Age before beauty

In the beginning, the question was: Is S/4 still up to date in 2022? The question may sound polemical, but it is justified - especially for larger existing SAP customers. The S/4 release change, like many previous updates and version changes, can take several years. Including training, changes to the organizational structure and processes (digital transformation), and testing, testing, testing, the upcoming conversion can take five years or more - by which time the existing SAP customer will be close to 2030 and thinking about their ERP in the next decade.

In 2030, Hana will be about 20 years old and S/4 about 15 years old, although S/4 also contains Abap code that is much older. Whether there will be a Hana 3.0 and so on after Hana and Hana 2.0 - as erroneously prophesied again and again by E-3 Magazine - is completely uncertain from today's perspective. At the beginning, Professor Hasso Plattner and his then Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka declared that Hana would develop continuously and without version numbers. To great surprise, Sikka's successor, Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert, presented Hana 2.0 at an SAP TechEd in Barcelona, but left the further retread of the database open.

S/4, on the other hand - like its predecessors R/3 and ERP/ECC 6.0 - is regularly retreaded. Legal regulations and new demands from existing customers are the driving force here. Nevertheless, the question is justified: Is S/4 still up to date in 2022? The clear answer: age before beauty!

SAP has more than forty years of ERP knowledge. SAP business processes are beyond reproach in terms of business management and organization. Complex organizational structures and processes can almost only be mastered with SAP software - which does not mean that Oracle, Salesforce, Workday and other providers do not also offer good algorithms in selected areas. But from a business perspective, SAP's old ERP is unbeatable. The user interface, on the other hand, has always been borderline at SAP - either very sober in the style of the IBM mainframe era or colorful in the style of Pippi Longstocking.

Thus the crystal-clear answer: age before beauty. SAP will not die, not even of old age, even if former CEO Bill McDermott is already lying in rehearsal and the Fiori flowers are wilting next to him. The basic knowledge, the foundation of SAP, will remain valid for another 50 years, but SAP will no longer win a beauty prize for its ERP. Perhaps Bill McDermott will succeed in overtaking SAP on the right with ServiceNow, but the ERP expertise, the unique business algorithms will remain with SAP - perhaps the young SAP CEO Christian Klein should tell his existing customers that once again, because age before beauty does not have to be a disadvantage.