Qorelo, Louis Schmidlin's Berlin AI startup, automates SAP transformation delivery, integrating with Signavio, LeanIX and Cloud ALM for fit-gap analysis.
Qorelo has 24 people and makes every hire read the 450-page SAP Activate book, arguing customers building their own discovery platforms will lag.
Qorelo, backed by Hasso Plattner Ventures, builds with SAP's own solutions and says goals align if SAP ships natively.
AI takes on the manual work of SAP transformation
SAP has moved its products to the cloud, but the work of getting customers there is still done the way it was twenty years ago, through Excel sheets and scattered notes, with waits of six to eight years. Qorelo's bet is that AI can carry that delivery work inside the tools consultants already use, and that the customers who need it most are the many still on ECC. Schmidlin deliberately builds alongside SAP's Signavio, LeanIX and Cloud ALM rather than against them, because the scarce input is knowledge of a customer's real system.
Takeaways
SAP transformation delivery is still manual and slow. Schmidlin, a former SAP consultant, saw implementation spend run seven to one against software spend, and worse at ten to one. Scope mapping happened on Excel sheets and scattered notes, and projects stretched to six or eight years.
Qorelo applies AI across the consultant's journey. Qorelo enhances each activity in a transformation programme so customers move faster and end up with cleaner clean-core architectures. It plugs into Signavio, LeanIX and Cloud ALM, so consultants keep their existing tools rather than learning another methodology.
Customers should not build discovery themselves. Schmidlin argues an enterprise building its own capability would be about a year ahead at most and would keep falling behind, because the field moves too fast. The opportunity cost is too high.
Qorelo builds with SAP, not against it. Qorelo works closely with Signavio and SAP, integrates with LeanIX and Cloud ALM, and watches where SAP puts its focus. Hasso Plattner Ventures backs it, and Schmidlin says if SAP ships this natively the goals are aligned.
Agents take technical work, humans take change. Greb says agents will do the technical work while transformation and change management drive growth for the next decade, and that functional consultants will still exist in 2030. Juniors must become power users who can judge AI output.
Qorelo learned the market was not ready. Pushing agents on top of S/4HANA processes failed because most customers were still on ECC with different problems. Every new Qorelo hire reads the 450-page SAP Activate book so the team speaks the customer's language.
How Qorelo runs a transformation
Connect to the customer's ECC system and read out custom code, showing in natural language what is custom, standard or unused.
Run process discovery on transactional data to find what is really happening, including things the customer forgot or cannot map.
Build a single source of truth and resolve conflicts before any fit-gap analysis begins.
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On this episode 3
Show 1
Map to-be processes against the SAP standard and label each requirement a fit, a gap, or a fit with configuration.
Generate configuration agents, custom code migration, cutover plans, functional and technical specifications, and uploads to Cloud ALM.