The True ERP Life

Core competence and alliances

SAP's core competence was and is ERP. The German-speaking SAP user association DSAG postulated many years ago that a well-maintained SAP Business Suite 7 system was already ready for the digital transformation - which of course does not argue against a release upgrade to S/4.

SAP's core competence is found in S/4. Here there are numerous and very innovative algorithms for business management. In IBP, Integrated Business Planning, there are many and new statistics functions for supply chain planning - the SAP community is impressed. SAP has proven its business management and organizational core competence with S/4, IBP, BRIM (Billing and Revenue Management) and many other ERP building blocks - SAP CEO Christian Klein should solve all other tasks such as databases, platforms, programming languages and hosting with alliances.

Platform Economy

In German there is the saying "Schuster bleiben bei deinen Leisten" (cobbler stick to your last), which means sticking to your own core competence. It is therefore best to avoid taking on external tasks whose complexity you do not master yourself. SAP CEO Christian Klein should leave cloud computing to the hyperscalers. Platforms such as BTP (Business Technology Platform) are too small within the SAP world to generate a sustainable scaling effect. The SAP Build framework can hardly hope for success in the IT world and thus remains reduced to the SAP community, where it hardly brings any added value for SAP's existing customers.

The large platforms can offer free test access and long-term evaluation because an economy of scale also allows a certain tolerance and generosity. SAP, on the other hand, must demand a payment obligation from the very first moment for economic reasons. As a platform operator (BTP) and framework provider (Build), SAP is too small for this IT world - but SAP will remain the ERP world market leader for many years to come.

The wrong in the right

SAP CEO Christian Klein neglects SAP's core competence and dabbles in foreign IT territory. There he does it like many others: He thus does something right, like cloud computing. Only for SAP itself, these are unmanageable dimensions. This makes the strategy for the ERP world market leader itself a wrong strategy: There is no right life in the wrong one. This sentence is a quote from the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno from his Minima Moralia.