The question “Why SAP Business Technology Platform” is asked a lot. “We have space on our ‘AWS’ available for your (UI5)-Apps”, “Our docker-based environment can be used” or “just drop your app on our webserver” – let’s be honest: Yes, this is working. But you’re loosing effort from things, SAP is providing you within the SAP Business Technology Platform. Beside the actual runtime for your applications, e.g. running on the Cloud Foundry Environment or the serverless kubernetes cluster, SAP is providing (micro-) services you can subscribe and use.
These services are the crucial point of your decision, using the SAP Business Technology Platform for your “Side-by-Side” Extensibility concept. Within services provided on the Platform, you’ll be able to save yourself and your projects a lot of energy. Out-of-the-box services and shared microservices are useful and suitable to your requirements.
Example:
Let’s say you want to extend your S/4 HANA solution and set up an easy UI5-Application to request IT-devices for your homeoffice (like a 2nd Screen or a Webcam). You can set up your app on any environment and relate this app to your ERP solution to post the request to your IT and post & relate the asset to the employee. But do you have all information available for the asset-adding? Employee & cost-center, company code and relations? Is this user even allowed to request this devices? Maybe he’s working in the factory and isn’t able to work from home?
Using the Business-Rule service from SAP, you can easy set up Business related rules and provide a simple integration to your app. These ruleset can be used to set up a decision-matrix, to decide if the user and his related cost-center is allowed to request this devices.
Using the Workflow-Engine, you can release a workitem to the people manager of your employee, approving the device-assignment to the employee first.