, and the underlying component called a Bitcoin, I was hoping you could explain what a Bitcoin was? How would it be integrated in a SAP ERP system?
A. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer , digital , decentralized , crypto currency. It is highly innovative and works on the concept of distributed consensus by proof of work concept invented by pseudonymous inventor Satoshi Nakamoto .
It is not constrained by any nation’s borders and can be used anywhere in globe unlike traditional fiat currencies. It also does not have any central backing institution and is backed by cryptography and math. Bitcoins may play very important role in future. Since they are deflationary in nature , the price of bitcoins are supposed to increase over the period of time.
Bitcoins are stored in Blocks. A block can be considered as a page in giant public ledger called blockchain.
Making the business caseInnovation, emerging trends, and technologies are at the heart of everything SAP does. Accordingly, blockchain, with its open, global infrastructure upon which other technologies and applications can be built, has been on SAP’s radar for some time now. As part of SAP’s activities to understand and assess emerging trends and technologies, they’re taking a closer look at the blockchain ecosystem and the blockchain technology. They are working with various blockchain implementations and flavors, including Ethereum, MultiChain, and the Bitcoin blockchain.
Reducing the cost and complexity of operations and processes will continue to be a critical focus for companies, and blockchain shows a lot of promise towards reaching this objective. It remains to be seen if solutions based on this technology will truly act as business disruptors and how well blockchain will integrate into existing systems and processes. Done right, SAP believes that, like other types of peer-to-peer interactions, blockchain definitely has the potential to disrupt entire industries.

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, why not share it with your friends!