ArchPulse April 2020

Dear Customers,

We know you have bigger problems currently than to worry about how Arch is managing the terrible impact of the coronavirus, but we would like to reassure you that we are set up well to cope with it and our business – and in particular our support for our customers – continues to operate as normal. The majority of our team already work remotely and have done so for many years; The IT infrastructure that we use to support your implementations of our technology is modern and robust having been replaced completely early in 2019. We are here if you need us now and have long term engagements that mean you can be sure we will still be here when this nightmare is behind us all. In the meantime, our thoughts are with those who are suffering from this awful virus.

We have recently launched a really powerful new version of Stelo Tile Builder for Fiori Launchpad, and this is available now. If you are running Fiori on premise, or are planning an S/4HANA implementation, then Stelo Tile Builder is for you: It enables incredibly fast development of dynamic tiles, turning Fiori LaunchPad into Dashboards. The only skill you need is some simple ABAP. Tile Builder is so easy to use you won’t need external consulting. Please take a look at the demonstration video here.

NEW! Free trial

We are delighted to announce that we can now offer a downloadable free trial for Stelo Tile Builder. Using this you can see for yourself how quick and easy it is to create dynamic Fiori tiles. Request access here.

Chatbot Integration

SAP’s chatbot technology is pretty cool and we have decided to add it as our fourth UI alongside PDF, HTML and Fiori. That decision means the bots we build can do more than  ‘chat’ and mimic some simple transactions, as is often the case. We can make our bots be really useful and be part of complex processes: to be workbots, not simply chatbots .  We have invested in the engineering to have SAP’s Conversational AI technology talk to our platform and interrogate any part of SAP via the Arch Posting Engine. This means our ‘workbot’ can complete a whole process just as our eforms or Fiori apps do. Having cracked the integration we have been enjoying ourselves building out examples like booking leave or overtime, which you can review in a video here.

We can talk to non-SAP systems too of course which is very helpful. For our own use we’ve figured out how to automate sending out trial licences for Floe, with all the checking we need on legitimate phone numbers and so on using a TOTP server. We’d strongly recommend that you review what is possible with chatbots from SAP because they can be seriously helpful. The initial feedback from customers has been really positive and we expect to be working with SAP to promote this neat and innovative combination of solutions. Who would want a chatbot when you can have a workbot?

The re-launch of Arch Consulting

Those of you who remember Arch’s origins will know we started life as an SAP consultancy doing hard things in R/3. Late last year we were approached by a large British manufacturer who had a tricky SAP problem to solve and liked our approach to the business issue. They have asked us to stay on and help support their S/4 HANA project and so we are. It’s hard to say this is a new venture for us when our regular work keeps us up to date with SAP, but in a way it is. We now need to consider whether we build up a small but high skill SAP practice. Watch this space for more on the project and our next steps along this road.

We hope you have found this edition of Arch Pulse interesting and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Warmest regards and Happy Easter,

Henry Blythe
CEO