Customer Competence Center

It used to be called CCC, Customer Competence Center, then it was renamed Customer Center of Expertise, CCoE. The idea remained the same. Some members of the SAP community remember the good old on-prem days. From SAP's point of view - it seems - a CCoE is no longer a necessity in the cloud age.

However, some existing SAP customers disagree. In the previous issue, E-3 September, there was an urgent comment by Johannes Szalachy to fight for the continued existence of the CCoE. Regardless of the operating model, SAP's existing customers need this construct to provide optimal support for their own employees. The CCoE is one of the most important interfaces between users and SAP. A successful CCoE is therefore also a servant of two masters. Everyone benefits from a well-managed CCoE - SAP seems to have forgotten that, hasn't it?

If no competence is desired: Perhaps everything was better in the past, or at least the SAP scene was more orderly. The SAP sales representative had the SAP manager of the respective existing customer as his counterpart. Discussions about licenses were factual and focused on the needs of the users. However, these discussions were also a challenge for SAP sales because the counterpart was just as much an experienced SAP expert with a knowledgeable CCoE. Show effects, as depicted in the cartoon, were the exception and were quickly debunked.

SAP thus came up with the idea of not negotiating with the IT and ERP experts, but instead presenting its own offering to the specialist departments. The task now was to show what would be possible - quite independently of the feasibility of customizing. SAP sales bypassed the ERP experts and relied on the desires of the end users. There were hardly any critical questions here, but much more often admiration for the technical magic tricks!

The competence of the CCoE, its head, the CIO and other ERP experts was more disruptive than helpful. SAP's business was doing well because now there were no annoying questions from the IT experts and the end users naturally wanted to work more productively. From SAP's perspective, the CCoE was becoming a critical disruptive factor. This development accelerated with the advent of cloud computing and the resulting license transformation. 

When all licenses, data, algorithms and add-ons are located at SAP on the Business Technology Platform and the existing SAP customer is finally one hundred percent dependent on SAP - yes, then the existing customers really no longer need CCoE.

S/4 and Hana in the cloud at SAP are the ultimate lock-in that needs neither a MaxAttention nor support nor a CCoE. In a maximally optimized cloud, S/4 and Hana no longer need a CCoE - just as they no longer need Oracle, IBM DB2 and SQL Server. The CIO transfers his IT budget in its entirety to SAP, where they are always happy to come up with new tricks and options.