My new book is now available to buy here in print version, and for pre-order in the Kindle version. As with my earlier books, I will excerpt roughly 10% of the 400 page book in a series of posts on my two blogs. While there is plenty in the book about what Brian Sommer calls "shale-fracking customers' wallets" and Jarret Pazahanick calls the "Wild West" of the SAP SI ecosystem, the bulk of the book is customer case studies.
I personally interviewed the majority of executives who are quoted. They spent countless hours talking to me, reviewing their transcripts (nearly 1,500 printed pages) and their book profiles (distilled down to 250 book pages). For a handful of other customers, I extracted the text from videos of their presentations at SAP and other events or from their quotes in articles.
They are spread across 4 customer categories I used for the book - Risk-Takers, Modernizers, Diversifiers and Bystanders. They represent over 20 industries and over 15 countries, and talk about experiences across a wide range of relatively new SAP products - S/4HANA, C/4HANA, SCP, IBP, AIN and also Salesforce, Workday, Plex, Rimini Street and other surround products and services. They are balanced - critical of SAP where needed. In book, I am also critical of SAP's competitors for their own missed opportunities.
Across these and other customers I noticed a wide range of customer strategies
"Here is a sampling:
- Ring-fencing ECC with many of SAP's own cloud properties, as with SuccessFactors at Terumo BCT and components of C/4 at Pregis.
- Two-tier deployments with SAP ByD and S/4 in their subsidiaries.
- Migration from ECC to S/4 on-premise at Johnsonville Sausage.
- New implementations in the S/4 Public Cloud as at a restaurant chain.
- New implementations of the SAP Analytics Cloud as at the Executive Huddle at the San Francisco 49ers.
- Trying out relatively new on-premise, but impactful SAP functionality like IBP at Louisiana-Pacific.
- Trying out Leonardo ML pilot projects as at Costco and Queensland OSR.
- Developing new ISV functionality on SCP as Vertex has done with their indirect tax app.
- Moving to new licensing and hosting models like Bombardier with IBM.
We also are seeing blends from this growing toolbox of strategies. So, some are moving to S/4 in the cloud, and at the same time have shifted to TPM for ECC support while they gradually migrate. GEBHARDT has been implementing a variety of SAP cloud products around its ECC on-prem implementation. Additionally, it has developed a customer portal and set of predictive maintenance services using Leonardo IoT and AIN capabilities.
Given the wide proliferation of products and terminology in SAP World, my firm, Deal Architect, recommends (and often facilitates for clients) an intense offsite meeting to help customers take a fresh look at SAP and the broader market. That confab should cover and assess the fit of many of the strategies above, while also evaluating internal and external talent and fit with emerging technology trends."
More excerpts to come over the next few weeks....
