Plattner explains S/4

Plattner tried a carrot and stick approach, writing in his blog that he would understand if not all existing SAP customers immediately dropped everything and spontaneously switched to S/4.

He would understand the due diligence of the users, because SAP Business Suite 7 is not a bad solution either.

But! No one can get past Hana, Plattner threatens. His in-memory computing database Hana has to be - whether as a platform for Suite 7 or for S/4.

Hardly worth mentioning: With Hana, the entire ERP infrastructure must also be adapted, because Hana is only compatible with Linux. Ultimately, however, it remains a mystery to him why his customers don't want to switch to S/4 and Hana.

Where Plattner errs:

It is not the use and business case that are primarily required, but a simple functional description of S/4. Nobody likes to buy a pig in a poke.

However, SAP is still not able to offer a simple Excel table explaining which functions are available or (still) missing in ERP 6.0, Business Suite and S/4.

The result of this poor educational work: SAP's existing customers are leaving S/4 on the left and will focus on SoH in the coming years - in other words, an S/7 with Hana.

As described: No one can get past Hana anymore, and this means that many existing customers will have to undergo a database change in the coming years.

The painful thing about a database change is the unproductivity. The base team works and sweats and the user notices nothing. Whatever database has been a stable platform for R/3, ERP 6.0 and Suite 7 in the past years, now it's over.

The old database must be disposed of and Hana must be installed. In the best case, the data remains the same. On the Monday after the database change, all ERP functions should run as before - nothing but expenses, the user thinks. But Plattner will be happy.

The entire SAP community is based on Hana because someone wants it. Sabine Bendiek, ex-Germany head of EMC and now Germany head of Microsoft, seems to be completely on Plattner's side. In Havard Business Manager, she wrote:

"The attitude of not having to change anything because things are actually going quite well is, in my experience, tremendously dangerous."

Many existing SAP customers think differently: they have spent years consolidating, harmonizing, automating, and virtualizing to ensure that Business Suite 7 runs properly.

So why change management with Hana now?

The system is just a year old and already Professor Plattner is declaring that S/4 is by far the best ERP system SAP has ever launched. And in his public attempt at explanation, he contradicts himself.

Here: Meanwhile, S/4 provides finance and accounting, as well as sales and logistics.

There: One of the reasons why companies have long-term plans for S/4 Hana is the completeness of the product. But then the professor also confirms again:

Of course, the lush feature set of Business Suite 7 can't be replicated in the blink of an eye. What now?