Bravo silhouette

I was a fan of Alice Cooper and Suzi QuatroThe latter was available one day as a life-size silhouette. Suzi is a good musician, but not a giant, and so after just a few issues I had my idol in a tight black leather jumpsuit hanging on the wall. Exciting! After all, the zipper at the front was open a good twenty centimeters.

Today, the zipper would have to be open to at least ten centimeters below the navel to attract attention. Perceptions and desires have changed. Obviously, however, not at SAP in Walldorf - here you still hang in the time warp of the silhouettes.

When not quite two years ago S/4 was presented in New York, USA, promised to Hasso Plattner, Bill McDermott and Bernd Leukert a new ERP based on the in-memory computing database Hana. The first throw was a huge disappointment: the well-known "Simple Finance on Hana" became S/4 Finance - ultimately an innovative Add-on for SoH, the SAP Business Suite 7 on Hana.

With S/7 on the SAP–Hana-database and some innovative accounting programs began the ill-fated S/4-Odyssey. Like a Bravo silhouette, for a year and a half SAP has been delivering a S/4-ERP in small portions. From the user's point of view, they are merely add-ons to his existing ERP/ECC 6.0 and NetWeaver–Platform. To the detriment of many existing customers, these S/4-Add-ons can only be used, however, if the SAP-The existing customer was ready in advance to migrate from S/7 with AnyDB to SoH (Suite on Hana) to switch.

So you don't just need patience for the new ERP happiness - sometime in 2020, all silhouettes (add-ons) for S/4 ready - but also the Hana database. All operating concepts, training, knowledge and organizational forms based on IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL and Oracle can be disposed of, because SAP is inexorable: for the silhouette collection S/4 is suitable only Hana as glue and basis. The add-ons S/4 Finance, S/4 Logistics, S/4 Core etc. fit together partly well, partly not so well: It's a risky business to renovate a car by getting a new part every month - once a new door, then a transmission, later the seats, bumpers, windshield wipers, and so on.
More and more SAP-Existing customers are therefore giving up their passion for collecting, saying goodbye to the silhouette model and waiting for 2020, when the SAP-garage a completely new S/4-Auto rolls. The S/4-The 2020 model should no longer consist of add-ons, but the whole should be more than the sum of its parts. Good things take time!