SAP connectors allow the integration of different applications and technologies with SAP systems through open standards. The connectors are means for technical interoperability of SAP components (written in ABAP or ABAP objects) and other components (written in Java, C++, and Visual Basic, for example).
SAP Business Technology Platform for Oil, Gas and Energy
These indicate a trend in the industry to rebrand, diversify and reflect priority beyond ‘oil’ and ‘gas’, only validating further that the ‘transition’ is real. Be it due to the need to diversify into renewables and other sources of energy, or the need to reflect accountability as a responsible and sustainable enterprise, oil and gas organizations must transform, and the role technology is playing to enable this transition cannot be emphasized more. Enhancing existing processes alone is not enough; one needs to redefine and remodel to venture into new business territories. Oil and gas companies cannot afford to rely on traditional methods and processes that have worked thus far. To sustain and grow, they must become energy companies in the true sense, scaling and providing innovative, yet responsible products and services.
Companies today operate in a complex technology environment comprising of on-premise and cloud systems, diversified supplier networks, and extensive partner ecosystems. Each operational system runs its own unique context-relevant data models, business logic, and process definitions. Unifying these business applications, processes, and infinite data requires your company to integrate your IT ecosystem. Transforming ways in which resources and assets have been managed and utilized for operations is an immediate need. Gone are the days when operational and application systems worked in silos. Teams spending 25% of their times gathering operational data from ‘n’ number of disparate systems and realigning it with the impact it had on business is no longer acceptable.
For this reason and beyond, SAP has packaged a unique innovative solution called SAP Business Technology Platform (commonly referred to as SAP BTP), that offers to develop, integrate, and extend business applications with a combination of technologies for database and data management, analytics, application development and integration, and intelligent technologies. These allow you to respond to business demands swiftly and flexibly by using one or more solutions and business-centric services.
Three broad business scenarios covered by SAP Business Technology Platform
The services and solutions of SAP BTP are available on multiple cloud infrastructure providers. The multi-cloud foundation supports different environments, such as Cloud Foundry, ABAP, Kyma, and NEO as well as multiple different regions, and a broad choice of programming languages. To access the complete library of services offered under SAP Business Technology Platform, please refer to the link: SAP Discovery Center: Services
Gartner repeatedly rates the SAP BTP as the Market Leader in Cloud Database Management Systems (Cloud DBMS), Multi-experience Development Platforms (Multiexperience Development Platforms) Enterprise Integration Platforms as a Service (Enterprise Platform) and Data Integration tools (Data Integration) that provides the most comprehensive suite of innovative technologies classified under four key priorities all under one platform offering.;
- Database and Data Management: SAP offers an all-in-one data management solution that delivers advanced transactional and analytical processing with the broadest advanced analytics solutions – securely – across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Solutions for data management give you the tools you need to identify, gather, analyze, and make available the most context-relevant data throughout your enterprise.
- Analytics: Empower users with 24x7 access to the Business Intelligence (BI) and data analysis tools they need to make faster, more informed decisions. Make data-driven decisions based on real-time data by establishing a single source of truth for your organization. Enable every business area to collaborate in real time by breaking down data silos, unifying plans, and aligning processes.
- Application Development & Integration – With SAP BTP, you can build, extend, and enhance SAP applications based on business needs and without disrupting core operations. Leverage tools and prebuilt content to address the full range of integration challenges, including integration flows, connections to third-party solutions, and Application Programming Interface (API) management. A blend of application development, process management, and artificial intelligence services sets the stage for optimized efficiency and resilience by providing a unified and consistent user experience and automating processes.
Business Application Studio (AppStudio) is the next generation of Web IDE, a new and modern web-based development environment available on SAP’s Multi-Cloud environment, tailored for developing business applications for the SAP Intelligent Enterprise. It provides turn-key solutions based on Dev-Spaces. A Dev Space is a pre-configured environment ("virtual machine on the cloud") where you can develop, build, test and run using pre-installed runtimes and tools. Each Dev-space is suited for the development of the target scenarios such as SAP S/4HANA extensions, Business Services, Fiori, and more. Business Application Studio is based on a new architecture running mostly natively on Kubernetes (K8s) and also on Cloud Foundry (CF). It is based on standards and open sources like Eclipse Theia IDE, which embraces VS Code extensions and experience - Intelligent Technologies: Optimize your processes, maximize your resources, and drive innovation in any area of your business with the right combination of intelligent technologies, services, and industry expertise. Keep up with evolving technologies with a platform that can help you choose the best from machine learning, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Natural Language Processing, Internet of Things (IoT), Edge Services, and others to deliver the outcomes you need.
SAP BTP provides the solutions that work better together – Database & Data Management, Analytics, Application Development & Integration, and Intelligent Technologies. The platform integrates and extends your current and future applications, including SAP and third-party, so you can ensure connected business process, achieve data-to-value and long-term success
Architecture for Oil & Gas
Below is a typical IT architecture in an Oil & Gas innovation setting powered by SAP Business Technology Platform, agnostic to the underlying technology environment, SAP or not. It provides a vast set of data sourcing and integration tools, connections to third-party solutions, and API management. BTP provides and extended list of services to connect to source systems through OData, REST, HTTP, Open Connectors, Historians like PI, Data Lakes, etc.
Once connections to relevant source systems have been established, Data Management tools such as Data Intelligence, Data Warehouse Cloud and HANA Cloud provide capabilities to orchestrate, structure and model the data that makes the most business and decision sense. The tools have further data processing capabilities leveraging extensive predictive and forecasting algorithm libraries.
Structured data is then ready for reporting and deep analysis with advanced analytical tools. SAP Analytics Cloud provides the most intuitive and modern real-time BI capabilities with pre-built industry models. The pre-defined dashboards allow for a plug-and-play environment based upon underlying data models for swift and accurate decision making. The solution offers unique capability to read real-time data from an extensive set of data sources, both within and outside SAP. It is enriched with advanced planning and forecasting capabilities, again based on rich predictive libraries.
Data streams provide a constant flow of information that applications can add to or consume from, independent of the transmission of that data. For instance, SAP HANA, streaming analytics option, is a specialized option that processes streams of incoming event data in real time and collects and acts on this information. Smart data streaming is ideally suited for situations where data arrives as events happen and where there is value in collecting, understanding, and acting on this data right away.
Some examples of data sources that produce streams of events in real time include:
- Sensors
- Smart devices
- Web sites (click streams)
- IT systems (logs)
- Financial markets (prices)
- Social media
Data flows into streaming projects from various sources, typically through adapters, which connect the sources to the smart data streaming server. The streaming projects contain business logic, which they apply to the incoming data, typically in the form of continuous queries and rules. These streaming projects are entirely event-driven, turning the raw input streams into one or more derived streams that can be captured in the SAP HANA database, sent as alerts, posted to downstream applications, or streamed to live dashboards.
Data can be acquired in one of the following ways:
- Data Acquisition & Transformation using ETL/ELT tools like SAP Data Services, HANA SDI or 3rd party tools
- Data Tiering to manage where the data is stored based on its value and frequency of use using HANA on-prem and/or HANA Cloud capabilities. An example of these tiers is – HANA In-memory (Hot), HANA Data Lake (Warm), and ADL/S3 (Cold) with seamless access across the tiers
- Federation to access the data remotely where it resides when it needs to be processed/queried using SDA or SDI
- Replication to replicate the data from source to a central repository in real-time using SLT, SDI, Data Intelligence
- Streaming to consume and/or process data from sources such as sensors, and still being able to mash it with other data sets
Integration between Enterprise Data and Data Lakes; or IT and OT data is made possible by SAP Data Intelligence to bring these disparate data types together and process them in context. Metadata across these different datastores and applications, along with data profiling results, is captured in SAP Data Intelligence where it can be published and catalog for discovery and search
Productive customer scenarios for Upstream and Downstream
- Upstream Production – Shortfall Analytics
- Business challenges and opportunity
- Unplanned and unexplained shortfalls at the oil wells have a direct impact on the revenue for the period (deferred revenue).
- By analyzing the characteristics of the production shortfalls and as many related data points possible, the ambition is to uncover connections between dynamic factors, well design characteristics, and shortfalls. The possible variables are weather, completion characteristics, well history, production parameters, and many more.
- Solution
- SAP Business Technology Platform integrates data from multiple operational systems into a single data model enabling an enriched 360o view of shortfalls history and details.
- The embedded SAP Data Intelligence algorithms and Python are used to determine which type of events impacted shortfalls and how
- SAP Analytics Cloud enabled business users at different levels of operational hierarchy to monitor shortfalls, impact on production, and identified drivers
- Business benefits
- Enabler of new initiatives to reduce shortfalls
- Enabled linkage between operational data and enterprise data at scale
- Reduced operational costs and improved revenue
- Downstream - Reducing Refinery Downtime
- Business challenges and opportunity
- Avoid unexpected and costly shutdown of refinery equipment
- Enhance standard preventive maintenance processes with data-driven predictive maintenance
- Lower maintenance costs by addressing potential problems before they occur so that equipment and components can be fixed rather than having to replace them
- Solution
- Predictive models for abnormal events based on sensor data able to predict potential equipment malfunctions with high precision
- Providing results through user-friendly dashboards and e-mail notifications using SAP HANA® Cloud, Extension Suite, and SAP Analytics Cloud, all part of SAP BTP
- Business benefits
- Up to 120 hours in advance to respond to any upcoming technical issues.
- Access to intuitive dashboards where sensors and equipment can be monitored in real time.
- As abnormal events can now be predicted in advance, technicians are able to simply repair sensors instead of replacing them entirely, which saves greatly on maintenance costs.
- Massive cost savings of avoiding production shutdowns
These are just two illustrations from a long list of scenarios realized at energy companies around the globe, wherein SAP Business Technology platform drives innovation across IT and engineering landscapes. SAP BTP offers the widest spectrum of intelligent technologies that in combination with open-source application development and integration services deliver the most robust and cohesive solutions.
Commercial Model for Business Technology Platform
SAP offers simple and flexible access to the Business Technology Platform. Get up and running with the new free set of services on SAP Business Technology Platform. Our new free tier model for SAP BTP includes over 30 services at launch. We plan to continue to add new services to the free tier model for SAP BTP.
Free Tier Model for SAP BTP | SAPPHIRE NOW Innovation News Guide 2021
Existing customers with a Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) or a Pay-As-You-Go contract get access to the new free tier model automatically through their SAP BTP cockpit on July 1, 2021. All other new and existing customers just need to sign up for Pay-As-You-Go to get started. For individual business users, the free tier model for SAP BTP is currently scheduled to be available this fall
There are two licensing options:
- Consumption-based commercial model: Your organization receives access to all current and future services that are eligible for this model. You have complete flexibility to turn services on and off and to switch between services as your business requires throughout the duration of your contract. This commercial model is available in two flavors: Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement (CPEA) and Pay-As-You-Go for SAP BTP. For more information, see What Is the Consumption-Based Commercial Model?
- Subscription-based commercial model: Your organization subscribes only to the services that you plan to use. You can then use these services at a fixed cost, irrespective of consumption. For more information, see What Is the Subscription-Based Commercial Model?
Conclusion
In my next blog, I will introduce you to the SAP Industry Cloud program for Oil, Gas and Energy and how SAP Business Technology Platform empowers the vast SAP eco system of partners and customers to co-innovate, deliver and own industry specific niche solutions as SAP ‘Endorsed Apps’. Watch out for this space.
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