Foundation first: how TAMKO built an AI-ready SAP platform on BTP

TAMKO Building Products is one of the largest independent makers of asphalt shingles, underlayments and waterproofing in the United States. Founded in 1944 and still family-owned, it runs its own raw-material plants and has built its culture on Deming in the 1980s and Six Sigma in the 2000s. It treats the 2020s as the automation and AI era, and it wanted to get there without skipping steps.

The integration backbone was an on-premise SAP PI/PO landscape. It worked, but it carried rising operational overhead, limited central visibility into what was running, and custom coupling that would complicate a future move to S/4HANA. As AI tools arrived, the question was not which model to pick. It was whether the platform, the identity model and the data were ready for an agent to act on someone's behalf without creating a security problem.

Mindset ran the PI/PO to SAP BTP Integration Suite migration in phases, from assessment through go-live and hypercare, following SAP's Migration Guide for Process Orchestration. Every in-scope interface was assessed for cloud readiness, rebuilt as an iFlow, governed through SAP API Management and monitored in SAP Cloud ALM across Dev, QA and Production. Every process was documented as a BPMN model in SAP Signavio.

That is the foundation. On top of it, TAMKO and Mindset put the pieces in that make AI safe to try. Principal propagation carries the user's identity across Integration Suite, Joule Studio and the SAP Gen AI Hub, so an agent only sees what that person can see. A Cloud Application Programming (CAP) service exposes ECC and HANA data read-only to Claude for maintenance analysis, mean time to failure and parts inventory questions, with write access deliberately held back until trust is earned.

Wayne's team works to three simple ideas: observe for opportunities, defend the data, attack to learn. The first agent they adopted was SAP's own Joule for Consultants, which the IT team now uses daily to pull SAP Notes, knowledge base articles and configuration guidance during live work.

The migration hit its quality bar before the manufacturing application phase: every in-scope integration passed code review and technical testing, 100 percent of process maps were documented in Signavio, and the first functional testing batches passed at 100 percent. Legacy on-premise servers are being decommissioned in favor of a governed cloud platform aligned to Clean Core.

On the AI side, the outcomes are the ones Wayne presented in Philadelphia. Joule for Consultants is in daily use. During a weekend S/4HANA CVI go-live, the implementation partner hit blocking issues and the team pulled the exact SAP Notes through Joule in the room, and the go-live stayed on schedule. Identity propagation is in place so agents act as the user, and data access is read-only by design until the next step. Mindset's earlier integration work is the reason those pieces had somewhere to stand.