ERP Visionary Officer

Strategy and vision in times of transformation

Everything has its time: Now it is up to the SAP managers and executives to repair the ERP architecture, while the Executive Board, with the support of the Supervisory Board, should turn its attention to the future. Of course, not all existing SAP customers have migrated to S/4 Hana yet. For many R/3 and Business Suite 7 users, the transformation will go into 2030, yet the S/4 successor T/5 Hana needs to be thought about now.

S/4 solution versus T/5 discourse

SAP's existing customers have a sufficiently viable ERP solution in front of them. With S/4 Hana as a private (on-prem) and public cloud, most of the challenges of the upcoming digital transformation can be solved. But the SAP community also needs a T/5 discourse: a vision of what could follow S/4. No answers are needed yet, because S/4 Hana will remain in maintenance until 2040. But there must be a discourse on ERP architectures and IT infrastructure so that development of T/5 Hana can begin in 2030.

Chief Visionary Officer

On the SAP Executive Board, there is less need for a marketing manager to look after the company's own customer experience and relationship management, because experienced SAP executives can also organize that very well. SAP CEO Christian Klein needs several people at his side for strategy and vision. SAP's existing customers need to know that they will continue to be on the right side with SAP software in the future. It is important and right that SAP continues to maintain the Abap programming language, see Steampunk. However, no ERP group needs an executive board position for these operational tasks. The same applies to topics such as BTP, ESG and cloud. For 2025 and beyond, Christian Klein needs an SAP Chief Visionary Officer.