Planetary Dogfooding at Neptune Software with SAP S/4HANA

“Eating your own dog food,” “drinking your own champagne,” and “eating your own caviar” are phrases applied to software companies that use their own products.

At Neptune Software, we have implemented the complete Neptune Digital Experience Platform (DXP) in our production environment as the primary IT system for our organization. Press release here. The core architecture implemented is the one we recommend to most customers, and therefore, that is the feeding bowl with which we serve our employees their daily dose of delicious home-made Neptune cuisine.  

(Image: © NASA/Rodrigo Luger)

Research from 2015 by Rodrigo Luger indicated that M dwarf stars could strip away enough atmosphere from mini-Neptunes to make them habitable. A beautiful visual analogy for this project where we ate from our own Neptune DXP planets and found them very livable indeed.

We are acutely aware of the fact that “Dogfooding” is not a replacement for traditional testing and feedback from developers, customers, and partners. The usage of Neptune products is widely diverse. The input from other industries and use-cases has been, and is, vital to our success. We will continue to improve those channels and augment our product quality and innovation through our employee's experiences.

Daily usage of a vendor’s own products by its workforce drives empathy with the end-customer and hopefully produces engineered serendipitous innovation.

Neptune has grown rapidly and globally. As a result, we were looking for new finance, sales, and HR solutions that could be used by all employees in all regions. Since we have massive SAP competence amongst our staff, we opted for a brand new SAP S/4HANA 1909 solution. We combined SAP with our software in addition to other services we use in the cloud.

The DXP suite consists of two modules. Our SAP-focused module, Planet 8 (P8), is in this setup installed on top of our on-premise SAP S/4HANA system. The main reason is the massive benefit of the REST API capabilities of P8, and we have connected it to the general-purpose module, Planet 9 (P9), hosted on AWS. For single-sign-on, we use Azure AD and utilize the built-in principal propagation functionality in P9 to access the SAP system with the correct end-user.  

We chose AWS for hosting P9 and AZURE AD as the identity provider, but customers can select their preferred providers for these services or even run P9 on-premise.

Since we are not using any non-standard hardware features in the solution, we decided to run the app as a Progressive Web App (PWA) to enable access from any device anywhere with a native “app-like” experience. We still use the camera and photo library for travel expenses and features like biometric authentication.

Another benefit of PWA is the ease of distribution through a simple web URL sent to the organization as well as removing the need for an Apple enterprise certificate for iOS devices. We believe PWA’s will replace Hybrid Apps for most scenarios in the future. The creation of a PWA is merely filling out a checkbox in the Neptune Launchpad settings. 

PWAs also work on Laptops and Desktop computers. Together with SSO, usage is much more convenient than pure browser-based applications, in my opinion.

Since we implemented SAP S/4 HANA, we wanted to try out the standard Fiori capabilities. Typical use-cases are when you do not want to reinvent the wheel but wish to maintain a similar look & feel and where you do not see additional ROI in adding your custom apps. We recommend this approach for our customers that upgrade to or install SAP S/4 HANA.

The ability to run standard Fiori applications from SAP in our launchpad (Or the entire FLP if you wish) is a significant benefit. On top of that, the Fiori apps will keep the state as Neptune apps do, and you can navigate between analytical apps and transactional apps as you please.

We added several changes and enhancements to our development platforms during the project. We got to test our API capabilities to software such as SalesForce in a productive setting. Our non-technical staff’s enthusiasm for the products and the company is noticeably heightened and they have an easier time explaining what we deliver with genuine pride. We don’t need to refer to customers only to say that our shit works – we know, and we love it.