From business management to technical

SAP did not have its own mainframe computer; at the first customer, programming was done at night, users were interviewed during the day; and little sleep was had. Back then, R/1 was still stored on punched cards, and the story goes that Hasso Plattner once dropped this stack of punched cards from his hand into the water at the SAP parking lot in pouring rain - it wasn't the end of SAP!

What also always distinguished SAP was business innovation: The discussions with Hans-Georg Plaut, August-Wilhelm Scheer and many others brought new processes and ways of thinking to business administration. It was debated for a long time whether a raw balance sheet at the push of a button was necessary, or whether it would not be completely sufficient to carry out the annual financial statement, as the name suggests, once a year?

Today, SAP's existing customers benefit from this discussion and BWL innovations, but SAP has largely abandoned this fruitful discourse. What counts today are in-memory computing databases and Corona apps. Obviously, the BWL tradition has not evolved; instead, there has been a paradigm shift: Technology seems more attractive, right? But SAP's existing customers need business and organizational support and processes.