Mastering Sap Technologies & Cloud
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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 ACCO Brands Australia | AGL Energy | Allianz Australia Insurance | Ausgrid | AusNet Services Group | Australia Post | Australian Broadcasting Corporation | Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) | Australian Pharmaceutical Industries | Australian Taxation Office | Bakers Delight Holdings | BHP | BlackLine System | BlueScope Steel | Broadspectrum (Australia) | Caltex Australia | Capgemini Australia | Central Health Services | CitiPower & Powercor Australia | Coates Group | Coates Hire Operations | Coca-Cola Amatil (Aust) | Coles Group | Commonwealth Bank of Australia | Costa Group | CSIRO Australia | Department of Health and Human Services, Victoria | Device Technologies Australia | Discovery Consulting Group | DuluxGroup | EY Australia | Fire and Rescue NSW | Fonterra Australia | Fonterra Brands | GenesisCare | GFG Alliance - Australia - Head Office | GFG Alliance Australia - Liberty OneSteel | GlaxoSmithKline Australia | GPC Electronics | Hanson Australia | Honda Australia | Hydro Tasmania | Icon Integration | Jemena | Kmart Australia | Komatsu Australia | La Trobe University | LeasePlan Australia | Linfox Australia | Lion Beer Australia | Lion | Macquarie Group | McGrathNicol | Medibank Private | Merivale Group | Metcash | MMG | Newcrest Mining | NSW Department of Education and Communities | NSW Department of Justice | NSW Police Force | O-I Asia Pacific | Orica Australia | Orora | Ruralco Holdings | SingTel Optus | Spotless Group | Stockland Corporation | Sydney Water Corporation | Synchrony Global Australia | TAFE NSW - Sydney Institute | Target Australia | Tomago Aluminium Company | Toyota Motor Corporation Australia | Transport for NSW | Turnkey Consulting | UGL | Visy Industries | Wilmar Sugar Australia | Woolworths Group | Yancoal Australia | ZAG Australia 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.