I-ERP Intelligent System Modelling and Interfacing : Excel with SAP HANA

Nowadays we live in an age of multiple technologies like cloud, AI, Robotics, and Machine Learning. They have become an integral part of our day-to-day life and business. Despite these modern technologies growing substantially, we still happen to utilize and depend heavily on our old software, technologies, programming languages and Microsoft office. Regardless of the noteworthy force and trade buzz about the latest and modern technologies, just a few organizations have attempted the power of macro in Excel. Most associations are so far arranging their excel progress procedure while gradually improving conventional IT benefits and modernizing their legacy applications and software. They continue to be the backbone of our business activities. Every ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) enterprise manages its Financials in ERP, but also usually tends to keep Excel as a base information tool. This paper aims to provide a framework and coding baseline for system modelling and interfacing of Excel with SAP HANA (One of the ERPs in the market), thus making ERP enterprises smart and intelligent. This powerful excel tool is based on VBA (Visual Basic Applications) and Rest APIs (application programming interface (API or web API) that conforms to the constraints of REST architectural style and allows for interaction with RESTful web services). REST stands for representational state transfer and was created by computer scientist Roy Fielding. This Tool can connect the SAP HANA database from the excel workbook. This excel tool is useful for pulling and pushing data to SAP HANA directly making this tool more versatile and beneficial for any financial reporting of any ERP enterprise using SAP HANA as its I-ERP (Intelligent-ERP) application. Additionally, this paper highlights the benefits and prerequisites for excel system modelling with SAP HANA and touches future scope of interfacing old applications with new technologies over heterogenous data sources making systems more intelligent and powerful.

I. Introduction

Microsoft excel is one powerful tool which has now being used by almost every kind of business whether small or big since ages[1]. It is sort of conveying IT that provides on-request versatile processing limit through self-administration requesting and automated provisioning frameworks. MS Excel also had upgraded time to time with the intention of giving modernized solutions and connecting third party services to facilitate all sort of business activities. Now a days, every organization is moving toward the info analysis for ML and large data etc. for their enterprises[2]. ERP systems like SAP has powerful reporting systems, however, Classic ERP solutions cannot connect variably to day-to-day applications like excel which is heavily used by business. With SAP HANA, SAP ERP has move one step forward towards digital transformation, thus making its database more agile and flexible to be integrated with any application inside and outside SAP[3]. With such reforms in SAP, ERP has become Intelligent ERP, thus we use a term I-ERP for the same. Connecting simple daily excel workbooks directly with SAP is like a dream for any SAP user, making his life super easy yet tech-savvy and informative at the same time. This paper provides framework for such Intelligent system modelling and interfacing of Excel with SAP HANA. It is implemented on excel workbook using Macro. This Excel tool will provide the functionality for connecting SAP Hana using REST API which returns JSON[4]. So with the assistance of this tool, SAP user can interact with SAP Hana from Excel sheet and pull and push data to SAP Hana and the other way around. This is a very versatile system framework to connect any REST API service using this reusable code with slight changes. Most importantly, this needs to secure for the https REST API and enabled username and password to connect REST API services[5]. This empowers I-ERP on SAP HANA enterprises with enlarged connectivity and data analysis on demand from Microsoft Excel’s Macro to handle the surging demand and changing requirements more efficiently[6].