Cruise Accelerator Fast-track Neptune Projects VMG Labs

Open Overview

Fast-track your Neptune project

Introduction

The Cruise Accelerator is a powerful accelerator for Neptune Software projects, designed to fast-track your SAP low-code projects. It provides pre-built SAP content, including data provider classes, well-designed APIs and ships with sample applications. With Cruise, you can quickly expose SAP objects to your low-code applications, significantly reducing development time and complexity.

Accelerate your development projects even further.

Cruise Overview

Cruise Accelerator is not just about speed - it's about quality and consistency. It enables your team to build scalable, maintainable solutions that leverage Neptune's capabilities to their fullest. Whether you're implementing new or extending existing Apps, Cruise allows you to deliver value to your business faster and more efficiently

Open Our Story

Why Cruise?

What are the benefits of the using Cruise templates? Good question. Here is our rationale.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

We believe in the power of Neptune - the SAP Certified add-in provides a powerful framework that works from within SAP. Using Neptune to build REST microservices made logical sense to us.

ABAP developers fell in love with Neptune - it gave them super powers to become full stack application developers - without the complexity of SAP standard tooling. But there was a catch - SAP's Cloud strategy (Rise, Public Cloud etc) started promoting the concept of a "clean core" and extensions "on stack" where heavily discouraged.

Cruise minimises the on-stack changes you need to implement on your SAP system and provides a set of "clean" ABAP classes that focus only on core CRUD methods for SAP data.

Project Lifecycles

For customers begining the SAP Native Neptune Edition

Open Composable ERP

Composable ERP

The future architecture

Gartner suggests that the future of ERP is composability - which drives agility and flexibility into business processes through a technology approach that integrates multiple applications and platforms.

Composable ERP is a plug and play model where companies integrate ERP elements to deliver better user experiences and operational efficiencies, more quickly, in response to evolving market conditions.

Key capability

In order to build solutions business components need to be packaged and easily assembled to create an adaptable business solution.

SAP ERP context

Many SAP implementations still consist of a monolithic system which host the majority of the functionality within a single instance. Companies often look at adding best of breed solutions to augment this solu

Open Architecture

Architecture

Neptune DXP

Neptune DXP comes in two versions: SAP Edition and Open Edition.

The SAP Edition is a certified Add-on which is installed within your SAP environment, exposing powerful Data Provider Classes (DPC) and API Factory capabilities.

The Open Edition is based on Node.js and offers rich low, pro and no-code capabilities.

Cruise Framework

The Cruise framework provides components across both editions and allows no-code applications which connect to SAP data to built easily in the Open Edition.

Open Mapping & Data Providers

Data Provider Classes

The core of our solution is a set of ABAP classes which expose common SAP objects via REST. These data provider classes (DPC) are delivered per object, so can be imported selectively based on your specific use case.

Extracting SAP content in a "clean" way

Our classes are designed to handle:

• Paging & Sorting to ensure efficiency
• Field mapping incl. Conversion exits
• Application Logging capability (optional)

Field Mapping

We provide pre-filled mapping tables for converting SAP names into business standard names. This way consumers of the APIs will see "business friendly" names:

In the example below see how the description field for an equipment has been converted. Note how we base this naming convention on the SAP S/4HANA CDS names:

![mapping_table_fields.png

Open APIs

API Definitions

Reducing the complexity of SAP integration

Our API definitions follow best practice and are layered on top of our Data Provider Classes. These APIs are REST enabled and can be configured to use different authentication schemes based on your requirements.

All APIs can be viewed using Swagger / OAS3 (standards), we can also provide a postman collection with examples to help your development teams understand how the APIs are designed and can be called.

API Types

Profile Management

We have APIs for handling user defaults: Date, Decimal, Language, Time zone etc. These make sure you can display data from SAP in a way that the user expects.

We have also included a mechanism for extracting and updating the SAP user parameters (these are defaults set by user in SAP) - these can be used to ensure only relevant data based on user prefe

Open Sample Apps

Sample Apps

Best practice built-in

We provide sample apps that leverage the Cruise REST APIs.

See all the capabilities that are built into the APIs, as well as having a reference implementation for your development team to reuse.

Equipment SplitApp

The SplitApp control from the UI5 library is widely used due to its responsive nature, We provide samples applications which includes search, paging and server pagination functionality included:

Equipment Table

We also provide samples which demonstrate table controls, which contain sorting and pagination.

Configuration Support

As part of our sample applications we also provide a global settings tile so you can easily configure global items across alll the Cruise components. As an example below we conf

Open Building Blocks

Application Building Blocks

Build apps faster

We provide building blocks to use with the Neptune App Designer.

Building blocks are reuseable elements that you can use help build components quickly. The blocks we provide include sample UIs - that you can easily drag into your existing application and configure.

Built-in caching

Our building blocks are designed to operate optimally and included caching so the API is called optimally.

Learn more

Need more information on building block capabilities? See this video from Neptune.

Open No-Code Samples

No-code apps

Adaptive Framework

Build great apps, super-fast, using the powerful Neptune Open Edition and the Adaptive Framework

Connect to SAP easily

We provide connectors to our APIs so you can consume these objects in Open Edition.

Neptune's adaptive framework is their no-code environment allowing your business users to quickly compose new applications.

Expose SAP data easily

We provide the connectors to fetch SAP data based on our APIs. This allows you to build simple CRUD apps using the adaptive framework designer.

We support the features you would expect sorting, search and paging within the framework. When

Open Accelerators

Code Generation

API definitions with Anthropic

We provide tooling to help build APIs definitions, here is an example of generating an API for an object in SAP in under 2 minutes which can then be exposed to your applications:

These definitions can be used out-of-the-box for search and read, but more development work would be required for update and delete methods to be working.

We are currently using Anthropic (Claude) for these generations, we can adjust the LLMs to client preference if required. This is a specialist application built by VMG Labs, see the next section for tooling provided by Neptune.

Automatic structure and class generation

Once you have designed your structure in our data modeller, you can automatically generate dictionary structures and the Data Provider Class (DPC). Using the basic employee object as an example, we have the following mappings defined:

![Em

Open Business Value

Business Value

How much time does Cruise save a project?

It depends on the apps and integrations that are part of your implementation project.

The benefits that the Cruise offers your implementation team include:

• A robust architectural framework which caters for common project scenarios. New team members can review end-to-end components from SAP to Open Edition and review the design patterns that have been implemented.
• A head start on common objects across all projects that have an SAP ERP backend.
• A set of building blocks for faster UI development
• The ability to expose SAP objects in the Neptune No-Code environment

What objects are available?

We are constantly building new objects on projects but have:

• Equipment
• Fleet
• Purchase Orders
• Employees (basic communication and validity)
• Organizational objects (Company Codes, Plants etc)
• Business Partner / Customer / Vendor

and the associated configuration elements i.e. categories, types etc included.

Open Commercial Model

Commercials

How is Cruise Licensed?

Cruise is an accelerator that we provide as part of our Neptune implementation service. It is a differentiator that allows our clients to accelerate the development of Neptune applications and services.

It offers a library of code that has been written to be deployed with Neptune Software, the use of Cruise requires valid Neptune licenses which are sold via a subscription and an associated EULA.

If your Neptune DXP licenses are purchased or renewed via VMG Labs, the Cruise Package is included as part of our offering.

Training and Support

We can provide tailored training leveraging the Cruise Framework to get your internal Neptune development working as efficiently as possible. Your development team and analysts will have access to best practice templates on which to build extensions for your specific use case.

Open Deployment

Installation

Overview

The initial installation of the Cruise Framework and set up should not take more than a day (assumption is that we have the correct level of access in your development or sandbox systems). We leverage the existing transport mechanisms offered by SAP and Neptune to deploy our solutions.

SAP Edition

We deploy our content into customer development landscapes using ABAPGit, this includes:

• Data provider class
• API Definitions
• Field mapping content

ABAP Dependancies

We leverage the open source ABAP logger framework which can also be installed via ABAPGit.

Open Edition

We provide all content via development packages in the Open Edition. This can be imported into the sandbox environments of our clients. Each object is versioned to ensure consistency across the DPC,

Open Clean Core

Clean Core & BTP

What is it?

 The "clean core" approach in S/4HANA refers to keeping the ERP system as close to the standard SAP solution as possible - with minimal customizations. This approach aims to simplify upgrades, reduce maintenance efforts, and leverage SAP's continuous innovation. 

While targeting a clean core is beneficial, businesses often require customizations to meet their unique needs. This is where solutions like Neptune Software can play a crucial role in balancing standardization with necessary customizations. 

How does Neptune (and Cruise) fit in?

Neptune DXP enables customization on top of standard processes with minimal impact to the core ERP systems (Neptune is a certified add-on). The optimal Neptune DXP architecture is when both the SAP and Open Edition are deployed together - in this configuration all your customizations can easily be built across low, pro and no-code capabilities - and integrated with your existing Fiori Apps.

Cruise provides:

• SA