Transformation Every Day
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.
00:34:18 · Alexander Greb
[00:34:18] S2: Yeah. And, what's... What I think is quite amusing in that that regard, Christian Klein, I think it was already at SAP file. He he made that statement that he repeated after that quite often saying, like, hey. The technology now is there to to make implementations and transformations much more efficiently and so on. So in a certain way, saying, like, okay, guys, it's it's not not our problem anymore. It's it's it's your problem. Yeah. On the implementation side, partner side, gear up. Yeah. It's not it's not okay like it's done anymore. And I think this... The statement is is is harsh as it was conceived by many, it's absolutely correct. Yeah. Because, we always, point at customers or organizations there saying, like, okay. They need change management because they have to start now finally working differently than twenty years ago. But but so many consultants are not actually better in a certain way, yeah, and also have to adapt these kinds of new way. But another topic which which I think is quite interesting, how many people are you at the moment? And I think we have to to say the day because I think it changes quite quickly with you. So on the October 27, what is the size of of your organization at the moment?
00:35:40 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:35:40] S0: I think at the moment we're 24 people, all sitting here together in Berlin. And I think we had quite an interesting kind of hiring policies where either you're really technical and it goes a bit in the point where you said before, it's really these technical nerds, or you understand the SAP ecosystem or the transformation pain. And it was really important that when you speak to a customer, when you speak to an SAP partner, that you can relate on a level where you like, I know what's being talked about here. I think this is so essential in order how we build this product as kind of a delivery engine across the methodology. We make everyone read when they start the whole book of SAP Activate. It's four fifty pages. And it's not always the most pleasant surprise when you start at a young company and you think, okay, can I start? And then the management puts you a big SAP Activate book in front of you. But I believe that, of course, on the technical side, so much more is possible with kind of hiring these best engineers straight out of university that can achieve so much. And these right experts and these people that experienced this pain before and were like, we need to change something about this. We cannot just accept even though some of the partners do not agree what Christian Klein said, but there needs to be a change and let's work at the forefront of this change and I think that is really exciting and I think through that we could hire a lot of people directly out of the SAP ecosystem and etc. And actually start making quite an impact currently with our product.
00:37:30 · Alexander Greb
[00:37:30] S2: But talking about 24 people, I think this is still smaller than most IT departments that you find at your customers. So, basically, a customer also could say, like, okay, based on the progress that is possible in the technology, why shouldn't we build our own discovery platform? Why why should we why do we need somebody from the outside to do this? What's your opinion on that?
00:37:54 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:37:54] S0: I think the opportunity costs are just extremely high to build it yourself. If you already see what what these kind of developers are costing, and it's not the core of many of our customers day to day business of building great software. And I think also software building has completely changed to an AI native way of building it, and these AI native companies have a huge advantage there to just math much more efficiently and in a much quicker way to much better results. On the other side, I also believe that if now a big decision is about should we build it ourselves, we kind of need to change on delivery, I say it's you're probably going to be one year ahead and the speed at what is now possible is so high that you will always be slightly behind. And what I think enterprises, consultancy, SIs, BIs should do, their experts, maybe together with their own solution, needs to integrate in solution like ours. And together, we can really build something like a powerhouse and really aggressively move across the market. And I think through that they can kind of build in their own expertise, their process knowledge, everything they have around that, they can build addition on top of foundation like ours. And if this comes all together, you have a completely new chance in the market and you can really deliver value for the customer. And I think in the end, that's what it's all about. And we see it happening, and I wish everyone good luck to keep
00:39:28 · Alexander Greb, Louis Schmidlin
[00:39:28] S2: up with the speed of our development. And plus what you said beforehand, you bring the deciding mixture of... Yeah. Let's say, on the one hand, the technologists who want to make the cure, and you you have the SAP consultants who bring the suffering and the pain that is supposed to be cured. This kind of special mixture is not really often happening within IT departments. Yeah. [00:39:58] S0: Yeah. And I think we get a lot of or we get good people out of these consultancies out of directly SAP, were like, okay, let's move at the speed what is currently possible, and I think it's quite attractive. And in this really special mixture of combined with a lot of hard work, I think a lot of things can happen. And on the other side, we're really customer obsessed. We're trying to adapt the technology to their specific approach, make it part of their delivery, work with them together, learn from them, learn from customer, bring our own delivery team to the customer on-site, help them to set everything up, integrate so seamlessly in their already existing system, and through that also make this transition much more seamless, which in the end is really essential to make a product like ours work. [00:40:54] S2: How do the workshops look like that you're engaging at the moment? Is it that you are joining consultants in, let's say, DDAs and discovery workshops, in architecture workshops? Or are you also yourself proceeding with end customers in engagements?