Microsoft Announces Deeper SAP Integration for Power Platform
Just before the Christmas 2022 break, Microsoft announced the General Availability (GA) of a broad set of new functionality in the Power Platform that will make it easier for organisations running SAP to digitally transform and automate their business processes.
Key Take-Aways
This functionality is the next instalment of Microsoft product releases following their acquisition of Clear Software in 2021. The Power Platform team have taken two of the most tedious SAP tasks, Sales Order entry and Purchase Order entry, and streamlined all the screens and data attributes involved into one simple screen in Power Apps.
In these apps, business users will be able to complete these tasks much faster while ensuring better data accuracy through automation of business rules in Power Automate.
Best of all, because Power Apps is completely configurable, customers will be able to easily modify these templates to meet their organisations’ specific needs.
During 2023, Microsoft plans to release a set of prebuilt Power Apps for the Order to Cash and Procure to Pay business processes in a downloadable solution called SAP Integration.
2023 Planned Applications & Power Automate Flows
The 25 planned SAP Power Apps, will have their corresponding Power Automate flows also prebuilt in the SAP Integration solution. These flows utilise released APIs from SAP and will work in any organisation’s SAP environment, regardless of their SAP version. This is a huge win for a number of reasons:
- Time to Value – our customers will no longer have to spend many frustrating months researching and experimenting with these APIs to get their flows working. These flows just work out of the box, with no installation requirements on our customers’ SAP servers.
- No Technical Debt – by avoiding custom code in SAP, organisations will position themselves for smooth upgrades in the future and a lower technical debt load.
- Sustainability – SAP’s published APIs have been supported for decades. These flows will continue to work as long as SAP continues to support their core APIs
Microsoft are providing approximately 20 Power Automate flows to support the Order to Cash and Procure to Pay business processes. In 2023, that number will grow to support the following areas:
- Order to Cash
- Procure to Pay
- Record to Report
- Make to Stock/Make to Order (MRP)
Get in touch!
If you’d like to discuss how this new capability could benefit your organisation, or explore how to exploit the full potential of Power Platform more broadly, please get in touch
