For Suggestions and Ideas I will be happy to answer any questions you may have about SAP Basis, S/4 operating models and/or the Competence Center at any time. Call me on +49/8654/77130-21 or write to me at pmf@b4bmedia.net.

For Further questions Ms. Andrea Schramm will be happy to answer any questions you may have about the SAP Competence Center Summit 2026. By phone +49/8654/77130-15 or via e-mail andrea.schramm@b4bmedia.net.

The conference rooms of the FourSide Hotel Salzburg, Trademark Collection by Wyndham, are the venue for the SAP Competence Center Summit 2026 on June 10 and 11, 2026 in Salzburg. All information about the hotel and conference rooms can be found here: FourSide Hotel Salzburg, Trademark Collection by Wyndham.

Plan your route: Google Maps location

EUR 154,- Price per room and night for single use
Double room supplement EUR 20,- per room/night

Long-serving members of the SAP community from the R/2 and R/3 era probably still have fond memories of the CCC. Customer Competence Center stood for first-level support for existing SAP customers by their own IT department, which was certified by SAP for this purpose. Because SAP obviously considers anything from a successful on-prem era to be „the devil's stuff“, the CCC became the CCoE, Customer Center of Expertise. SAP has also tweaked many CCC settings, making the CCoE a true experiment in the post-SolMan era.

If an existing SAP customer believes the Rise with SAP promise, then neither a CCC nor a CCoE will be needed in the future: However, this is merely marketing and an empty promise from SAP. Numerous existing SAP customers and partners from the SAP community have reported in recent months that the opposite is true: those who signed a Rise with SAP contract usually had to expand their SAP Basis team (Customer Center of Expertise) or outsource additional tasks to service providers. Rise really does create a lot of work!

SAP's idea of CCoE thus became a field of experimentation for SAP Basis Support. Why?

With an SAP ERP system in the cloud, not a single problem from the previous ERP/ECC 6.0 system has been solved. System copies, authorization management, user administration, monitoring and automation, batches and program updates etc. are still on the agenda of the in-house IT team. Some tasks can be delegated to SAP via a Rise ticket system, but SAP itself does not act proactively as part of a Rise contract. The existing SAP customer has to create a ticket for each job. S/4 expertise, IT administration and enterprise architecture therefore remain the responsibility of a CCoE - SAP does not see itself as having operational responsibility with „Rise“!

Existing SAP customers are therefore facing a historically unique turning point, the core of which is not only the inevitable migration to S/4 Hana by 2033 at the latest, but also the fundamental change from a monolithic, on-prem-centric IT world to a highly complex, hybrid cloud architecture that is ultimately not managed and secured by a Rise contract. This transition is therefore much more than a technical release change; the S/4 Rise conversion is highly challenging from a business, organizational (the CCoE experiment), technical and licensing perspective. At the heart of this far-reaching change is the organizational unit that has traditionally ensured the stability and smooth running of the company's „crown jewels“ - the SAP ERP systems (S/4, new SAP Business Suite and SAP Cloud ERP): the Customer Competence Center (CCC), currently renamed the Customer Center of Expertise (CCoE).

At the beginning of this year, SAP and DSAG e. V. asked: To what extent are the following topics relevant to your investment plans for 2025? n=243, source: DSAG

The CCC has a long and successful history. It functioned as an organizational operating model and certified competence center within the IT organization of the existing SAP customer. The CCC's main task was to coordinate internal IT with SAP support, optimize the overall performance of SAP operations and serve as a hub for collaboration between IT and the business units. In the new S/4 Rise world, which is characterized by agility and shorter update cycles, the CCoE should become a guarantee for sustainable success, especially as SAP emphasizes the necessity of the CCoE for cloud solutions such as Rise and Grow.

The role of the CCoE is bipolar: on the one hand, it has to keep the highly complex S/4 Rise operation up to date and, on the other, drive forward the strategic digital transformation. From a business perspective, the CCoE manager and CIO must jointly organize the operational operation of the SAP applications. In view of the tight maintenance windows and the need to keep systems available 24/7, the CCoE must demonstrate efficiency gains through automation. It is about cost and resource savings, which must be significant through the full automation of processes and end-to-end monitoring. Organizationally, the CCoE is the focal point that directly feels the skills shortage of base administrators, exacerbated by retirements, labor shortages, growing Rise-with-SAP project loads and Rise ticketing system.

Automation would be the logical answer to relieve employees and free them up for higher-value tasks. In addition, the CCoE must structure the cloud orchestration role of the IT department, for which SAP assumes no responsibility as part of Rise. In selected cases, SAP „gives away“ an enterprise architect with LeanIX experience. A significant new focus is clean core governance in the S/4 world, where the CCoE must ensure enablement, governance and communication for compliance with the clean core principles - here too, the existing SAP customer is left to its own devices with the CCoE.

Technically, the CCoE has to manage a hybrid system landscape (ECC 6.0, S/4 Hana, SAP Cloud ERP and non-SAP). This requires the management of complex maintenance (patches and innovations in many parallel system landscapes). Routine tasks that are still performed manually or using complicated scripts are numerous and error-prone: SAP kernel patches, rolling out authorization objects, making adjustments to profile settings, creating sandboxes and system copies.

This is where specialized automation suites such as the Empirius Planning and Operations Suite (EPOS), which act as a central point of management for SAP IT infrastructures, come into play to carry out these recurring activities in a fully automated manner. Tools such as Ansible from RedHat support the automation of SAP workloads (deployment, configurations, housekeeping) and are increasingly able to automate „into“ ongoing SAP operations (e.g. rights management).

In terms of licensing law, the CCoE - as the unit responsible for contract management - remains in a constant state of tension. With over 300 lines and 200 pages, the SAP price list for S/4 is complex and creates uncertainty among existing customers. The topics of digital access and indirect usage are particularly critical. The measurement of indirect usage is becoming the focus of SAP system measurement, with the CCoE having to use IT tools such as the Passport Report and the Estimation Note, the results of which are not guaranteed by SAP and require their own critical interpretation.

Even the path to the cloud (Rise with SAP) offers no guarantee against mislicensing. The existing SAP customer continues to bear responsibility for compliance. The CCoE must therefore develop calculations and strategies to manage the complexity and the associated technical, contractual and commercial risks.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), the sum of all methods and tools for managing the SAP landscape, is the central work area in which the transformation manifests itself most clearly. With SAP Cloud ALM (CALM), SAP has created the strategic successor solution for the established SolMan (SAP Solution Manager), primarily geared towards cloud-centric solutions such as S/4 Cloud, SuccessFactors and Ariba.

However, a critical analysis shows that CALM is currently not a fully-fledged alternative to SolMan. While SolMan offered extensive functions for project management, monitoring, incident and change management and test management and was used centrally in large IT landscapes, CALM can currently only partially develop its full service potential for on-prem or IaaS/private cloud environments.

A serious shortcoming from the perspective of existing SAP customers is the lack of functions for IT service management (ITSM) in SAP Cloud ALM. The solution can only be used optimally if either no other monitoring tool is in use, no infrastructure and system monitoring is required or integration with external ITSM solutions (such as ServiceNow) can be used. In the case of ServiceNow, however, SAP is not happy about this.
While CALM supports test management and operational automation by providing mechanisms for automated response to incident situations and integrating with SAP Intelligent RPA and SAP Workflow Management (both on BTP), actual transport control is handled by external services such as the Cloud Transport Management Service.

In addition, CALM does not provide the necessary analytics data for the adaptation or further development of Fiori apps, which is why external analytics tools are still required. CCoE teams need to take a critical look at the cloud ALM roadmap and realize that they will typically need to maintain hybrid tool landscapes supplemented by partner solutions to fill the gaps in CALM.

SAP for Me is SAP's comprehensive self-service portal designed to support customers in managing their SAP system landscape and licenses. For license managers, it offers functions such as monitoring API usage and performance as well as maintenance planning. Critically, this portal, which is an important IT tool for CCoE employees, repeatedly suffers from malfunctions and interruptions. This leads to annoyance and unproductive work in the CCoE.

In view of the future requirements of AI agents and the SAP BDC, which demand 100% availability, this lack of IT stability and reliability is being sharply criticized by CCoE managers. The acquisitions of SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX strategically position SAP in the area of Business Process Intelligence (BPI) and Enterprise Architecture (EA).

Signavio is primarily used for process transformation (business process redesign/reengineering). Process mining and AI-supported tools (such as task and communications mining) are used to perform a data-based, objective analysis of the actual process flows in the SAP system (how they actually take place). Signavio thus identifies process cost drivers, complexity and automation potential, which creates the basis for determining which processes need to be standardized and then tested. The integration of AI is advanced, including an AI-supported process modeler (text-to-process function). The seamless integration of Signavio Process Manager with SAP Cloud ALM enables the transfer of process models for solution implementation.

Transition to the cloud and Rise with SAP: Despite the Rise contract, responsibilities remain with existing SAP customers under a new cloud operating model – a CCoE experiment, right? Source: SAP

LeanIX, on the other hand, covers enterprise architecture. It is understood as a tool for transparency across the IT landscape and as a model for the future architecture (in the course of the S/4 and cloud ERP transformation). The critical analysis of these IT tools from a CCoE perspective focuses on the bipolar challenge: the tools are strategic instruments at the beginning of the ALM process, whereas automation and monitoring are operational tools for later operation. The existing SAP customer must organize the simultaneity of process mining (Signavio) and automated testing during operation (CALM, basic automation). Critics doubt the direct business and organizational added value of LeanIX and Signavio if SAP does not provide a clear strategy for orchestrating these complex tools.

SAP has acquired WalkMe to strengthen its support for end users. WalkMe, the Digital Adoption Platform, is designed to increase productivity and reduce risk by identifying where friction occurs and providing customized support and automation directly in users' workflows (across all applications involved, including non-SAP). WalkMe helps existing SAP customers to adopt new functionality quickly and efficiently, improving user adoption - a critical success factor when introducing new SAP systems.

SAP's vision of business transformation: From routine to supporting growth and new business models, but existing customers must take responsibility for proactive action.

The S/4 Basis architecture requires specific measures in monitoring and automation. The migration to S/4 Hana requires a large number of integrations. The IT systems are often no longer monolithic, but hybrid (on-prem, private cloud, public cloud, non-SAP systems). This fragmented environment makes holistic monitoring complex. Despite the increased risk, many existing SAP customers struggle with seamless real-time monitoring for their SAP landscapes. The CCoE must ensure seamless monitoring of interfaces and apps (such as Fiori) in order to proactively detect problems. Solutions such as New Relic offer full-stack observability and business process monitoring across SAP backend and Fiori to measure the performance of end-to-end processes (e.g. order-to-cash) and assess the impact of migrations.

The trend is towards linking monitoring and automation (Observe, Engage, Act). The aim is self-healing during operation (e.g. automated disk expansion, restarting backups). Platforms such as Avantra use AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) to simplify IT operations and speed up problem solving in complex environments. But with Rise with SAP, access to SAP operations is restricted, making it difficult for standard automation tools to work, especially when handling end-to-end processes. Legacy interfaces are no longer available in some cases. Workload automation solutions must therefore be Rise-compatible, ideally operating directly from the SAP system (such as Honico BatchMan).

The SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) concept aims to create a semantically integrated database for the intelligent enterprise. The BDC and the associated technologies (Databricks, Snowflake as data lake solutions from hyperscalers) are revolutionizing the data architecture, as they could potentially replace the classic data warehouse (DWH). The work of the CCoE and SAP Basis will be massively influenced by this development: instead of monolithic data storage, distributed, hybrid environments are emerging that require data streaming and big data analysis. The CCoE must ensure the governance of the numerous APIs required for data exchange between SAP Cloud ERP (S/4 Hana) and external cloud platforms.

The CCoE must deal with the issue of data sovereignty. Licensing becomes complex when SAP data flows into external LLM models outside the SAP ecosystem. In addition, the CCoE must have a comprehensive cloud exit strategy in place, as cloud providers including SAP could delete the data when contracts end. The CCoE therefore becomes a strategic partner that has to establish the link between Hana and PAL (Predictive Analytics Library) data storage and the requirements of the cloud analysis tools (data fabric, data hub).

The CCoE is the central organizational unit that must ensure security governance and compliance (e.g. SoD, authorization management). Concerns about potential system breaches are justified for existing SAP customers. The biggest operational challenge is the monthly SAP patch day management. SAP provides security notes, but the manual checking of relevance and implementation of hotfixes is often inadequate due to a lack of resources. 

Automation (e.g. through specialized software that collects, prioritizes and initiates actions for SAP Security Notes) is the only way to ensure sustainable security and drastically reduce troubleshooting times. For SAP cloud solutions, the responsibility for compliance and application security remains with the customer (CCoE) despite the Rise-with-SAP contract, even if the hyperscaler (e.g. Azure, AWS) or SAP itself ensures a high level of infrastructure security. The CCoE must actively address compliance with laws (such as the GDPR) in the public cloud.

The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) introduces new challenges. The CCoE must establish governance, fixed structures and best practices for the BTP, as these are often lacking. It must be clarified where the responsibilities lie and how the BTP tenants and sub-accounts are configured securely. New threats such as Economic Denial of Service (EDoS), in which the customer's cloud resources are increased through misuse, must be addressed jointly by developers and CCoE. Regardless of on-prem or cloud, the CCoE is required to ensure cyber resilience - the ability to remain capable of acting even in the event of successful attacks. 

This requires a holistic, proactive strategy and close, often absent, collaboration between the SAP teams (Basis, Development) and the IT security organization in order to overcome silo boundaries (DevSecOps approach). Basic security starts with the infrastructure and extends to interfaces and data streams.

The CCoE is also responsible for maintaining up-to-date and transparent authorization concepts; here too, SAP does not assume any responsibility through a Rise contract. The CCoE tasks include checking critical authorizations (such as SAP_ALL), SoD risks (Separation of Duties) and the management of emergency or super users, which are viewed critically by auditors. Identity and access management solutions (such as SAP Access Control or SIVIS/2ndC) are needed to centralize and automate user lifecycle and access control.
And the CCoE must carry out regular system configuration audits in order to comply with security-relevant specifications (SAP profile parameters, database level). Reporting apps from automation suites provide the necessary information for audits and compliance checks.

In summary, the CCoE has become the strategic control center in the era of S/4 Hana and SAP Cloud ERP (new SAP Business Suite). It must preserve the role of the traditional CCC - the perfect, automated mastery of the SAP machine room - and at the same time adapt SAP's strategy by resolving the bipolar tension between strategic process design (Signavio and LeanIX) and operational IT stability (automation and monitoring). Without this comprehensive service - business-wise through cost optimization and licensing clarity, organizationally by reducing the workload of specialists through automation and technically through seamless monitoring and robust cyber security - the existing SAP customer will not be able to manage the complex S/4 conversion safely and successfully.