Why OpenText and SAP S/4HANA fit together perfectly

At the heart of digitisation is the information-driven, networked, intelligent enterprise. This requires a completely new generation of business applications that not only process data many orders of magnitude faster than before, but also enable real-time analysis of information. SAP S/4HANA is such a new generation – from the underlying database HANA to the SAP Fiori interface. To ensure that the brave new world is not limited to data, but also includes all unstructured information, OpenText solutions are needed. Companies can rely on them: OpenText has accepted this challenge and is mastering it at all levels as well as in all areas. For 25 years, OpenText and SAP have been the perfect duo: also and especially for SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA.

Personalized communication

Faster data processing and evaluation open up completely new possibilities for individualised communication, especially with customers. For example, a boring bill can be turned into a modern marketing instrument that contains concrete suggestions for other tariffs or tariff supplements, for new or different products and services, based on the previous usage behaviour of the respective customer. In addition to the familiar lists of invoice data, such documents – whether delivered online or by the good old postal service – also contain images and references to other online assets such as videos, podcasts, etc. – all individually tailored to the respective customer situation.

However, this degree of individualization, which combines the traditionally separate areas of marketing, customer service and financial accounting, is only possible by means of automation and integration – in both the backend and frontend. Because while SAP C/4HANA and SAP Fiori provide for the modern processing and analysis of customer data and its presentation, the digital assets such as images, graphics, videos and audio files must also be managed and automatically linked to the data and merged in the individualized online or print documents. This is achieved with the OpenText solutions Digital Asset Management, Document Presentment and Extended ECM.

Automated input communication

SAP S/4HANA and SAP C/4HANA are the racing cars among enterprise applications. In contrast, in many cases, inbound communication proves to be a brake pad. This is because many manual steps are usually still required there, which are not only time-consuming but also error-prone. OpenText offers a variety of solutions and technologies to bring inbound communications up to speed. Using self-learning mechanisms, OpenText Business Center enables automation levels of 90 percent and more in the capture and processing of input information. The same applies to the OpenText Vendor Invoice Management solution, which is specially tailored to incoming invoices and is based directly on SAP S/4HANA Finance, thus enabling a fully automated process from invoice capture to payment – not only on-premise, but also in the S/4HANA cloud.

Content as a part of processes

80 percent and more of corporate information is content, i.e. unstructured information, which in many cases is still stored in IT silos. On the other hand, thanks to the new generation of business software, especially from SAP, companies are able to eliminate their data silos. This disparity prevents companies from realizing the full value of their content. This is because unstructured information must also be available beyond application and system boundaries – or even better: it must be actively provided at the right place in the process at the right time and as automatically as possible. This is what lies behind the concept of “content-enriched business processes", to which OpenText is fully committed.

Illustrous examples of this in the SAP S/4HANA context are the solutions OpenText Archiving and Document Access as well as OpenText Extended ECM. They all use SAP HANA as a database. This means that they do not only contribute to a higher added value after migration to SAP S/4HANA, but also help during the migration itself – for example, by reducing database size and thus costs, shorter downtimes during the changeover to the new software generation, and lower administration costs.

OpenText and SAP S/4HANA: certified and qualified

The close partnership between OpenText and SAP has now lasted for 25 years. No other provider offers more solutions that are on the SAP price list than OpenText. All OpenText solutions for SAP customers are certified for SAP S/4HANA. The OpenText offerings sold by SAP itself as solution extensions are also qualified for SAP S/4HANA, and have therefore undergone a particularly stringent certification process.

SAP customers can therefore rest assured that their investment in OpenText is protected. In addition, the OpenText offerings for SAP S/4HANA and SAP C/4HANA help to increase the value of customer investments in the new generations of software from Walldorf. This is because OpenText runs on SAP HANA and uses its analytical capabilities. Furthermore, OpenText is integrated with SAP S/4HANA and SAP C/4HANA as well as SAP Fiori. Regardless of whether customers decide to implement in the cloud or in their own IT environment, the duo of OpenText and SAP puts them on the side of the digitization winners.