A Dead End With E2E
My SAP regulars' table is becoming increasingly complex and chaotic. SAP provides us with what feels like an infinite number of topics and functions, so that a consolidating debate is hardly possible anymore. Every week, SAP comes up with new ideas, half-finished products, immature innovations, and very complicated price lists. SAP CEO Christian Klein is always happy to make new explanatory comments that seem inconsistent and arbitrary over time.
My regulars had a discussion about end-to-end processes and how these are hardly possible anymore with the abundance of functions, possibilities and exceptions in an S/4 environment. The goal was not a criticism of SAP CEO Christian Klein and his comrades-in-arms Jürgen Müller and Thomas Saueressig, but an analysis of a dangerous development: The triumvirate produces many new ideas that can hardly be processed, perceived and sorted by existing customers.
Technology
SAP is focused on technology. Christian Klein likes to discuss the infrastructure problem of cloud computing. Thomas Saueressig remains silent and his colleague on the Executive Board, Jürgen Müller, philosophizes about an SAP programming paradigm somewhere between steampunk and build. Business processes with an E2E approach are left out. Standard business and organizational processes no longer seem to be SAP's core competence.
One of my regulars' table participants put it in a nutshell: those who have been there from the beginning have customized an unfinished S/4 three times to date and have still not achieved any functional gain for their users. The upcoming S/4 anchor release should once again capture and consolidate everything so that SAP's existing customers can finally leave the technology behind and start their digital transformation.
Successor
Of course, I gave Editor-in-Chief Färbinger the pleasure and sent one of my staff members to his event in Salzburg. This successor to the legendary CCC Forum is tentatively developing, but I hope it will be a success in the years to come. My co-worker told me about an enlightening presentation by SAP veteran Uwe Grigoleit; he said that with the go-live of SAP S/4 Hana, the digital transformation begins! This statement seems surprising and honest to me at the same time: S/4 would therefore not be the answer, but the basis for an upcoming digitalization. Grigoleit's words would make sense if S/4 were a consolidated and stable basis and not a collection of different technologies, functions, innovations and operating models. I can also put it positively: It is too much of a good thing. SAP tends to exaggerate. Why didn't SAP stick with partner Celonis, which has already made it onto SAP's price list? SAP bought Signavio and since then a schism has been going through the SAP community.
With the purchase of additional IT solutions in recent years, SAP has created an almost unmanageable and uncontrollable offering. SAP CEO Christian Klein is a provider of manifold excellent individual solutions, which are offered to SAP's existing customers at fluctuating license prices without a concept. SAP has surrendered its ERP expertise.
Business Technology Platform
The DSAG discourse shows that a business technology platform must be functionally convincing and not dazzle with innovative technology. The business aspect is the competitive advantage for us existing SAP customers. Instead of focusing on business management, integration and diversification, Klein is pushing his existing customers in the direction of the public cloud, and in doing so he is promoting a technical operating model discussion.
However, a digital transformation of the organizational structure and processes cannot be achieved with a technical release upgrade. My SAP regulars' table agrees that there are currently no consistent end-to-end processes in an SAP ERP landscape. The SAP offering, the options, the technology, the licenses are too complex, too diverse and too heterogeneous to achieve consistent business processes. It ends in a dead end.
