Transformation Every Day
00:08:56 · Alexander Greb, Louis Schmidlin
[00:08:56] S2: And and what's the interesting thing is, I know there are lots of companies at the moment, startups coming out of everywhere, yeah, who are in in that space. But what's interesting with you and which I think is is special is you you are not the, the typical tech guys, yeah, who usually found these kinds of company. You have a lot of them in in there. I I... I've I've learned to know a lot of them. But but you, personally, you are not, from your background, the the typical tech nerd that that you would be suspicious of of founding such a company, or neither the typical developer who comes up. But but you've been an an actual SAP consultant, so you you felt the pain. Tell me about the, yeah, the SAP projects that and the experiences that made you think like, hey, Jesus, that that has to be easier than that. [00:09:56] S0: Yeah. I think I was always... And I wouldn't say I'm not a nerd at all. I I still love... I'm I'm a big fan of SAP, and I I can speak hours about it. [00:10:05] S2: And I love of SAP already qualifies you as a nerd. That's correct. Yeah.
00:10:10 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:10:10] S0: Yeah, I would say so. I think many in the ecosystem are. But for me, I was always I was really amazed by the actual capabilities of the software, and I was much more on like, how does I was coming quite out of the finance direction. How do these end to end processes work for account reconciliation, etcetera? And I was amazed by how enterprises so seamlessly and so reliable can count on these SAP processes. And then I kind of came on the reality of this implementation. And during that, the first kind of keyword that really stick with me is this ratio between implementation cost and actual software cost of this famous seven to one ratio. We saw much worse cases of one to 10, where in the beginning I couldn't imagine that it's that difficult to implement a new system. I think I came to learn better during my transformation days when I myself helped integrated S4 system and saw how slow and extreme manual these efforts are. And I was always mostly bothered by the fact of I understood the methodology, I understood the deliverables, understood the quality gates along the way, but there was so much manual work to get to these stages and it slowed down, and we were going about again, and another cycle, and another manual notes, and let's wait because one person was on holidays, and and let's go about this workshop again, etcetera, that I always couldn't understand why we are not focusing on the most essential tasks during the transformation. And I was like, why don't we leverage software in order that all of these manual tasks are being taken over and we as consultants can really just focus on the most essential parts? Seeing that dragging across transformation project that was on, that in the end takes six, seven, eight years, was for me, un understandable. I was like, ERP is at its core of so many enterprises. And to be stuck for so long in switching from an old one to a new one, I couldn't find an explanation in my head. I saw the reality why it happened, but I always thought there needs to be a better way to go about this.
00:12:30 · Alexander Greb
[00:12:30] S2: I I fully I fully agree with you because, I think we... If you have done this job for a few years, you... It happens quite often that you forget about actually questioning why are we doing it like that. Yeah. I think everybody knows these kinds of template rollouts who are... Even when they are not yet finished, the templates are outdated because they they do not resemble at all the the strategy or the the situation a company is in. Or I... These kinds of experiences, yeah, of of these kinds of huge rollouts, they directly influence also, decisions of the future. I have lots of customers who approached me like, my name is x y. I'm a brownfield customer. When I asked them, like, how do you already know that you are a brownfield customer? They quite often said as a reason, well, you know, I I remember the time when we had our ECC or our r three implementation and, you know, these kinds of years and years and years and, one and a half year blueprint, and then we finally saw our first screen, and we we do not want to to to experience anything of that again. So that... Those kinds of bad experiences from from an inefficient, ineffective, implementation, more or less influence company decisions for decades after that. And this is astonishing in my opinion.
00:13:58 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:13:58] S0: I fully agree. And I think it's it's also mostly when we approach new customers where it's, of course, we're doing a brownfield. We could never afford a greenfield. We don't want to rethink processes. But then if you go to the ground of this, it's like, when have you last kind of questioned your processes? Oh yeah, that was twenty, twenty five years ago when we moved from R/3 or when we moved to R/3 or whatever. I believe there is a big misconception that happened because of all of these negative examples that happened in the market. There's the famous little example, etc, that stuck so much in these enterprises' heads, and they're so afraid of making this move. And I think many of the consultants in their day to day work weren't really pushing for the most efficient. We saw so many SIs that were switched, we started from again, and we figured out, okay, but a year ago, we once already spoke about this topic. Are they notes? Oh, no, that wasn't well documented. It's not clear what really happened, let's just start from the beginning, and this transformation project that just dragged on and dragged on. And I think what needs to be clear that the technology SAP evolved but also the way of implementing and go about transformation project evolved, and there are new ways of going about it, and there's so many amazing things happening in this market, and if we put these two together, system transformation can completely be refiled from the beginning.
00:15:36 · Alexander Greb
[00:15:36] S2: And that's interesting point, yeah, because the product moved, but the method didn't. We work or we still work in many cases the same way like we did twenty years ago when things were much less complex. And like like I said, when you didn't have that kind of amount of of of grown architectures where these kinds of dead bodies are hidden somewhere, yeah, that you have to find and so on. And you you get now questions by each and every customer during, an an conversation when you are about of of embarking these kind of journeys. Like, how do you how do you want to find our APIs? How do you want to find what's happening there? What's sitting there? Because most of the companies, yeah, systems have merged. Systems have been been been changed in that way. They have no really clue what they're running anymore.
00:16:29 · Louis Schmidlin
[00:16:29] S0: Yeah. Yeah. And I think this this first discovery, especially with with platforms that are now available at the market, completely astonish a customer. And they see what's really in their system and they're like, oh, we completely forgot that we have this. Oh, we finally see how this is all mapping together. We didn't think, oh yeah, this is completely outdated and we haven't used it in two, three years or nobody even touches it. Just to give this transparency into actually legacy system is such a huge thing. To give customer this trust that this is possible from the beginning lets them look really different about what is possible later during the transformation, because if you give these insights from the start, they often see, okay, maybe it doesn't even is that bad. Maybe we can take many things directly over. Maybe we can retire quite a lot of things. And if this message is transported in the right way by the consultants, I think many customer would gain a lot of confidence back of actually doing their transformation in a much greener way, in my That's