Succession planning

The end of 2015 was fun, the beginning was difficult. But first, the surprising part: Just before we all said goodbye to the Christmas vacations, one of my employees stormed into my office unannounced.

He was on a business trip to China and visited some of our suppliers there for the purpose of electronic data exchange.

"You won't believe what I've been through".

the good man was hardly to be stopped.

"I was sitting there in front of an SAP screen, and I was able to use the system without any problems - only I was emphatically assured that it was definitely not an SAP system."

Later, my coworker learned that it was an "ERP system" from a large local university and that they had never heard of SAP. Whether one can now assume that ECC 6.0 was copied in China, I do not know. But rumors of illegally operated R/3 systems in the Asian region have been coming up again and again for many years.

How does SAP know this? These R/3 users often don't know that they are using an illegally copied R/3 system, and in the event of a problem, they call support quite unabashedly.

However, the ECC-6.0 replica in China is likely to have been created more trickily. According to our supplier's employees, the support comes from the local university.

Kick-off 2016:

The first major topic in the CCC Steering Committee was the SAP document "Simplification List for SAP S/4HANA, on-premise edition 1511".

In the introduction on page 12, the first and, for me, most important sentence of the 300-page white paper reads:

"SAP® S/4HANA is SAP's next-generation business suite, it is not a legal successor of any SAP Business Suite product. It is a new product completely built on one of the most advanced in-memory platform today - SAP HANA® - and modern design principles with the SAP Fiori user experience (UX)."

Now everyone knows:

SAP wants to wrest new licenses for S/4 from the community. Whether this will work remains to be seen.

S/4 is far from being an ERP system as we know it from ERP/ECC 6.0 and the Business Suite. The range of functions is marginal compared to the current SAP products.

The transformation process from S/7 to S/4 is more than vague and shadowy. A resilient roadmap until 2020 is still not tangible. U

nd the great Hana is far from productive outside BW - which is not only what I say, but is also confirmed in a research note from analysts at Crisp: Due to this complexity of the architecture, various problems arise when preparing the migration to Hana.

In particular, the massive skills gap on the part of employees is a typical scenario before a new technology rollout.

One-third of the decision-makers surveyed, for example, fear that it is precisely this knowledge gap that represents a barrier that must be overcome in order to successfully operate a Hana system.

In addition, 28 percent of decision-makers complain that there are no migration concepts for non-SAP systems. [...] Many companies encounter the first show stoppers in earlier project phases. For example, in every fifth evaluation, the PoC results do not meet expectations.

The situation is similar with the topic of use cases

For 19 percent of the companies that have evaluated the use of Hana, the use case is not yet clear or at least not yet conclusively assessed. In-memory technologies and platforms are over their niche existence and the triumphant march seems unstoppable. [...]

The decisive factor for users will be the extent to which they are able to use this technology profitably and move from the experimental stage to routine use. (end of quote)

Our PoC showed that Hana still has many anomalies and is not always faster than our good old Oracle and DB2 system. We have deliberately left out the topic of add-ons and S/4 so far, and not only because of the topic of NetWeaver Foundation for 3rd Party!

The "compatibility view" approach may work in theory, but in practice there are always escalations. Simulating the missing Abap tables with a kind of firewall is charming, but perhaps too tricky?

We are under time pressure if SAP sticks to the 2025 deadline for ECC 6.0. Apart from the enormous costs and the high technical effort, from today's point of view it hardly seems feasible to us from an organizational point of view to convert the systems by 2025.

Regardless of architecture and infrastructure, on-premise, hybrid cloud or whatever, the parameters for testing, transformation, rollout and training are identical for all scenarios.

I think SAP is making a huge error in thinking: just because a system can be made to work for selected reference customers with a lot of effort, that doesn't make it suitable for everyday use.

And the financial burden on existing customers by continuing the maintenance fee for ECC 6.0 with parallel acquisition of S/4 licenses plus the total project costs cannot be argued.