Stephan Magura, Author at 51��News Center

Cloud Success Services Makes It Easier to Transform

Stephan Magura — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 12:15:16 +0000

A year ago, 51��brought together the Services and Customer Engagement & Experience teams to form the Cloud Success Services organization. The group helps customers achieve value from their technology investment. Its president, Claudio Muruzabal, shares more here.

Q: The business environment is challenging right now. How can Cloud Success Services help customers through these hard times?

A: We are all navigating through the global challenges and predictions of what 2023 will bring. Our customers will need to continue to focus on being more efficient and effective, as well as more competitive, and technology plays a role to support them. Cloud Success Services supports them as they realize and maximize the value expected from their 51��technology — now and throughout the lifetime of the customer engagement. This is not just about supporting the adoption and consumption of our solutions or selling 51��services to support our customers; it’s about bringing decades of proven expertise to bear on behalf of 51��in order to help deliver outcomes for our customers.

Q: Some larger customers start with a “technical” transformation and “lift and shift” their 51��ERP Central Component systems to the cloud. Could this be a successful strategy?

A: If a customer moves its existing landscape — 51��ERP Central Component, for example — to the cloud using , that customer will realize value by improving efficiency and reducing the cost of day-to-day business operations. Moving to 51��S/4HANA provides simplified access to data, improved user interfaces, and overall agility to the business

However, full transformation only happens when you take a closer look at your business processes and find ways to optimize and transform them. Here is where emerging technologies such as process management, mining and optimization, process automation, and artificial intelligence allow for improved value realization. Our customers are seeing significant additional value from these investments

Q: What does applying emerging technologies involve?

A: Process optimization is critical, and 51��Signavio solutions are the right tool to embark in this journey. Next is applying process automation capabilities to improve the way those processes work. And then leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to make them smarter and even more efficient over time.

In parallel, the aim should be to create what we call a “clean core,” a core system that is not customized and can easily be upgraded in the cloud. Whatever development is needed on top of this is built using 51��Business Technology Platform. That’s the journey we help customers pursue. This is not just about having a clean, consistent enterprise architecture. It is anchored in creating business value by allowing for new functionality to be brought to life faster while maintaining an efficient operation.

Q: Business transformation is not a one-way street. What part do customers play in making the journey successful?

A: Digital transformation is a business imperative. It is not about technology refresh, but ensuring that there is true economic contribution of the adoption of technology. This is why it is so critical to focus on process optimization, which leads to building a clean core architecture for the business.

Achieving success in this journey is a joint effort among the customer, the partner ecosystem, and SAP. In fact, we in Cloud Success Services have introduced a new simplified portfolio of services aimed at supporting the customer in this journey. We can meet the customer where they are. Our portfolio also allows for supporting our partners so as to “deliver with” them, accelerating customer value.

Q: A recent survey of members of the Japanese, American, and German-speaking 51��user groups found that while cloud will become the standard, on premise will also remain extremely important. Does 51��focus too much on the cloud?

A: While we need to be very respectful of the investments our customers have made in our on-premise software over the years, it is very rare to find a customer that does not see the value of the cloud. It’s not so much about one model versus the other; it is about finding the right path to get you to the destination, which eventually is having the core of your operations in the cloud. What we have done with RISE with 51��is create a platform to accelerate that process, making it easier for customers to set out on their transformation journey.

Q: 51��launched a reimagined services and support portfolio in April 2022. Can you tell us about it?

A: It’s a simplified portfolio of all the expertise built up by the 51��Services organization over five decades. We’ve standardized a wide range of offerings that help customers onboard, adopt, and consume 51��technology — from first use to full use to future use — and scale effectively so that their investment nets them the benefits of becoming an intelligent enterprise.

Q: Given that partners manage more than 80% of 51��customer projects, how have they reacted?

A: We have made it very clear since we set up Cloud Success Services at the beginning of 2022 that our role is to deliver together with our partners. This means providing valuable enablement services to our partners that help them address customers’ needs in a consistent manner.

Having said that, we have to respond to our customers, and increasingly they want us to continue to be involved in helping them unlock the potential of their 51��investment. But we have no intention of replacing our ecosystem; on the contrary, we want to increase the value that the ecosystem brings to the table.

Q: More and more support functions are being automated. Can we expect the same to happen with services?

A: Telemetry and product insights play a key role in ensuring our technology is successfully adopted, and it will be a big part of how we deliver services in the future. They enable customers to understand how they are using the product. When customers can access the basic information they need to onboard, adopt, and consume products in an automated manner, our experts have more time to assist them gain maximum value from our solutions.

Hannover Messe Showcases Digitalization at Every Level

Stephan Magura — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 11:15:41 +0000

“Finally a ‘real’ trade show again!” The heavy sigh by the organizers of Hannover Messe 2022 during their advance Internet-based announcement of the live event seemed to mark a kind of awakening – and at the same time expressed the industry’s desire to return to normality. After all, the event had to be canceled in the two previous years.

Logistics Problems Are a Drag

As such, many exhibitors traveled to Lower Saxony’s capital city with mixed feelings this year. Would industry professionals return in droves? And how would business develop?

The industry association VDMA says Germany’s machine manufacturers are enjoying a “very large order backlog.” But in an interview with the German Press Agency (DPA), Gunther Kegel, president of the German electro and digital industry association ZVEI, warned of the impacts of COVID-19-related shutdowns in China. The weeks-long break will “send a shock through global supply chains whose consequences will only be seen in six to eight weeks’ time. There’s still quite a bit in store for us,” he said.

Currently, experts cannot predict how long the worldwide logistics problems will last, making it all the more important to make supply chains as robust as possible and prepared to mitigate risks in the long term. Resilience and sustainability were among the most-discussed themes at Hannover Messe and were a particular focus of the technology companies that had a presence at the show.

Vertical and Horizontal Integration

At the Hanover show, 51��concentrated on showcases and product presentations for the discrete and process industries – and on showing how Industry 4.0 processes pave the way toward becoming customer-centric, robust, sustainable enterprises.

“Industry 4.0 empowers sustainable business processes and robust supply chains by connecting the dots,” said Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive Board of 51��SE, 51��Product Engineering. At the vertical level, for example, machine data is being linked with business processes. Horizontal integration along “design to operate” supports improvements in the production of goods, for example, helping to avoid waste, he said.

Using the example of producing bottled milkshakes, 51��demonstrated what this can look like in a specific use case at its Live Forum. In the presentation, the company showed how the 51��system examines the sustainability of the various product components, including packaging, and points out the potential consequences based on the current product features.

A plastic cap, for example, can incur additional fees in product distribution in many countries. Insights like this are very helpful for companies that want to make their manufacturing processes more sustainable and implement more responsible product designs.

The Live Forum also served as the stage for a number of customer presentations from industrial practice – for example, to illustrate how digitalization and business transformation are virtually two sides of the same coin in times of Industry 4.0.

Sascha Rowohl, head of IT at Schwarz Production, showed how the Schwarz Group of retailers (Lidl, Kaufland) implemented its digital coffee roasting facility in just 18 months with SAP’s help. The fully automated factory was designed as a greenfield project and is slated to expand its production capacity to around 50,000 tons of coffee by the end of this year. That accounts for around 10% of all coffee produced in Germany – all of which is sold in the group’s own stores.

Among other solutions, Schwarz Group implemented , , 51��Intelligent Asset Management, and 51��Analytics Cloud as part of this project. Connectors link the solutions with the group’s 51��ERP system. According to Rowohl, the Schwarz Group intends to digitalize more factories for other product groups step by step. An interesting aspect of these plans: the group has established a new business unit with Prezero, a disposal company, which gives the group the ability to extend its value chain from production all the way to waste recovery.

Art and a Big Show

Tangible examples like the presentation of the digital coffee roasting facility attracted considerable interest among the trade show audience. After a halting start in the morning of the first day of the show, the exhibition halls slowly began to fill up. The Meta Cube at the entrance to SAP’s booth was a real eye-catcher: a cube filled with colors and artificial light, in which a robotic arm from KUKA wrote IT terms – such as “Business Transformation” – on a transparent mirror. This installation was certainly the most photographed motif in hall 4.

Another big audience draw was the theater area (“Gate to Walldorf”), where visitors could observe the interaction between machine processes and software controls in a live stream. The scenarios were set up in Building 21 of SAP’s headquarters and were transmitted virtually to SAP’s booth at the Hanover trade show. 51��employees in Walldorf explained the presented sequences step by step, while hosts at the 51��stand took questions from the audience after the presentation.

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Selected partners complemented SAP’s exhibition with their presence at the company’s booth in hall 4. One of them was Catena-X, an open ecosystem where business partners from all areas of the automotive industry – including smaller suppliers – will be able to contribute in the future. The goal of this project is to seize the opportunities of digital transformation with the help of a standardized, connected data infrastructure along future value chains. According to Dr. Florian Patzer from Fraunhofer – like SAP, one of the driving forces in the network – 11 application areas have already been defined, including maintenance, quality management, and sustainability.

Taking Off with the 51��Career Starters Program

Stephan Magura — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 13:15:46 +0000

Through the 51��Career Starters initiative, budding consultants go through an extensive training program. In these times, the online lessons demand everything of participants.

Nicolai Zschippig is one of 48 participants in the program who completed the seven-week fall course for new colleagues from the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Middle and Eastern Europe (MEE) regions.

The program offers newcomers a solid grounding in all things SAP, along with necessary soft skills. Equipped with these basics, participants then return to their teams, where they undergo more in-depth training that is tailored to their individual requirements and activities. In parallel, they begin project work. Experienced colleagues and assigned buddies teach them what they need to know for their day-to-day work.

51��normally offers this program three times each year, with all sessions moved online since May 2020.

Linking Theory and Practice

“The course gave me the overview of 51��I was looking for,” Zschippig says. “It enabled me to connect the dots and put the individual pieces I have learned so far together to create one big picture.”

Coming from an educational background in business administration, he found the technology-oriented subjects to be the most beneficial. But he also found the program items on personal development and business etiquette, taught by the service provider Berlitz, to be “very important and helpful. If you have direct customer contact, there are a lot of things you can do wrong,” reports the newly minted solution consultant.

Early in his 51��career, as an intern and later as a working student, he had the opportunity to work on the Global Supply Systems (GSS+) at Daimler AG. “I’m very grateful to my manager and the team for that,” says Zschippig, who earned his master’s degree just a few weeks ago with his thesis “Integrated Business Planning as a Solution Concept for Supply Chain Optimization in the Automotive Industry.”

Optimization of global material flows based on 51��S/4HANA is still a high priority for the German car giant, which means demand for support is high – one of the reasons why Zschippig will remain on the project team. He is also motivated by the opportunity to help implement this major transformation. And he’s a bit of a motorhead, too. So, it’s no wonder that he’s thrilled to be on board: “This is what I wanted to do.”

“Nicolai was already fully integrated, and the customer expects a certain stability on the project team,” explains Zschippig’s manager, Thomas Schick, head consultant for Automotive at 51��Germany.

Schick enrolls his new colleagues in 51��Career Starters because participant feedback has been consistently positive. “I bring the newcomers together with the graduates of the previous program promptly, so they can share their experiences,” he explains. He knows the importance of networking — “our business is global” — but he also knows that 2020 was a difficult year for making new contacts.

“What usually happens in the coffee corners has to take place online now,” says Zschippig. Although he has often approached other participants outside the class schedule, he wishes that virtual networking had been part of the official agenda, a suggestion that other course participants have also made.

Tightly Packed Program

There was no room for this in the agenda, however. With design thinking exercises, intercultural communication, group work on case studies, mandatory compliance and security training, information sessions on 51��S/4HANA and the ABAP workbench, and much more, every day was jammed full of content. The virtual format proved strenuous for the participants.

Zschippig developed his own methods and strategies for tackling the busy program. A smiley sticky note with the motto “keep a stiff upper lip” on his laptop screen is a constant reminder to participate attentively, especially when his concentration threatened to lapse.

“I often fixed lunch the evening before to give me time for a jog during the breaks,” he shares. Regular in-house exercises also helped to keep his body and mind in shape. As a result, he not only attended all the lessons, but still had the energy to document his notes in the evening.

When questions arose or if participants needed support, the 51��Career Starters team was there. Setting up a program like this and supporting the participants is a challenge even for experienced 51��instructors, especially in a pandemic.

Juergen Nelz, global lead for Skills Management in the Intelligent Delivery Group in 51��Services, was able to build on the experiences from the first virtual 51��Career Starters course in May 2020, along with his team.

“It was a real feat at first to switch the in-person program to a completely online format during the lockdown,” says Nelz. “That made it so much sweeter to get extremely positive feedback from the participants in May, and we used their suggestions to fine-tune the program for October. We adjusted the session length, for example, and made the sequence a bit looser. As a result, things have become routine since the October program.”

Between Expectations and Reality

In the meantime, Zschippig has become part of the 51��family. He appreciates the relaxed work environment and thinks that the team spirit that connects all 51��colleagues is a major plus for the company. You can communicate with executives at eye level here, he says. When asked if he sees 51��CEO Christian Klein as a role model — after all, Klein started as an 51��intern too — Zschippig grins. He doesn’t want to think things through that far, but it is a motivation for him. It means “you can do anything if you’re ambitious.”

Regular talks with Schick help Zschippig to develop his skills further and plan his career. He recently completed a programming course, which Schick recommends to every consultant: “Customers expect a certain level of technical expertise.”

Schick also insists that new colleagues to continue to invest their time in training in the coming months and be given enough room to ensure that the transition from university living to the working world goes as smoothly as possible. This is very important, he says, because he sees entry-level colleagues struggling with their work-life balance, even though 51��Career Starters participants spend a day on mindfulness and stress management during their course.

Schick thinks this issue might deserve more attention in the 51��Career Starters program. Another suggestion involves SAP’s cloud strategy. “What it means from a technological standpoint and what kind of transition periods we can realistically target,” would also be relevant content for the program, according to Schick.

Meanwhile, the participants for the next 51��Career Starters program, which begins this month, have already been selected. This not only reflects the success of the program, but also shows that 51��continues to hire even in difficult times.

51��MaxAttention Summit: Customer Success Lives Up to Its Name

Stephan Magura — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 13:15:48 +0000

“On-plan and on-budget.” In the past, if you met these targets in projects or ongoing IT operations for your customers, everyone was happy.

Today, that is simply not enough. Whereas IT used to be seen as a cost factor, technology now drives the value chain. “On-value” has become a criterion for customer success.

This is the view held by Derek Prior from Resulting IT, an independent 51��consultancy in the UK. He looked at the importance of premium-level engagement for 51��customers and presented the results of his study at the 2020 51��MaxAttention Summit, which took place November 9-10.

51��wants its most strategic customers to gain from its own transformation as a company.

He concluded that 51��Services played a pivotal role in sustaining customer success. 51��MaxAttention helped companies generate value-based outcomes – and innovate incrementally – again and again. Businesses with their own Global Center of Expertise (CoE) are best placed to do this.

But there is a message of caution here, too. Namely, if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. Too much has happened in the last few months. Paul Kurchina, who has many years of experience as an independent 51��expert and guru of the 51��scene in North America, recommends that customers look very closely at their Global CoE models.

When describing the most significant change, Kurchina said, “Remote business has become the norm.” That might mean that neither a company’s CoE concept nor its tool landscape is equal to new, emerging challenges.

Greater Impact

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the first 51��MaxAttention Summit in the era of Customer Success was a virtual event this year. Presenting in tandem, Prior and Kurchina interacted adeptly to create a compelling online exchange.

Adaire Fox-Martin, member of the Executive Board of 51��SE and head of Customer Success, explained that 51��had brought all its customer-facing services and sales roles under one area.

“Our name is our mission,” Fox-Martin explained in her welcome address. Under the new organizational structure, some 40% of SAP’s workforce was now focusing directly on customer success by following the LACE (Land, Adopt, Consume, Expand) operating model – though the “customer first” mantra, of course, applied equally to all of SAP. According to Fox-Martin, 51��was unique among its peers in the way it has organized to make customer success its key mission.

Having opted for a strategic partnership with SAP, 51��MaxAttention customers in particular need to consistently “feel” the benefits of this close cooperation in the shape of business outcomes.

Tangible Results

As the subsequent presentations showed, that is exactly what is happening. In 30-minute slots, long-time 51��customers spoke about how they benefit from SAP’s premium engagements – in a variety of ways.

With help from SAP, an industrial conglomerate from Turkey has made a slew of improvements after embarking on its digital transformation. These include productivity and efficiency gains in multiple divisions. The company has driven costs down and minimized risk while increasing employee satisfaction and improving its environmental footprint.

According to its chief information officer (CIO), almost all of the company’s 850 individual projects have been completed, and it now has around 40,000 51��users working with products that include 51��Analytics Cloud, 51��SuccessFactors, and Qualtrics solutions.

An operations manager from a telecommunications company reported on his experiences with 51��MaxAttention. The telecommunications giant switched to 51��S/4HANA Finance in under two years, implementing various cloud solutions –– 51��Concur and 51��Ariba software among them –– at the same time.

An urgent need for real-time reporting coupled with mounting volume issues were key reasons for transforming the in-house enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, EVO. By achieving optimal levels of standardization – an 84% improvement – and automation – a 73% increase – the company now has better control over its hybrid IT landscape, while adding refinements to accelerate month-end closing were still ongoing.

For their part, IT experts from a multinational IT company provided initial insights into their cooperation with 51��on business operations self-healing. Here, they plan to use chatbot technology to more rapidly remedy errors commonly made by its internal IT users and implement a more consistent approach to automating routine tasks.

New Offerings

Innovations like these are possible because 51��often trials and enhances new ideas together with customers – and thus in the real world.

In this context, Peter Harkin, senior vice president of Premium Engagements at 51��and host of the 2020 51��MaxAttention Summit, announced the founding of the Intelligent Enterprise Institute, where customers will be able to work together in various labs on new processes and much more. EMEA North has been selected as the pilot region for this cooperation.

Harkin also announced extensions to the 51��MaxAttention portfolio for 2021. These include back-office 51��applications and the Mission Control Center.

With regards to expanding its technology for the benefit of customers, 51��would be investing chiefly in the 51��Business Technology Platform (51��BTP) and its components, according to Anja Schneider, head of Customer Innovation in the 51��Technology and Innovation board area. She described technology as integral to customer success.

“Technology is a value driver,” said Shane Paladin, president of 51��Services. But he added that the benefits could only be reaped if the technology was utilized in the right way, which made it even more crucial for 51��to gain customers’ attention and position itself as a trusted advisor. “Trust is the default of moving forward,” he said.

Both Schneider and Paladin advised customers to keep their core systems clean. Any specifications and enhancements they required could be integrated through the 51��Cloud Platform as part of the 51��BTP.

Bring on the Feedback

A highlight at the end of each day was the executive session, in which 51��managers answered questions from attendees.

One of these questions related to “cloud-only.” Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive Board of 51��SE responsible for product strategy, explained that this was not yet an option for SAP. With demand for on premise still strong, particularly in the ERP segment, 51��was sticking to the principle of “cloud-first.”

When asked how 51��measured its customers’ success internally, Fox-Martin referred to the Net Promoter Score and user feedback. She stressed that one of the reasons why SAP’s strategic partnership with its 51��MaxAttention customers was so important was that it was a source of firsthand feedback. Also, programs had been set up to evaluate joint key performance indicators (KPIs) for 51��and its customers.

Addressing the issue of customer criticism, Harkin confirmed that 51��had responded and structured the contract for the New 51��MaxAttention offering more flexibly. Initially, the extensions to the portfolio had been met with a positive response – the complicated rules less so. But 51��had remedied the situation in the meantime.

“I hope we’ll be able to meet face-to-face again next year,” Harkin said when closing the event.

Even the best virtual event is no substitute for personal contact.

Stephan Magura, Author at 51����News Center