Be better, not different.

Apple promotes its products with the slogan ‘think different’ which led them quite far. As today everyone adopts, the slogan for being successful rather changes to ‘think better’. You need to be better than the rest. Do not be one of the last just following what others did because your tools running out of maintenance. Be the first one: thinking better, doing great staff and dominate the market.

These paragraphs are about SAP architectural topics leading to transformation and simplification needs to enable generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Let’s go.

There is a strong need in the market to transform current SAP environments towards S/4HANA. SAP announced already to stop the standard, at no charge maintenance support by 2027 and the extended one which comes with quite heavy additional cost end by 2030. This facts throw questions:

·??????? What is our roadmap towards S/4HANA?

·??????? Is there any technical possibility to walk this around?

·??????? Who is in charge of the change – business or IT?

·??????? Who did it successfully, so we can copy?

·??????? …

SAP announced the end of maintenance already some time back, but there are still quite a number of SAP customers in early stages of their transformation (or even not started). In general, a technical conversion can be done within the given timelines, so do not be afraid. But is it really what enables your business to grow further and provides you with the foundation for all the new technologies? The technology is there. It’s ready. You can use it. But a successful transformation never starts with the technology. Rather it starts with your needs! Define and be clear about your business needs, and those needs are the customer needs. Start to become a customer and consumer centric environment. Put your customer and consumer in the middle of everything what you are doing. Generally, sales and marketing organizations are quite successful with that: Understand your customer and consumer needs, develop it, sell it to them and be successful. Why do we think it should be different with an SAP transformation? You might ask now ‘who are my customers and/or consumers?’. It’s easy. The people who are using the SAP system day-in, day-out. Your employees are the experts to drive the transformation. They know the current processes, they know the exceptional cases, they run it. Place them centric. Listen to them. They will tell you the pain points, the processes which are not ideal, the funny stories why seven people are involved in the simplest process. You need to accept that your people are the key for a successful transformation. Treat them accordingly.

Of course, these people know the AS-IS, the current world, but you want to become better and not similar on new technology only. That’s the moment you need to look out for external consulting. Find the A-team. Do not accept consultant who just want to make quick money. Look for long-term relationships and get a trusted advisor. Find some who did it already with proven track record. This identification takes some time, as good people are very rare. But you will find your A-team, just take your time. But do not let them go anymore.

How to get started? There are different approaches on the market how to transform your current environment. The typical one (and unfortunately many consultants are using this approach) is to sit together with the customer’s experts and listen to customized processes and exception / edge cases, closing meetings disappointed with statements like ‘Why do we need this? Everything is up and running. There is no need for changes, and we did it already like this for year.’ In this situation you already lost your people. In many cases not even good and strong Change Management will recover such a situation.

There is an easier and more successful approach to it. Start with introducing simplifications. It’s not about selling technology and adopt needs and/or requirements. It’s to make the people understand what values an out-of-the-box technology holds already compared to your current word. I can tell you from my own experiences that these explanations (ideally with system demos) come already with a lot of wow-effects for the employees. Many of today’s custom solutions are by default off the table as there are SAP standard solutions for it. But the people need to know it. Invite them into your workshops with open ears to listen and open mind to understand.

And there is a nice side-effect: This approach is helping a lot to keep the SAP core clean, as one of the golden rules during any transformation is to stick to SAP standard.

Agreed! What’s next? A typical mistake (which I see unfortunately at some customers) is to now kick-off the execution. We are not there yet! You answered the most important question ‘how’, so the people-side is ready, but the answer on ‘where’ is still open. It’s very important to define the north star before you start the run. It’s the same in your personal life: If you start running without having a concrete target, you might have fun and you did some exercise, but you will never reach anywhere. And trust me, in this situation Konfuzius is not right by saying the journey is the reward. You need to be clear on your landscape architecture and your roadmap:

·??????? Do you want to have a single box?

·??????? Do you want to have a split by functions?

·??????? Do you want to have regional ERP’s?

·??????? Do you want to do a big bang or Finance first approach?

·??????? …

There are many fundamental questions with a heavy impact on your success. Have a clear answer to all of them and stand behind it with the full leadership team. There can only be one target through one roadmap, and everyone need to follow it. That’s key for success!

Get started. It sounds simple. Have the right people on board. The experts sitting in your organization. You need to give them space to participate in your transformation. Allow them to reduce their daily tasks and combine your experts with external resources who guide you through the journey. But never forget: The decision is always yours! A good consulting partner is running the show for you, but puts your people always in front. They are the decision makers, empowered by the leadership. They know what they want. They defined their needs and requirements. Have strong and experienced consultants who challenge and recommend decisions to your people and except some escalations through your consulting partner to happen. That’s not meant to overrule your experts but to influence decisions taken rightly in early stages leveraging broad market expertise. That’s why you need an A-team – trust them. When decisions are taken, stand behind it. It’s the worst to change decisions, i.e. after they have been widely communicated. You are losing trust and motivation of your teams.

That’s the basis. Go and run the show. There will always be the ask for better and faster. It’s funny, as you could have started your journey way earlier. But now having it finally started, everything need to be optimized immediately. A project plan will get challenged, scope will be asked to get extended and acceptance criteria need to be 100% accurate and delivered. A strong advice: Plan realistic, listen to experienced people, stick to your defined scope (new items belong to the backlog) and get this secured by strong and experienced project managers. You need to fight back to be successful. Accepting strange requests will not help anyone. You will find yourself quite often is situations where your bosses will ask for more and faster delivery. Be honest: It’s always a weighting up between reality and quality. And unfortunately, those requests come in 99% of the cases from people who never went operationally through a comparable journey. If you accept, you are the one who fails finally. Don’t be that one.

Accept to put some new perspectives and fresh thinking behind your transformation. There is a whole new generation who grow with GenAI. They love what they do and they are real genius in their area. They laugh at you when you do things manually. It’s about machines thinking and learning like humans, solving problems without explicit programming. The entire topic is still in early stages, but it’s impressive how fast it is growing and how successfully it can be used by everyone of us. Asking ChatGPT to propose your end2end project plan, incl. required resources and the indicated budget for your transformation is a game changer. Think about intelligent ways of embedded machine learning, chatbots, data mining, robotics, etc. crowned by GenAI into your project. It will help you steering your project and it will simplify your life. Do not expect too many ready-to-use solutions from your consulting partner yet, but they will be happy to invest with you in growing in those areas. Be better, not different!

I am happy to connect with you to take it further. Experience counts.