Transformation Every Day
00:22:05 · Alexander Greb
[00:22:05] S2: Hi there. Quick break for a short message before we go right back to the episode. Enjoying the insights and stories on transformation every day? Want to make sure you never miss an episode packed with practical tips and best practices from the SAP world featuring conversations with some of the most interesting people in the SAP universe? Then hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform, whether it is Apple, Spotify, or any other you use. And if our podcast brings you value, we would be incredibly grateful if you could leave us a five star review and share it with your friends and colleagues. Your support means the world to us. Thanks so much and happy listening. Yeah. In a certain way, for example, this means for a consultant that his work is actually changing. It's less about fighting with the system. It's more about being a classical consultant who really takes a customer by the hand and leads them then to, to to the new state of of a transformation, which is what we basically pray since years, which should be the way that we approach things, yeah, instead of, just, treating everything as a technical exercise. Know that technical exercise part will be done by agents or LLMs that you use within that case. You are then again responsible that, your customer works differently on Monday after the go live, or on Monday after the... You change something in the system, which is a fantastic thing, yeah, because it's, about to solve the big problem, that our whole industry is having since decades, which is, yeah, where is the value in that? Yeah. You are far more value focused after this than than before. But but give me give me a short walk through what what you're... What you are doing, what you're offering as a technology, as as a tool, as as how you enable, with what tooling the consultant to be basically the consultant of the future?
00:24:26 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:24:26] S0: Yeah, I think the first part is really about kind of capturing everything that the customer has, or maybe even yourself has already in sort of documentation, knowledge, integration, so you integrate into already the existing tool, into a Signavio or into a LeanIX, into a Calm, and bring all of the knowledge right in a platform that it can work with the reality of the customer. On the other side, you also connect to the actual system, so you connect to an ECC system, read out the custom code and give the consultant the possibility in natural language to see what is actually going on in a customer's legacy estate. What is custom, what is standard, how is everything built up, what is being used. Of course, the same side, you can also do process discovery on your transactional and event data where you can see, okay, how the processes end to end actually work at the moment for the customer. And through that, a lot of knowledge gaps are actually being produced. Because what you first need to understand as a consultant is not just what is in the code, but also why are they running a process like this? And I think there the right question needs to be asked, where are the inconsistency? What is not part of the code? Why are the enterprise customer uses them that way? And exactly these questions need to be written down and need to be asked by the consultant or by the technology itself, the right stakeholder to get a full picture of their assets and estate. And that all goes in kind of one place, which we call the single source of truth. And the single source of truth gives for all of these kinds of lines of businesses, the different requirements that are already existing, the different as is, or maybe they're already existing to be processes. It tells you what is the old system architecture, what is the new system architecture, and all of these deliverables the consultant can take and bring to the customer and say, is this right? Is this wrong? Do we need to amend something or out of our own experience? Maybe this process can be amended in that way. So it's really about technology, the consultant, and in the end the client working together.
00:26:43 · Louis Schmidlin
And as soon as this baseline is kind of given and the single source is populated and the conflicts have been resolved, you can start designing, you can start doing the difference between assets and to be processes and process comparison. And you can map these to be processes against the standard and tell them per requirement, is this now a fit? Is this a gap? Is this a fit with configuration? What are the different process steps? Or you can run it if it's a template rollout against different templates. And through that, you help the customer in much more efficient way design their future estate and how their processes actually need to run. And that is then the end of design, but design is not just enough. You also then need to execute and you need to help the consultants to execute much faster. So what are the right configuration steps? Where after the RISE with SAP framework do you make or how do you go about the different gaps? How can you use configuration agents to directly configure in the system? How do you bring custom code over to the new system? Everything proposed, because I think that's what AI is really great at, at proposing these options and letting the consultant making this decision. And that goes then as far as bringing it into a release management, the cutover plan, bringing it to go live, making sure that the test scripts are written, the feedback is being put back into the platform. And during this way, you will have a lot of, deliverables. You're gonna upload the 2B processes, you're gonna upload certain requirements directly to Cloud ALM, you write functional specification documents, technical specification documents, cutover plans, and all of these deliverables on the way that the consultant needs to document it right, to present it to the client, are being written with the help of AI and the consultant together.
00:28:42 · Louis Schmidlin, Alexander Greb
And through that, you can lead him to deploy, to run, to then helping him with the adoption management, with incident triage, with business optimization, and build this kind of layer and foundation of the actual reality of the customer, together with your services to bring him much more efficiently to the go live and help on every single step of this way, and in the end he will have a run of a better adopted system of cleaner processes he can then use as a base to what Thomas Fix of SAP said at the Partner Days to identify and automate, and I think if that is a given, that will serve as a precursor to do that later on. [00:29:24] S2: That's quite a lot for a company which exists now since how many months? [00:29:31] S0: It's it's a bit... It's more than a year.
00:29:33 · Alexander Greb
[00:29:33] S2: More than a year. So so I wonder where you will be in three, four years. Wonder as well. Yeah. Exactly. Which is which is... And I think this is this is this is huge because this is solving so many things, yeah, that we are struggling in our industry since years. When... Whenever you you talk about, actually, the the service our industry is is is giving, yeah, with implementations and so on, I I think we we, by far, not often enough talk about customer experience in that way. Yeah. Because, an implementation project is like going to a to a dentist. Yeah. Nobody really enjoys it so much, probably on a customer side. Yeah. But you have to do it and so on. Yeah. Okay. Come on. Let... Let's get let's get it over. Yeah. Then then we are fine. Then we are fine. I think things like that, yeah, what you what you said, they really could could make a difference in a certain way that an an customer is experiencing an implementation or a transformation and so on. And after after it's done, yeah, he's so excited by not only the result, by the way it was done because it was a positive experience that he says, like, hey. Jesus, we we we have to do this again. I I want more. Yeah. Let's do the next step. Let's go to the next plateau, yeah, of value and so on. And whenever we were talking in the last years about, okay, which kind of services and so on are the one that will grow within a consulting space and the one which basically will go down and diminish, everybody said that, like the typical ABAP stuff and so on, the configuration stuff and so on. That will be done by agents and so on. But more transformation part, the change management and so on, That that will be the thing that will will generate the growth for for the next ten years. And, what what I think is an interesting thought is that, basically, your technology is is enabling to do change management for the better. Yeah. Because it's not, separated. It's not happening on a different slide deck. But imagine a change management change manager who is, not only doing his job on, yeah, the typical enablement level. Yeah. But but it's having a tool like this being able really to to close the gap between the system and the organization. I think this is incredibly powerful.
00:32:07 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:32:07] S0: I believe so as well, and I think I like the kind of example you drew. I think let's make going to the dentist as fun as possible, and because in the end ERP is at your core of your operation or of any enterprises operation, and it's so essential to actually understand what's going on in their ERP. And if you look at these legacy estate and even IT leaders say have no idea what's going on, And it needs so much manual work to actually understand what's happening within the system. That I say, if you're going into such a transformation, yes, in the beginning it can be scary. Let's try to make it as little scary as possible. And and let's give you the most insights. But if we're already on the way to go there, let's try to build it up in the best way possible in order that what you have after the transformation saves us this plateau that we can take as a baseline to move upwards from there and not that the next transformation needs to go okay, let's try to understand what we did over this five, six, seven year transformation in some cases. And if this is a given, I think much more possibilities are also possible what actually can happen on top of an S/4 system. And if you look at what SAP is constantly talking about is, well, it's all possible on top of an SAP system and how our partner helping to enable all of that. And I think there are so many great things where, yes, the true enablement isn't there yet. It takes time. I think we spoke about it before briefly and it will come more in the future. But in order that you can leverage this to the absolute maximum, need to have process you understand, you need to have clean, processes, and you need to have an adoption where these processes are actually being used of the business units as they should. And for that, I think to build up this transparency and can capture not just what is in the code, but also why our business units using it in a certain way gives this kind of picture that you can take to then actually transform.