Cloud Computing Part 3: Use Cases for the Cloud - How companies use cloud in their real life scenarios .. Cloud for Business

In my previous articles (1 2) , I started by describing what is the cloud, benefits we expect/get from the cloud and different models that companies can use the cloud services as infrastructure.

This post is to introduce you how in real life, companies use cloud services; in what type of business scenarios/the real use-cases of the cloud..

Use cases are analyzed from 3 main perspectives:

1. From a technical and architectural point of view which matches cloud use cases with technical capabilities 
2. From a line of business perspective to explain how different departments (sometimes multi-cross departmenta) may benefit from the cloud.
3. Industry based categorization to describe how different industries use the power of the cloud and cloud based services to create business value.

Although we cannot cover all use cases, this post aims to give you the starters for using / evaluating the idea of the cloud services in your own scenarios. Note that the same use-case can fall into multiple categories / industries / functional areas.

USE CASES BY TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL PERSPETIVE

 I believe as a technical consultant, the most strategic approach for IT is to enable business operations as much as possible and nowadays go beyond enablement and be in the heart of operation / business itself. Examples are; being an online channel for sales, developing an app to provide the main functionality of your services to your customers..

 That requires having an always-ready-to-go infrastructure to respond accurately, faster, in a "low-cost" manner and being connected-open to your stakeholders all the time. Which means better computing, integration, development capabilities. Some of the examples that cloud provides you in this area is as follows: 

Integration - Connectivity capabilities of the cloud allows you to connect to multiple systems(may be SAP and/or non-SAP) in a holistic approach. By using open connectors for instance, you can exchange information from third party systems, with adapters gather & process this data in technical backends and provide them to other applications and business users.

While doing this you can benefit from providers' prebuilt out of the box integration scenarios. SAP for instance currently have 1500+ integration scenarios combining not only own on-prem and cloud systems(S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba etc.) but also many third party industry applications (SalesForce, Workday, ServiceNow,Sharepoint,.. and many more). With this you can jump start your workflows and building applications without reinventing the wheel and start from scratch.

Even if you already have many applications working very well, old methods are mostly slow, more expensive and heavy; the ones you want to communicate are evolving and forcing you change; so why not use the new technology to adapt easier and use the power of modern methods and cloud's strong muscles. (create apps faster, test faster, publish faster at the same time more secure(monitoring-governance), cheaper and more integrated)

SAP API Business Hub environment is a platform where you can find many ready-to-go examples of these scenarios such as connecting your S/4HANA system to for instance a SalesForce application; build a flow&an app in the cloud to trigger a Sales Order, generate a document in S/4HANA with the required information gathered from customer and SalesForce which is not very easy & integrated in the past. 

Your technical and solution architects may have a look at the APIs provided and can model their own apps / workflows easier by using these artifacts.. 

Developing and Publishing Your Applications:  Exposing your on premise data with APIs are lot easier with cloud.

Think of a scenario where it takes a lot of time to create a mobile app for using internal data provided by your SAP system. With a well developed API Strategy, you can generate APIs from on prem systems, without duplicating the data, you can provide them to your suppliers, customers etc in a secure manner(API security) and build your own applications on top in the same platform. You can even let your partners / suppliers to use your services and build their own applications to utilize and enrich this data but controlled by you.

Application testing, simulations, backing up - clustering : As systems in the cloud can be easily expanded, new systems for copies of your applications can be provisioned within minutes for running parallel in case of disaster scenarios in different location; backing up these systems are a lot easier and you dont need to plan ahead multiple years of strategy and invest in huge amounts earlier.

Big Data, DataMining/TextMining: BigData calculations are scenarios where collecting, storing, analyzing and presenting data are different contexts.. Those need to be integrated. With the help of cloud capabilities, you can connect to multiple inside and outside providers, collect and store and compute without thinking about the limitations and present to inside and outside stakeholders in a secure and flexible manner. You can use your on prem data, use your code as a function even from multiple cloud providers and publish them to your end-users with the same platform.

Providing document content, media and information to different geographies, stakeholders and parties easier with multi location capabilities of the cloud platform. 

Machine Learning capabilities of cloud may be used to analyze the information and respond to events before they even occur, Why not help your customers and your company in this way? Think of a manufacturer which collects information from its products directly with iOT services, analyze the information with cloud platform services, more importantly learn from it and predict the maintenance times more effectively or within the company use the information to proactively minimize outages.

USE CASES BY LINE OF BUSINESS

Different use cases can be applied within the same company in many line of business areas and these scenarios can be cross-domain where multiple departments benefit from the same flow simultanously which creates more value.

Another point is to extend these to multiple geographies.. Remember from my previous articles where I discuss about the cloud giving you the extensibility to design your services for multi-countries in an a lot easier manner

Procure-to-Pay : Using the power of the cloud to open cloud portals to suppliers, make their on boarding / transactional processes easier so that they are more willing to work with your company and spend less effort.

Catalogue Management : Expose your data in a controlled manner to outside parties, let them enhance their data direcly, no duplications, more benefit. You then can use it as well in your own systems for reporting and other purposes as well

Plan-To-Produce : Expose your data via mobile application to field workers collect data from the field online. Use the computing power of the cloud to analyze collected data from ioT devices and from these apps, use this BigData and combine it with cloud data services for predictive planning / maintenance scenarios-using the planning applications provided- and plan your future production and budget, calculate future supply balance, workforce demand and execute production and human resources policy accordingly for the next period(a cross-domain scenario).

Finance : Use computing power provided by cloud to make complicated calculations - faster-easier closings, leave time for strategic decisions. Use RPA services to automate standard data entries

Hire-to-retire / Human Resources : Onboarding processes which need to integrate with other applications.. Such as workflows/applications provisioning the employees, open records in other systems: For instance employees email from email systems, systems, other requirements related to employees department (if sales for instance in a SalesForce system for instance with necessary permissions) without worrying about if you miss anything.

Note that this type of coordination can be applied from the cloud and have an end-to-end scenario with minimum change efforts to the original applications and with the help of integration, development and workflow capabilities.. Possible with a good architecture & design.

CASES BY INDUSTRY

Lets have a look at some use-case examples that can be applied in different industries where you and your customers are a part of.

Manufacturing : Collect production information from devices and machines via iOT services, create preventive maintenance applications to preactively respond to events, use this information in the mobile applications and collect information from the field to enrich and report - use the information to build your future products, strategy and do not worry about the scaling, timing because of the power of the services from the cloud.

Energy : iOT scenarios- digital twins - Collect iOT data from sensors, analyze them, report about statuses, usage. Find insights and execute a strategy such as determine real time energy consumption from iOT devices, analyze and through an application recommend a new pricing . Use cloud platform for computing power, application development and integration

High Tech : Where there are many industry standards for using and exchanging data, combine the data from suppliers to your systems, provide them mobile applications via APIs to easily provide you the valuable data and be a part of your organization. There are industry standards which are already implemented in cloud based solutions as adapters like SAP's B2B adapters for SAP Cloud.

Finance & Insurance: Use your on prem data to easily create new applications - new products and service offerings to customers, respond to the market conditions in a quick manner.. Integrate with your corporate customers / end users and integrate your applications to their systems easily .. Think about a credit scoring application that can easily be used by customers of your customers. With the information gathered from these end users, and also from your corporate customers, you can provide many new services to your corporate customer and let them indirectly use your logic (for their end users). This partnership can allow your business to extend beyond the corporate users and lets you reach the end-users as well.

Healthcare: Inform the patients, with given permissions, analyze their data with cloud's analytical power to find insights

Retail : Computing power which is required in campaign times, scale easily without worrying, and develop quick applications and service them to your customers. Use ChatBots, RPA and combine them with your cloud services to collect information directly from your customers. Another promising scenario would be using blockchain technologies with the integration capabilities of the cloud platform, enable your customers to track the products that are sold from the production to the tables, houses..

These of course are not all of the cases.. The number of examples can be increased in other 20+ industries or the same scenarios can be possibly implemented in different industries.

WHAT TO DO NEXT, TAKE AWAYS 

As technology should be an enabler, not a stopper for the business to be successful, we as technology providers and business users should be responding fast and accurate to the changing world. These use cases are just some examples; more and more innovative ideas are coming from businesses everyday, therefore what we need to do is building a platform to make businesses run faster, adding more bricks day by day to this platform for new challenges, and start doing, building today with a good plan.

.. Why not start picking one-or-two business cases and make a pilot in the cloud .. Why not start exploring ready to use scenarios and create an architecture, combine with your own on-premise systems & on-premise applications and build new and effective services. Please have these cases and capabilities in your mind next time you are planning :)