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A New Dawn for Enterprise IT: SAP Leonardo

  • Writer: Mohit Malhotra
    Mohit Malhotra
  • Apr 22, 2024
  • 8 min read

Embracing digital innovation is a modern prerequisite for success. Still, many businesses are unsure about where to start their digital journey and which tools and solutions can help them on their way.


We do business in the age of innovation. Machine learning, blockchain, and IoT are all becoming must-haves for the enterprise—but these tools aren’t usually part of the enterprise software stack, and companies are struggling to bring these new technologies to bear on their business and their existing app portfolio.



In today’s digital era, the pace of change and innovation is so fast that companies have to innovate quickly to survive. Moreover, while technology has been changing the way companies conduct business for decades, business now increasingly impacts technology choices, as these focus on business innovation. That’s why, building on decades of experience creating innovative enterprise solutions, SAP developed SAP Leonardo – a platform that provides a systematic approach to digital innovation. This digital innovation system takes the enterprise system of record and supercharges it with the tools of digital transformation – coupled with a design thinking process specifically created for business modernization and agility.



Bundling technology, services and design thinking methodology, the SAP platform makes it easy to innovate, integrate new technologies into your business, and scale up step by step – putting your digital transformation in the fast lane.


SAP Leonardo…could be the most happening technology from SAP


It can be tricky to find a working definition of SAP Leonardo at this point because it is an umbrella term for a number of SAP technologies, all built on top of its open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering called SAP Cloud Platform.



The idea behind SAP Leonardo is to allow customers to take advantage of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, advanced analytics and blockchain on top of their business data.



The SAP Leonardo digital innovation system was designed with three key principles in mind:

  • Help companies innovate quickly and effectively

  • Integrate the new innovation into the fabric of the business

  • Scale innovations to maximize value


Building blocks to boost innovation


More than a bundle of technologies, SAP Leonardo is an integrated system of software and services, with SAP Cloud Platform as the PaaS infrastructure foundation. It brings together innovative technologies (machine learning, blockchain, data intelligence, big data, IoT and analytics) and value-added services and capabilities such as design thinking, cyber security, API management, user experience (UX) tools and more to support quick and efficient adoption. To further speed up time to value, SAP Leonardo includes packages tailored to specific industries and core functions, such as IoT.


SAP Leonardo ‘applies the force of digital technologies to the power of imagination to reinvent new business models’. 


“SAP Leonardo is about accelerating time to value by finding generalized, common business problems across an industry”. “It’s about taking a business problem, which is specific to one customer, find the elements of that problem which are common across the industry, then defining the elements of a methodology, the technologies used to solve that problem and package those up and make them available as an accelerator for the next customers”.


SAP provides three routes to getting started with Leonardo.



Embedded Intelligence: Leonardo capabilities are embedded in SAP applications, such as smart insights within SAP Ariba, Hybris and S/4HANA.


Industry Innovation Kits: For quick implementations, SAP provides 23 Leonardo-based innovation kits for specific industries, for use cases across retail, life sciences, manufacturing and automotive.


Open Innovation: Then at the more bespoke level customers can either invite SAP on site or visit a global design centre (the first five are in New York, Paris, Bangalore, Sao Leopoldo and Singapore, with seven more to be added soon, in: Silicon Valley, Berlin, Moscow, Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo) for a day of "design thinking" sessions meant to identify the key use cases customers want to bring Leonardo to, and ending with a working prototype using SAP's Build tool. SAP then provides access to this prototype for employees to offer immediate feedback.


These three consumption models are all built to connect seamlessly through the power of the SAP Cloud Platform. The result allows all your innovation efforts to work in concert together – making your entire enterprise intelligent.


SAP Leonardo Industry Innovation Accelerators



Methodology



At its core is a Design-Thinking inspired approach that works through 4 key phases:

  • Explore: This phase allows you to work through potential innovation ideas and understand where the opportunities are in your business – ultimately leading to a game plan that is the focus for moving the initiative forward

  • Discover: Taking the desired business goal/area from the game-plan, deeper investigation into both to-be and potential as-is solutions are built leading to a more resolved idea for innovation and target beneficiaries

  • Design & Prototype: Iterative cycles to resolve the broad idea and work with target personas to get to a prototype that shows the proposed solution, as well as gain an early definition of the technology needed to deliver it

  • Deliver: Finally, the prototypes are turned into working proof of concepts on reference architecture, to enable validation by key users as well as business value assessment


Unlike many previous approaches which can consume significant amounts of time, the Leonardo approach is designed to run for an average of 6-8 weeks, ensuring your business can evaluate ideas in a sensible time frame.


Role of SAP Cloud Platform


SAP Cloud Platform is an open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that delivers in-memory capabilities, core platform services, and unique microservices for building and extending intelligent, mobile-enabled cloud applications. The platform is designed to accelerate digital transformation by helping you quickly, easily, and economically develop the exact application you need – without investing in on-premise infrastructure. Based on open standards, SAP Cloud Platform offers complete flexibility and control over your choice of clouds, frameworks, and applications.


SAP Cloud Platform is the foundation for SAP Leonardo, offering on-demand services for innovation including:

  • IoT

  • Machine learning

  • Big data

  • Blockchain

  • Analytics

  • Integration

  • API Management

  • User Experience

  • Mobile Services


Because SAP Cloud Platform is available on all the hyperscale IaaS vendors: Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon AWS, you can choose an implementation for the cloud infrastructure you already know and use. That makes integration between your innovations and other enterprise systems easier and faster—and reduces overall latency. Best of all, SAP handles the management of the hyperscale vendors’ infrastructure, so you just have to worry about agile app innovation – not hardware optimization.


And of course, today’s enterprises rely on mobile to bring all of these capabilities together. That’s where SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS comes in, offering a natural, efficient, and fast way to tie such innovations to mobile device use.


Leonardo is a focused attempt to build a productized consulting and service offering to help drive adoption of SAP’s cloud software. SAP’s new openness relinquishes much of the heavy lifting around core infrastructure and machine learning to other cloud/compute platforms such as Azure, AWS, and Google. SAP focuses on using open frameworks in the cloud and elsewhere to expose business data to enable the construction of custom applications and vertical solutions. This is not a bad thing, as there is value in a guided, structured approach to innovation — especially if you already have a long-term commitment to SAP. Leonardo initiatives also enjoy the support of the company’s strong partner ecosystem.


The digital innovation system that enables you to innovate at scale to confidently redefine your business.


SAP Leonardo Capabilities



Internet of Things

The IoT service in SAP Leonardo helps you to easily and securely connect devices to the platform. The information flowing from and to these devices is managed by this service. The pre-packaged IoT solutions make use of the service to communicate with devices.

 The following IoT solutions are offered in SAP Leonardo:


SAP Connected Goods — Connect, monitor, and control a large number of customer-facing products – such as beverage coolers, freezers, coffee makers, and vending machines. Connect IoT devices to your back-end systems, trigger alerts, and get actionable insight into product usage patterns, service, and quality.


SAP Vehicle Insights — Monitor live vehicle conditions and run powerful connected car analytics. The cloud-based app can help you collect, map, store, and analyze sensor data in real time. Integrate with automotive telematics data to improve services and create new business models and opportunities.


SAP Asset Intelligence Network — Access four key pillars: network, content, integration, and applications. These pillars help original equipment manufacturers, operators, and service providers connect machines and businesses to meet asset management challenges head on. 


SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service — Leverage predictive maintenance tools to use the Internet of Things (IoT), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and machine-to-machine (M2M) technology to transform field service and asset management.


Machine Learning

Machine learning allows automated pattern recognition in data and acting upon these patterns. By acting on patterns new insights become available which are new input for the machine learning process. This circular approach will make the machine learning algorithm better with each iteration.  


Learning can be done in three ways:

  • Supervised learning, where human interaction is needed to make the algorithm better with each iteration.

  • Semi-supervised learning, where the machine is rewarded or penalized for choices it made which enables the machine to enhance the algorithm.

  • Unsupervised learning, where the machine finds patterns on its own without human intervention.


The following machine learning solutions are offered in SAP Leonardo:

  • SAP Service Ticketing, makes the customer service ticket process more efficient by directing issues to the correct agent quickly, who can then offer options for troubleshooting.

  • SAP Customer Retention, sifts through data to predict things like cross- and upsell and loyalty

  • SAP Cash Application: This tool can see how humans do things like match incoming bank statements to open receivables like invoices

  • SAP Job Matching, which connects job seekers to recruiters.

  • SAP Resume Matching, to help recruiters hunt down the right applicants for a position.

  • SAP Job Standardization, which helps businesses create accurate and unbiased job descriptions

  • SAP Brand Impact uses deep learning to help businesses track who is sharing their brand images in near-real time on social media and elsewhere online.

  • SAP CoPilot uses machine learning to offer customers an automated digital assistant to aid in internal communications and conversations with vendors.


Analytics



SAP Analytics solutions are split into three categories:

  • Business Intelligence – for data visualization and analysis for both desktop and mobile.

  • Predictive Analytics – used for data modelling and management of predictive analysis.

  • Planning – Embed collaboration tools and analytics directly into your planning processes and dramatically simplify and speed up financial planning and analysis FP&A). 



Big Data

The Big Data service is not yet available in SAP Leonardo. In the near future, it will contain SAP Vora, a distributed computing solution based on HANA, which can help you uncover actionable business insights from Big Data. Use SAP HANA to run enriched, interactive analytics on both enterprise data and Hadoop data, quickly and easily. SAP HANA Vora runs on Hadoop and builds upon Apache Spark.


Design Thinking

Design thinking is a methodology helps you generate new ideas. It is not an SAP specific methodology but it is used within SAP to help customers to find innovative solutions which they probably would not have thought of immediately. AppHaus is SAPs creative space where design thinking sessions are held. AppHauses can be found in Heidelberg, Palo Alto, Korea and Berlin. 


Blockchain

While blockchain is an innovation that is not yet available in SAP Leonardo, the plans have been made available already. SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain will allow IoT devices to securely trigger business processes which can also reach suppliers and customers.


Data Intelligence

Data Intelligence is used to include anonymized data for decision making. This data can be used within machine learning and predictive functionality. An example of this is publicly available historical weather information.


The Time for Innovation Is Now


The combination of ready to use solutions and an innovation platform make SAP Leonardo very powerful. Because the platform contains a lot of innovation accelerators it can really boost your innovative execution power and help you from a System of Records to a System of Intelligence. The world is digitizing, and so should we!


The most important thing about SAP Leonardo and SAP Cloud Platform is that you don’t have to wait for the expertise and budget of a perfect future for innovation. Start with design thinking methodology from SAP Leonardo to embrace new models and processes. Implement through the services at hand in SAP Cloud Platform. Begin the transformation today. #GetAgile.


SAP, with its market leading enterprise solutions, platforms, and Leonardo innovations, may be uniquely positioned in the competitive landscape to serve companies world-wide in transforming their business at scale to thrive in this new reality.


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© 2022 by Mohit Malhotra.

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