My Travel skills are rusty, how are your ERP upgrade skills doing?

Sitting at a window seat on my flight to Bangalore for Customer & Partner meetings, go-gembas with my team, DKOM and our 25-year celebration of SAP Labs India. As much as I look forward to this highlight of the year, I must admit that my travel skills are almost rusty after 2+ years of teams & zoom calls and mostly working from home or a local subsidiary. As I feel more stressed than usually, I realize that travel hibernation had a toll on my former award-winning travel habits!?

Like my travel skills, ERP Upgrade skills require to be trained

like a muscle to avoid stress and ensure arrival at schedule

The suitcase capacity seems more challenging than last time (or my packaging skills disappeared), I needed a full extra round to spot my prebooked parking lot, I triple checked if I have my boarding pass and passport at hands and I ended up with a half-full bottle of water in front of the security. At the gate, I finally queued in the wrong lane…. Mental note to myself: I need to check my Boss for a higher travel budget to retrain my mind such that travel, once again becomes second nature!

Time warp to 2019…I had by this time travelled so much, that I almost felt like Ryan Bingham, the character played by George Clooney in the movie ‘Up in the Air’.

I had adopted habits that helped me to optimize my travel routine down to a T. My mind and body were like on autopilot, always a step ahead and already around the next corner. Instinctively, I knew for when to set the alarm clock to be in time, check in and download my boarding pass onto my phone and how and where to fastrack gate access in Frankfurt airport, where to park to shorten my walking time to the plane, which check-in counters to go to, etc.?

The benefits of this ‘process optimization’ were that I was able to minimize my stress level, be prepared for any potential tweak, never missed a flight in my entire live, and, most important, to make best use of my time, either to spend with my family or work depending.

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As I pen this, I cannot help but draw an analogy to my daily role in Cloud ERP Product Success, particularly the process of upgrading a system. In the case of SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud, this is a well-oiled process. Upgrades are consumed mandatory. The Core is kept clean by design, a calendar of upgrades is published well in advance, the procedure of the upgrade is well documented in the Activate methodology, the impact of the upgrade specific to a customer environment can be analysed with the RASD tool, the new innovations are documented in the ‘What’s new’ viewer and customers have at their disposal the built-in automated test tool to fastrack regression testing and customers are used to the drill. Ryan Bingham would be so, so proud ??.

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On the other hand, if we look at ERP systems in general, upgrades are not mandatory, yet customers have the same advertised need – to be on a modern, latest and greatest platform that allows their business to keep up with the fast pace of change and innovation. Paradoxically, living up to that need requires upgrading your mindset and your platform, frequently. The longer you put it off, the harder it becomes, the more you fall technologically behind, the more you give an opportunity for outgrown and outdated processes to take root, the less value you get out of your system, the more it costs you and the bigger the mountain to be climbed.

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I would also be remiss to not mention this great blog written by Leslie Castle, from our S/4HANA Regional Implementation Group, an organization that I run for several years now. Set up to Roll In practical experiences from projects into Product engineering, Solve complex situations and Roll Out the hands-on experience to be shared with others.

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Leslie captures a concentrate of real life upgrade best practices experienced by S/4HANA customers that do upgrades regularly and if you need more exhaustive guidance then please download SAP’s Upgrading SAP S/4HANA - How, Why, and Best Practices guide that was recently updated.

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The secret sauce of success is to foster an agile and always

ready to change mentality in your organization

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In many senses, travelling is much like upgrading:

Planning and preparation: You would not improvise travelling to a new country completely w/o preparation. Nor can you stumble into an upgrade. Understand where you are (technically, technologically, and functionally), where you want to go, and how the most current release will help you get there. Just like travel guides, use the documents, tools, services (to link just a few) that are available to you to plan your upgrade.

Consistency in execution: Next time you travel to the same country, many things will already be familiar to you, allowing you to focus on the new sights. Upgrading is the same, many things you will already have done, you will only need to focus on the delta, thus allowing you to fully reap the benefits of the new version quicker and consistently get better at it over time.

Optimizing your processes: Both frequent upgrades and regular travel can help optimize processes. With each upgrade, you can identify areas for improvement and make changes to the way you approach an upgrade as well as a business process and increase efficiency.

Adapting to change: Both frequent upgrades and regular travel enable you and potentially require you to adapt to change. Upgrades may allow for or require changes and improvements to your business processes, capabilities, and workflows. Traveling today doesn′t have much in common with trips two decades ago. Think for a moment of a full non-digital trip. No internet research for best and best-price destination, no navigation to airport incl travel updates, no last-minute gate change information on mobile, no check in on mobile, no digital payment in the shop, no travel network to hook onto, no … I guess you get the point. Change has boosted our travel experience. Upgrading to new versions of S/4HANA can introduce you to new features and functionalities, whether it be AI capabilities that will allow your employees to dedicate more time to value added tasks or fully buying into the value of a Clean Core and extending your processes on the BTP (Business Technology Platform).

I am often asked what the secret sauce of success is to be able to run upgrades smoother – I believe the question should uncover a secret formular or recipe. But it is much more trivial. Upgrading is like a muscle to be trained. The best book will not gain you the real-life experience and challenges. Like my travel skills. It is not that I don′t know how to travel and can′t react spontaneously to unplanned events, but the overall experience is so much better if it is something I am used to do. The secret sauce is to foster an agile and always ready to change mentality in your organization, and be in a better (more prepared) position to tackle the next potential disruption (Environmental footprint- pandemic restrictions – Artificial Intelligence) for both, Business & IT.

With that thought, let′s all strive to aim for Ryan Bingham perfection and a perfectly trained muscle. Next time you travel, maybe think about your personal routines and what to fine tune and what learnings could apply to the way you approach an upgrade, to make that process fully part of your normal business operations, just as it is in the Public Cloud.

I look forward to hearing from you about your learnings and experiences. You can also follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/beschulze or LinkedIn https://de.linkedin.com/in/bert-oliver-schulze