Mastering Sap Technologies & Cloud

M A S T E R I N G S A P T E C H N O L O G I E S & C L O U D

C O M M U N I T Y S N A P S H O T 2 0 2 0

I N T R O D U C T I O N

For 24 years, The Eventful Group has specialised in developing technology, and particularly SAP-Centric communities of practice for both business and IT professionals. Intense research is conducted with these communities via a process known as the Circle of Customer Engagement, where both the challenges faced and opportunities perceived are identified through roundtable discussions held across Australia. P A R T I C I P A N T P R O F I L E

The roundtable discussion groups brought together business leaders, business analysts and IT teams who leverage SAP’s technology stack of tools from a wide variety of industry sectors including mining, financial services, media, pharmaceutical, retail, healthcare, telecommunications, pulp & paper, energy, utilities, transport, manufacturing, technology consulting and the public sector. Over the course of these groups we met face to face with 170+ SAP professionals from over 100 organisations who shared their stories regarding process optimisation and the use of SAP solutions to support that. These insights are captured in this report.

Some of the job titles of participants include:

Development Lead - SAP GM Business Applications, Digital Services Head of Architecture, Design and Innovation Head of Group Information Technology SAP Application Manager

SAP Basis Team Lead SAP Development & Process Integration Team Lead SAP Functional Team Lead SAP Technical Architect Senior SAP Developer

Solution Architect

N O T E O F T H A N K S

O V E R V I E W

SAP is constantly reinventing its' portfolio of solutions. Whether you are an SAP Customer, an SAP Partner, an independent consultant or an SAP employee keeping up with developments across all of SAP’s on premise and cloud solutions is a time-consuming endeavour. The Mastering SAP Technologies event is Australia’s premier event and a one stop shop where you can get up to speed on all these advancements. As you try to digitally transform your organisation, implement the new UI offerings, move to HANA and S/4HANA, adopt SAP’s Cloud Platform, automate, innovate and integrate the various tools it is vital to be able to draw on the shared expertise and experience of the wider SAP ecosystem.

Customers were particularly interested in:

1. Integration 2. SAP S/4HANA Readiness & Developing a Digital Roadmap 3. User Experience 4. Monitoring and Administration 5. Innovation: AI, RPA, ML 6. The Development Environment 7. Cloud 8. Shared Services 9. Patching & Upgrades/ Testing

1 . I N T E G R A T I O N

Over the past 18 months, SAP's senior leadership has acknowledged that integration is SAP's largest technical challenge and their responsibility to find a solution for. At present, SAP may provide integration code for some scenarios but the responsibility and cost for getting the integration working remains a customer responsibility. Customers are asking how they can do integration in a consistent, repeatable and maintainable way. · What is SAPs roadmap for integration between SAP products? Given that most SAP customers are still on premise customers, what is SAP’s solution within a hybrid landscape between ECC and the Cloud solutions SAP offers: SuccessFactors, Ariba, Hybris, Concur and others? At first XI and later PI-PO was SAPs answer as their ‘central message switch’. Customers are interested in the capability within SAP’s Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) Is Master Data as a Service the key to customers moving to the cloud, does it go some way to solving the integration issue, with the data stored and maintained in one place? Essentially what war stories are out there of customers who have got integration right and what is SAPs roadmap with integration layers and integration tools?

2 . S A P S / 4 H A N A R E A D I N E S S & D E V E L O P I N G A D I G I T A L R O A D M A P

To go SAP S/4HANA or not to go SAP S/4HANA. First and foremost, customers must understand the roadmap, design the architecture and plan out the integration. With 2025 looming fast on the horizon customers want to make the jump to SAP S/4HANA at the optimal time. Too early and fingers get burned, too late and the fear is that there will not be sufficient resources in country to successfully make the move with the flurry of activity that will exist.

Questions are: And if one makes the move is it better to go Greenfield or brownfield? Ie. Just start again from scratch? Customers are asking what upskilling of technical people is needed? When is a good time? What are those who have made the leap’s experiences? What is the effort and time required? Do I need to do business process reengineering? Or is it a technical lift and shift? What about custom code? Will there be an impact?

How good are the migration tools? What do I get every 3 months with the quarterly Feature Package Stack releases and how disruptive is that? What is the best way to evaluate impact and options for moving to SAP S/4HANA?

3 . U S E R E X P E R I E N C E

Back in R/2 and R/3 days SAP’s Green Screen User Interface was a challenge that customers continuously cited. This is no longer the case. SAP have worked hard on their UI/UX and the Fiori Launch Pad (FLP) and Fiori Apps are earning great kudos. But still some customers want to better understand the Fiori Launch Pad.

The questions that we are hearing around FLP is the related to the required administration, configuration, security.

Should the strategy be that Fiori (Version 3) be made available as the front end for my business users, while the SAP GUI is still the interface of choice for professional users? Do Fiori Apps provide enough drill down depth for serious users?

The aim whenever you are doing UX, the user doesn’t care what is behind. In that regard, can I customise the Fiori launch pad?

Other discussions revolved around user centric design. Actually, bothering to understand what your users want. · How should one approach design and what is best practice in terms of the design process? Some customers have dedicated UX teams. Native is the new development paradigm. With web apps only working while the user is connected. You can of course build a web app that can work off line, but it will never be as robust as a native app. And what is the go with SAP Fiori Cloud. At the moment the on premise tools are richer, but when will the Cloud version catch up?

How do I use the Content Delivery Network (CDN)UI5 library? Customers want help understanding the new development paradigm of CDS (Core Data Services) Views and annotations. These annotations are rules or strong hints. Fiori elements then introspect the annotations and generate the UI for you.

4 . M O N I T O R I N G A N D A D M I N I S T R A T I O N

Solution Manager is SAPs go to ALM tool for monitoring and root cause analysis. This task becomes more complex in a hybrid environment. Is enterprise level monitoring beyond the scope of Solution Manager and what do I use for that? Robust monitoring tools are required. How do we now monitor the sap landscape that has extended to the cloud? · Most PCPs (Performance Co Pilot’s) have services that allow you to get reports and recommendations to scale size and spend up and down. What reporting can we use in a cloud environment that allows us to reduce spend in our SAP landscape? Are there dashboards for management so that I can help this make sense for leadership? What other capabilities does Solution Manager have? What is SAP’s roadmap to slowly ween me off Solution Manager and onto Cloud ALM? SAP have developed Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager - Several dashboards based on all the insights gained from years of Active Global Support. For example, the very useful service level dashboard. This will come free of charge in 2020. What integration exists between Solution Manager’s business process change analyser and ARIS?

5 . I N N O V A T I O N : A I , R P A , M L

We all know the future is here. Image recognition, Machine algorithms and other sexy tech is changing our everyday lives.

Customers want their imaginations aroused as to what is possible and then to hear real life case studies from their peers and the partner ecosystem as to who has done what. Most importantly, customers want to know how to get started. And how in a human sense does one prepare the organisation for automation? · Practically the concern around SOD (Segregation of duties) amongst bots was raised. What will the Qualtrics acquisition offer up? Are there war stories from SAP customers who have integrated Qualtrics into their customer experience solution?

6 . T H E D E V E L O P M E N T E N V I R O N M E N T

What is best practice in terms of the development methodology of choice is concerned? The hugely slow turnaround times between specification, build, test and deploy renders many development projects futile. Who has adopted a fail fast agile development methodology and what factors or conditions need to be put in place for this to work?

The Agile Manifesto mantra of ‘working code over documentation’ is a ground rule when it comes to development. Who practices this?

What customer examples are there of effective DevOps, CI/CD, etc. solutions for SAP landscapes?

7 . C L O U D

SAP is a cloud first business. They have stated this fact and are heading that way. A cloud business powered by SAP S/4HANA. How steadfast is your leadership’s direction of where you are going? Do you have a clear strategy in this regard? Do you fully understand the impact this will have on the skills you need? And has the total cost of ownership been comprehended? Getting to the cloud is hard work – what war stories exist of customers who have made the move?

Where the scalability of hardware is concerned, how have other companies changed their behaviours around the scalability of modular hardware? Is the fear some customers have that the Cloud is a walled garden - once you are in you battle to get out – a founded fear? What is SAPs roadmap for HANA Enterprise Cloud? Do SAP still want to be in the business of hosting your system in an SAP data centre and do the system administration? How does this infrastructure as a service allow for scale up and scaling down by SAP? Is there the option of elasticity to meet demand? SAP migrations to the cloud are generally complex and time- consuming. What field-tested tools can cloud vendors provide that would reduce the migration effort and business downtime?

Much conversation was had around the topic of Neo vs Cloud Foundry: The SAP Cloud Platform (their extension platform in the cloud) was built initially on SAP’s own technology called NEO.

SAP and customers started building services that are used in apps on the cloud platform in NEO. But Second generation was built on an open source, industry standard cloud platform operating system called Cloud Foundry. The question asked is what is the appropriate platform to use? What will survive?

8 . S H A R E D S E R V I C E S

Federal Government has an appetite to standardise their systems. The idea is to rationalise all their ERP implementations. Not to invest separately. The question is how does one prepare for this? What outcome are they trying to drive? Are their governments that have gotten this right at scale? And if so, can the federal government learn from these examples? Is it best to go to one system or to adopt a hub method where large departments’ instances absorb and host related departments? It is critical to understand what they are going to lose and what they will gain should they go this route. Other questions around onboarding to shared services –

What can the consuming agencies do now to prepare? Resourcing – how do we understand getting the right skills? Who owns the project?

9 . P A T C H I N G & U P G R A D E S / T E S T I N G

Methodologies and processes for testing and applying updates under SAP S/4HANA is little understood by customers. SAP’s goal is for customers to be able to implement innovation updates as soon as they are available, but this goes against all previous practises. Can customers be comfortable that they don’t need to perform full regression testing before moving SAP- delivered changes to production. Will SAP provide unit tests for their code? What level of testing do SAP recommend for SAP S/4HANA extensions? How are SAP ensuring they don’t make breaking changes?

Given SAP’s requirement to patch SAP S/4HANA every 3 months through the quarterly FSP updates, how can SAP assist customers to optimise and reduce their test cycles? In the public cloud this is not negotiable. You simply receive these quarterly updates. On Premise you are encouraged to do this. 12 - 13 OCTOBER, 2020 CROWN PROMENADE MELBOURNE

Bringing together IT Leaders, Architects, Developers and Technical Specialists to talk:

Integration; S/4HANA Readiness & Developing a Digital Roadmap; User Experience; Monitoring & Administration; Innovation: AI, RPA, ML; The Development Environment; Cloud; Shared Services; Patching & Upgrades/ Testing (1); Licensing

WANT TO FIND OUT MORE?

https://www.masteringsapconference.com/msap/aus/tech/

Call Steve Morris on +61 2 9955 7400 BUILDING COMMUNITIES AT THE EVENTFUL GROUP

At The Eventful Group we are all about building communities, creating value for the members, and immersing ourselves in their world to ensure that members walk away from one of our community events with knowledge and connections they will not, and cannot, get anywhere else. To do this, we know we need to listen to our customers and create an exciting, unique event based on solid, in- depth and collaborative research.

We have been successfully building communities for over 20 years. We don’t just put an event together in a couple of weeks based on phone calls to consultants and reading a few articles. We invest a lot in our research process – typically a whole year for a new community. At the heart of everything we do is a fundamental belief in the power of people. We invest our time, resources and knowledge into developing something that’s far more than an event. This philosophy sets a climate where ideas and people grow. Where minds and hearts open up to fresh thinking and new faces. https://www.theeventfulgroup.com/