Pledge allegiance to SAP

I received an invitation to a conference of the Würzburg-based consulting firm Barc, in which I found the remarkable sentence: The incompatibility of SAP and non-SAP data slows down companies! An old insight that SAP also had many years ago. Unfortunately, SAP took a wrong turn and maneuvered itself into the sidelines with the Data Hub.

Almost all analysts agree that ERP users spend too much time collecting and preparing data instead of trying to understand and analyze it. Lifting the treasure trove of data is far too time-consuming, and neither a fast database nor a more modern ERP can help against this. So the question is very much: swear allegiance to SAP or look for alternatives?

With S/4 and Hana, once it would run operationally, we consistently continue the well-known ERP path of the past 50 years. Even if Hana is better than AnyDB and S/4 is better than R/3, ECC 6.0 and SAP Business Suite 7, the focus remains the same. With Rise, SAP's existing customers get even more of the good delivered to their homes, but nothing fundamental changes. Currently, an almost perfect Business Suite 7 is on a par with an S/4 that is poorly customized. If Hana and S/4 improve, then things are moving linearly in the right direction. But transformation done well is a disruptive process.

Pledging allegiance to SAP is a sensible, albeit expensive, path. SAP is a secure and stable foundation, but SAP is also overpaid. Compared with competitors, SAP is too expensive. By their very nature, SAP platforms serve their purpose. Existing customers have invested in ECC or S/4 and have no interest in destroying this ERP now. What SAP users want, however, according to ex-SAP CEO Bill McDermott, is hyperautomation, which enables the aforementioned merging of data and also algorithms.

In general, McDermott believes it is a mistake for companies to talk about digital transformation but implement it in a traditional way. Many ERP users are upgrading their systems from the last century and confusing that with digital transformation. "And unfortunately, they're putting all their resources into that," McDermott explained at an event in The Hague that I attended in May of this year. Digital transformation is not about making the old things a little better. It's about changing the system - a gamechanger.

In the coming years, many existing customers will swear allegiance to SAP and customize S/4 Hana, incurring high project costs. At the same time, my successors, the young CIOs, will look around for alternatives because they will realize that Rise, Data Hub, NetWeaver and Hana are not necessarily bad, but they are no longer up to date.

I'm probably still under the influence of the event in The Hague, because more and more I'm coming to believe that disillusionment will soon set in for companies taking the traditional ERP route with Hana and S/4, because we SAP legacy customers are looking at digital transformation in a 20th century perspective. Bill McDermott said that in comparison, there is now a new world that is becoming aware of the power of hyperautomation. In order to unearth the treasure trove of data mentioned at the beginning, we will need this meta-level.

With the current S/4 product roadmap, many existing customers and DSAG members are questioning their strategy for Big Data, BI/KI and Analytics. And I learned something else in The Hague: Bill McDermott's company wants to cooperate with process mining specialist Celonis. In addition, McDermott is using the tools of Danish SAP migration specialist Gekkobrain. With Gekkobrain, SAP legacy customers can analyze the Abap modifications that have been built into ERP/ECC and streamline parts of it to run at a meta-level. So I, too, will pledge allegiance to our SAP and look for alternatives to leave a successor a contemporary system in a few years.