Give Hana a chance
My wife briefly skims the opening credits of my column as I pass by. "You find a hair in every soup," she says, amused. "Why don't you just let the Walldorfers have a go at it," she says with wisdom.
But IT, and software in particular, is a different matter: whether IT is decisive in the war is a matter for my fellow board members to argue about. For me, IT is first and foremost a tool and a foundation for successful organizational and operational structures.
IT can lift the treasure trove of data. So we are grateful to SAP for Hana. But I am not satisfied! The eternal talk of "Run Simple" makes me nervous.
Computer science, algorithms, graph databases and in-memory computing can simplify business processes and generate new insights, see predictive analytics and the simulation of dynamic systems.
My employees and student workers are doing amazing things on the Hana platform. Even though the complexity has now disappeared from many SAP systems, it still remains complex and a finished engineering degree is always very helpful.
Bill McDermott is completely wrong with his "Run Simple". Complex, global production, trade and logistics are by definition not simple. Even the most beautiful and easy-to-use Fiori interfaces of our student projects are not simple.
A lot of work has been invested here to present complex issues in an easy-to-use manner - the business process and the mathematical algorithms remain complex.
But "Run Simple" is not my current problem. The S/4 Roadmap 2025 worries me, or rather, its non-existence makes me and my colleagues nervous.
There are plenty of official and unofficial meetings and discussions. But the statements between a Sapphire stage in Orlando and small CIO meetings in Walldorf are hard to match: Everywhere only simple innovations and non-disruptive IT, but nowhere consolidated and resilient S/4 statements.
My regional CCC leader and his team spent quite a few hours in the SAP service marketplace trying to get some clarity. The result was meager. He then had no desire or interest in traveling to Orlando for Sapphire, although a DSAG colleague from Arvato strongly urged him to do so.
Time is running out: As my acquaintance, CFO at Bayer, recently told me, after many years they have completed the global consolidation to R/3. One appreciates the fruits of this labor.
There, too, they are experimenting with Hana, but an S/4 roadmap is out of sight. Of course, SAP is taking the easy way out internally! The group is relatively small and has the best SAP specialists at hand. So why not switch quickly and successfully to Simple Finance - after all, it costs nothing.
The rest of the community just finished the technical version change to ECC 6.0 a few years ago.
Some of my colleagues have implemented almost the entire NetWeaver stack. And the unfortunate ones who were now at Sapphire in Orlando had to take note that even this ERP platform developed by ex-chief technology officer Shai Agassi will not be of eternity. Now comes Hana!
As my wife always says, "Life is change." I can accept that, but does it have to happen so quickly? The last NetWeaver projects have just been successfully completed, the team well trained and now (almost) everything is to be replaced by the Hana platform?
One insight my team gained from the visit to Orlando is thus: NetWeaver is dead because it is no longer relevant. I don't want to believe my US employees quite like that. I will ask them in Walldorf.
I think that the problems lie elsewhere at the moment. I was prompted to do so by a commentary by financial analyst Antonio Sommese. He wrote on the occasion of the turbulence in the VW Group:
"How useful is an established automotive executive with gasoline in his blood and a lead foot when self-driving electric cars dominate the road scene in the future?"
And I can only add: How useful is a salesman (McDermott) and technician (Leukert) on the Sapphire stage when digital business processes will determine the ERP scene in the future?
IoT and Industry 4.0 are the order of the day for us in the Group. The digital tsunami is coming, as analysts at Gartner predicted two years ago. And the analyst went on to write:
"For many years, carmakers have rested on spicing up their models with technical gimmicks every few years and have been very successful with this strategy across the board.
It remains to be seen whether this strategy of tripping steps will be enough to fend off the onslaught of the new market players from the IT league, first and foremost Apple and Google."
I have a similar view of SAP: Can the group defend itself in cloud computing against the start-ups from Silicon Valley? Is it enough to position Hana as a cloud platform?
Short answer: Hana is good, the SAP cloud is a disaster. Technically, I don't want to start a fight here, but Microsoft recently admitted it: With a cloud subscription model, the company will earn at least 80 percent more in the coming years.
At SAP, the numbers games won't be much different. The only thing is that I don't see any existing customers paying this voluntarily. The model for the medium-term future will therefore be S/4 Hana on-premise.
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