Transformation Every Day
00:48:55 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:48:55] S0: Yeah, I definitely experience the same. It's just not always so clear, and everyone has a bit of a different interpretation, and we kind of wait on clearer instruction, and I think if there would be a bit more freedom on this, I think innovation could also move at a higher speed. On the other side, I also understand SAP in many topics where I think that was a conviction we had from the beginning where we worked quite closely with the people of Signavio in the beginning, where we worked quite closely with SAP. One of our backers is also Hasso Plattner Ventures, where they were like, you need to embrace and push the own solutions of SAP. And I think that was a conviction from the beginning, where we never want to work against the Signavio, where we never want to work against the LeanIX, where we never want to work against the Cloud ALM, but either just enhance their own capabilities and work with these tools together, because that's SAP strategy. And I think there you need to work with it. On the API policy, I would say, open it up and make it a bit more transparent on the kind of BTP strategy. Would say this is right, you know, you need to work with these toolings, and you need to help the customer using these tools in a much more efficient way, and that's why we're trying to work with them as close as possible and co innovate together. But, yeah, I think I experienced the same thing.
00:50:29 · Alexander Greb
[00:50:29] S2: But but you said something interesting, concerning, SAP's own stuff in a certain way. Well, since you are in a in a surrounding where there's tool for consultants and so on, who is also going a little bit to that direction, What happens the day SAP ships that those things that you do natively?
00:50:51 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:50:51] S0: Yeah, I think there is always our effort, first of all, to understand where SAP puts the focus on and start integrating with that and making it all better, and kind of just enhancing the realities. We always wanted to focus on the customer reality. We always wanted to say, if everything is in a perfect structure and all, whatever the agent tool trading can do and all of the tools can do, it's all wonderful and it works really well on the presentations. But I think we just talked about what the reality of customer actually looks like and what the most urgent pain points are to get it in a form that even the tools of SAP can work. And I think during this transformation, a lot of things can be done, but also, you know, afterwards, and it's going to be a completely new business model as soon as you understand these processes. What can you do on top of it? How can you modernize? How can you optimize? How can you look directly in the system for incident reporting, for change request tickets, etc. And in the end, we all have a goal which is quite similar. We first want to bring customer faster into the cloud, and secondly, we want to build the most efficient kind of ERP possible in the market, because that makes SAP stickier, that makes customer happier, and an overarching ERP's work better. And I don't think there is any sort of clash in sort of the mission that we all work towards, and I think work there really closely is kind of the key word.
00:52:30 · Alexander Greb
[00:52:30] S2: Imagine a 25 year old SAP junior consulting... Consultant is listening right now, who's unsure about the future and so on because, he experienced something similar that I had experienced when I was young. We were the generation in Germany, yeah, where you had to, or many of us had to to engage in in unpaid employments for months and some for years. And a similar kind of future question mark, discussion is now at the moment also happening with young people. What should they do in your opinion on Monday after listening to this podcast? What what is your encouragement to them? What would you recommend them?
00:53:17 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:53:17] S0: Yeah, I think it's a big topic and I probably don't also have the perfect answer for it, where the question is, if AI can do the grunt work and the seniors can make decisions, what is left for juniors? And I ask myself the question quite a lot, because I also, it was not a practicum, but I also had to do a lot of manual grunt work that if I now think if I would be a junior and use a solution like ours, on one side, I would be amazed and I think my life would be much, much better and I would be a much happier person because I it would take a lot of these redundancy away that I personally experience. On the other side, I think for juniors, it's hard to evaluate now if the outputs of AI is right or wrong. I still believe there is a lot of value that can be generated also from younger people. On one side, it's really about educating yourself about the possibility of AI, because AI will stay, and it will change fundamentally how delivery is happening. And I think this is a huge advantage where probably proximity to a technology like this is much closer than maybe from some more senior people within the organization. So it's for one that actually can be a power user that really understand the functionality of the tool that can help integrate and kind of produce these results in the most efficient way possible. On the other side, I think it's about their own kind of reasoning going through the output and say, look, I don't know if this is right. And then kind of from the senior management, try to educate these junior people to understand what comes out, at which point should they start being suspicious, when is it not right, Where is the actual value? Bring them as early as possible to customer to experience this customer relationship to go about these these critical points. And I think in this combination, you will end up having juniors moving much more efficiently to seniors and educate them while I still had to read through a lot of SAP help desk pages to understand what now the capabilities of this and that is. I think that is now so much more intuitive, can be applied much more easily, and in the end you end up having huge opportunities for juniors. And if they start moving upwards, they come with a power weapon, which is called knowledge about AI that know how to handle these tools.
00:55:46 · Louis Schmidlin, Alexander Greb
And it's going to be quite dangerous for the people above that weren't able to adapt. [00:55:53] S2: Absolutely. And I fully agree to that, because there's still something that humans can add to this an ingredient that human can human can add to this discussion and to this transformation that AI is not able to do, which is empathy and which is also the the the feeling on how to how how to solve problems. And I think this is something that's when you are engaging in customer situations, when you are engaging in, these kinds of activities, that's what you learn. You do not learn it if you are trying to stay within your own enterprise bubble and try to avoid customer contact, but I'm I'm fully convinced that even in the year 2030, we still have functional consultants. They are better equipped than today, definitely, but I think they still are there. [00:56:42] S0: And I agree. And if I look back what was who the people were that I looked up to in this transformation project, it was exactly these kind of people that had an emphasis that really navigated these critical customer moments where things could make or break it, where you were in front of really critical decisions in the most efficient and kind of best way possible. And these people will stay, and these people will provide a lot of value and will be the differentiator between good and great kind of transformation projects, great client relationships. And these people will stay and will have still a huge impact on the market and in the end to the outcomes that this transformation project actually bring.