Mastering SAP Collaborate Melbourne 2024 Review

It was a wonderful event this week at the Mastering SAP Collaborate Melbourne. It was a great opportunity to catch up with the latest trends and old friends, and make new contacts.

Many thanks to all the team at Mastering SAP for pulling off a great event, including Kim Aldridge , Debra Burgio , Leah Yeung , and Annette Slunjski .

SAP colleague Vivien Boche kicked off the networking session with some good advice about how to make the most of the next two days.

I had the honor of doing the keynote on The Age of Acceleration, full of fun topics like Data Magic, why AI algorithms are sociopaths, the rise of the purple people and more

Jonathan Fogarty did a great job of moderating the two days:

As usual, I couldn't attend all the sessions I would have liked. I particularly enjoyed these:

• Accelerating Accounts Payable Processing by 90% at Lionsgate with Kate Davies

• The Royal Eswatini Sugar Corporation's SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud Implementation Journey with Rob Coombe of The Royal Eswatini Sugar Corporation . Rob gave a master class in making sure that moving to the cloud was about business transformation, not just technical lift and shift, and real-world organizational mechanisms to ensure clean core approaches, avoiding complexity.

• Enterprise Architecture, Motorbikes, Corners, and Potholes with James Drummond of GrainCorp explaining the benefits of SAP Signavio and LeanIX for Enterprise Architects

• Seeding Success: Transformative Planning with SAP Analytics Cloud with Zeenat Siddique and Christoph Siebold of Costa. A great overview of how to move from Excel to a more modern and flexible approach in the cloud.

• SAC Planning for Budgeting and Forecasting, The Powerco Journey with Rudy Gesterkamp and Amanda Forsyth. This included a detailed review of all existing pain points and how SAP Analytics Cloud planning improved scalability.

• And we had a great panel session at the end of the conference talking about the human side of digital transformation, with Barbara Ciancio Frank F. and Melinda McKinley

And, bonus! I even got to catch up with Prof. Marek Kowalkiewicz, a former colleague and now celebrated author of the book The Economy of Algorithms, AI and the Rise of the Digital Minions (thanks for the signed copy!). It's a breezy, highly recommended read stuffed full of real-world examples.

And maany thanks to Malcolm Hamilton, SAP colleague and local Melbournite for dinner and his great local travel recommendations!

And save the date for the next Mastering SAP event at the Gold Coast in November! Details here:

https://masteringsap.com/events/mastering-sap-connect-gold-coast-2024/