As the business world looks to tackle modern-day challenges presented by a volatile environment, the concept of the Intelligent Enterprise is quickly gaining popularity. With the vision of breaking down silos and establishing intelligent, cross-functional processes, the Intelligent Enterprise aims to empower organizations with the tools and capabilities they need to deliver seamless customer service experiences and great business outcomes.

Read on to learn the role SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) plays in transforming organizations into Intelligent Enterprises.

What is an intelligent enterprise?

SAP defines the Intelligent Enterprise as, “one that consistently applies advanced technologies and best practices within agile, integrated business processes to break down departmental silos and adopt cross-functional processes to deliver optimal experiences”. By infusing AI and machine learning capabilities into everyday business processes, it empowers organizations to continuously collect insights about customer needs, business opportunities, and market trends and risks and leverage powerful technologies to make the right decisions.

The Intelligent Enterprise also enables organizations to build flexible value chains and apply cutting-edge industry practices to understand and manage the environmental impact for better sustainability.

What benefits does the Intelligent Enterprise offer?

An Intelligent Enterprise enables organizations to unlock hidden business potential and use emerging technologies to reach business goals. Here are the top benefits an Intelligent Enterprise offers:

• Creates a unified environment: Optimizing business processes or delivering seamless customer experiences isn’t possible if teams work in silos. The Intelligent Enterprise helps in creating a unified business environment – free from rigid teams or data silos. By bringing people and data together from across the business, it enables better enterprise-wide visibility, so comprehensive decisions can be made.
• Enables data-driven decision-making: An Intelligent Enterprise centralizes data from different processes, teams, and systems and brings it to a centralized repository. Organizations can use apply advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence algorithms to this data and pave the way to effective data-driven decision-making.
• Helps innovate faster: Through the adoption of no-code and low code tools, an Intelligent Enterprise also helps organizations innovate faster. Because new applications and processes can be set into motion quickly, they can jump-start projects with pre-built templates and keep up with evolving trends and requirements.
• Accelerates time-to-market: Low-code and no-code tools also make it easy for organizations to accelerate time-to-market. Simple drag-and-drop features mean everyone in the organization can spin up new applications to meet team-specific goals and objectives – without falling back on expert IT resources for day-to-day requirements.
• Makes the IT landscape extremely interoperable: Because an Intelligent Enterprise breaks down silos, it makes the IT landscape extremely interoperable. All tools and systems within the enterprise ecosystem can easily be integrated, enabling seamless data flow and communication for better user experiences.

How does SAP BTP fit into the puzzle?

Built with flexibility and choice in mind, SAP BTP helps establish the foundation of an Intelligent Enterprise, so you can accelerate innovation and drive enhanced value.

• Breaks departmental silos: SAP BTP establishes the foundation of a unified enterprise, allowing companies to break down departmental silos and adopt a dynamic, cross-functional approach to business operations. It also aids in transforming traditional business processes via constant analytics and automation.
• Brings together data and analytics: The SAP BTP platform brings data from across the business and infuses it with advanced analytics to give it purpose. Using a modern data stack, it delivers trusted insights, extending planning and analysis across the enterprise.
• Infuses AI into business processes: Leveraging ready-to-use, business-specific AI models, SAP BTP helps transform and optimize business operations while also scaling them to meet growing needs. Built with the latest and best governance requirements, the platform helps in running AI responsibly and transparently while allowing you to manage end-to-end AI lifecycles via a unified platform.
• Speeds up application development and management: As a platform that offers leading-edge low-code and no-code tools, SAP BTP aids organizations in creating apps and solutions faster, while automating processes and scaling without limits. Prebuilt workflows and RPA bots help in kick-starting development with little or no coding language, allowing teams to accelerate app delivery and management.
• Helps personalize experiences: Offering capabilities that natively integrate with SAP applications, SAP BTP enables access to real-time customer data from across the business. Such access, when processed with AI and automation, helps in enriching user interactions and building personalized experiences.
• Provides a birds-eye view of the enterprise: By integrating and automating processes business-wide, SAP BTP provides a birds-eye view of the enterprise. Such visibility ensures decision-makers take a holistic approach to decision-making while accelerating outcomes using pre-built integrations and connectors.
• Drives sustainability: SAP BTP helps infuse sustainability into core business processes, empowering organizations to become as sustainable and intelligent as possible. By connecting environmental, social, and financial data from across the business, the platform helps steer decision-makers towards making the best sustainability decisions.

SAP’s vision that all businesses must run as Intelligent Enterprises is easily fulfilled by the SAP BTP platform that helps turn data into meaningful insight and processes into automated workflows. By integrating functions and processes from across the enterprise, the platform delivers a complete and comprehensive picture of the business, enables data-driven decision-making, and paves the way for holistic integration of people, processes, and technology, so you can shorten time to value and accelerate the speed of innovation.