Sense of Urgency - Composable ERP
My own board has already experienced it: SAP is transforming itself into a cloud company. SAP's successful balance sheet figures show the success of this ambitious project. When I presented Christian Klein's SAP strategy in my own words at our annual board meeting, I received only mild smiles. The board did not want to doubt or discredit my words or the ideas Christian Klein had passed on, but transforming a technical operating model from on-prem to cloud is an operational challenge at best, not a visionary strategy at all. Is there anything more to come? the board asked me at our retreat.
The question is justified, of course, and came from our Group CFO, who financed an S/4 release change for some departments and investments up to three times without recognizing any added business or organizational value. New processes and functions are constantly forcing SAP's existing customers to modify their ERP systems, which consumes considerable resources and slows down digitization.
Management
The personnel policy of the SAP Supervisory Board has been modest in recent years: There is one member of the Executive Board who was elected with only one vote - the vote of Professor Hasso Plattner. There is the Microsoft rope team, which is now being left voluntarily by one member of the Executive Board; the other member of the rope team is not allowed to leave because there is a risk that the press will again write: "SAP can't deal with women". Memories of Jennifer Morgan come to mind, and the ill-fated dual leadership with Christian Klein.
Our board asked me about a resilient SAP strategy: Cloud computing, S/4 maintenance until 2040 and Abap on the Business Technology Platform are interesting parameters for SAP operations, but they are not insights that a board of one of the leading industrial companies wants to hear.
In our board retreat, the sense of urgency for an ERP strategy became obvious. The approach of an ERP discourse is not about final answers, but about possibilities, orientation and the opening of perspectives.
Leadership
SAP under the leadership of Christian Klein is neglecting the future. His repair service behavior prevents the collapse of the ERP world market leader. The system design of a future ERP may be based on SAP components, but its essence will be composite IT solutions. Composability will define upcoming ERP architectures. Platforms will become even more important because they represent homogeneity. Composable ERP also carries a bit of cybernetics.
SAP's loss of control results from the autonomous interaction of the individual IT components. It is about interrelationships of components. Composable ERP therefore does not mean that everyone does what they want, but that there will be a common understanding of context in the SAP community. This composability will be a principle of ERP system design and owned by the community. The discourse about an ERP after S/4 will not be conducted at SAP, but by us existing customers in the community.
