Transformation Every Day
00:00:04 · JP Haas, Johannes Langguth, Johannes Langguth
[00:00:04] S0: We worked with a customer that identified a bottleneck on the production line, and they didn't understand why a certain order type always took six days to be scheduled and actually be produced, even though they expected it to be only two days. We were able to find out that two different edge conditions were interacting with each other in a way that led to this particular order type always taking six days to be scheduled and not the two days that they wanted. And that was hidden in some kind of custom code line, some edge condition that no one knew actually had an impact on the on the other one. The [00:00:43] S1: other thing. [00:00:43] S0: And and so we we were able to figure that out and actually suggest how you could resolve that. [00:00:49] S2: Navigating an SAP transformation? We get it. By day, we work hands on with people like you across the globe. By night, we share what actually works. Welcome to Transformation Every Day with Alexander Greb and Johannes Langguth, where your complex transformation becomes clear, actionable, and achievable.
00:00:49 · Johannes Langguth, Alexander Greb, Johannes Langguth
[00:00:49] S2: Navigating an SAP transformation? We get it. By day, we work hands on with people like you across the globe. By night, we share what actually works. Welcome to Transformation Every Day with Alexander Greb and Johannes Langguth, where your complex transformation becomes clear, actionable, and achievable. [00:01:10] S3: Welcome back. My name is Alexander Greb. My guest today is JP Haas, founder and CEO of Conduct AI. JP and his cofounders came out of Palantir, and they built something that does one deceptively simple thing. It reads your SAP system's own code and finally tells you the truth about how your business actually runs. What's critical, what's left over, and why that strange rule from years ago is still there. If you ever felt like changing your system means flying blind, this one is for you. JP, welcome to the show. [00:01:50] S1: But but how was your summer? I guess quite busy because I saw you running around on SAPPHIRE with these training suits, these Adidas suits, and I thought, like, oh, these guys are doing a lot of miles.
00:01:50 · Johannes Langguth, JP Haas
[00:01:50] S1: But but how was your summer? I guess quite busy because I saw you running around on SAPPHIRE with these training suits, these Adidas suits, and I thought, like, oh, these guys are doing a lot of miles. [00:02:02] S0: It's a good description. We we've been we've been running at at very full pace the last few months and honestly, the last few years ever since we found it. But the the marathon has now turned into a proper sprint, especially since since SAPPHIRE or with the momentum of SAPPHIRE and the announcement of of SAP's investment and partnership into Conduct. And ever since, it's it's gotten even more high pace, and we... We're loving it. But it's... It hasn't been a chilly summer. It's been a it's been an intense summer.
00:02:34 · Johannes Langguth
[00:02:34] S1: Definitely. Definitely. And what's also definitely intense will be this episode because we are recording. We have JP in the house. You are the founder of a very, very, very interesting company, is called Conduct AI. And I know there are there are a lot of companies mushrooming at the moment around AI, and everybody has to to... Tries to do anything with AI. But what my opinion separates you from the rest is at the first that absolutely striking use case that you offer, the amount of content that is already in the use case and the game changer that you are positioning. Because we have that had that in the the conversation upfront. You can open a lot of doors with what you do. And when you ask me what are these kind of doors that you see at customers that Conduct may open is that many, many organizations on the move to S4HANA who are, for example, in ECC, who are in a legacy world, having a legacy architecture which has been growing in the last twenty, twenty five years. They, in many cases, remember the effort they had was the first implementation, and they are quite afraid of repeating that again. And as such, they choose these kinds of lean conversions and, and in a direction where they do not really realize any big benefits and, are still having a lot of tasks before them to really be able to generate value out of business AI and the stuff and and so on. Because to to clean this up, to make this kind of unsexy work in the end, you would have have another project. Projects will have no clear ROI because you have just one guy sitting there cleaning up ABAP codes and so on. You are closing this window of inopportunity and opening doors by scaling a lot of those things that consultants had to do themselves with a lot of budgets burning through and with less first step advantages. And that's why I said you are so interesting for me. But before we go to this, JP, how did you end up in this industry or in this SAP focused industry? Because your past with Palantir was a little bit different. How the move towards SAP?
00:04:55 · JP Haas
[00:04:55] S0: Yeah, you're right. It is an interesting and not very traditional SAP background. But I think that that has opened many doors for us as well in our mental perspective on on how the industry operates and how we can rethink it in many ways. So let me take you you back to to the founding days. And before that, my two co founders and I, we all worked at Palantir in different leadership positions across product engineering and go to market. And in every big project that we were working on with, you know, industrials, with telco companies, with even government entities, SAP systems were always one of the one of the core systems and data stores that we had to connect with in order to to build the foundation of what Palantir was then going to do with these companies. And what we observed over and over again was was two things. Number one, none of the IT teams that we were working with had a really good idea of what the structure of the SAP system that they were connecting with Palantir even even really looked like. They were telling us things like these structures of the data, but also of the logic that connects everything. These are leftovers of of the last twenty plus years. You just said it, Alex. And there was this feeling of of a lack of control and almost, you know, uncertainty and and insecurity, frankly, because Yeah. These systems are so so mission critical. But if you don't really understand how everything is connected and how things are set up, then making any change in the system is like open heart surgery. Right? There's there's very, very dangerous implications of it, but you're... In many ways, you're flying blind. Yeah. And then the second the second observation was that most of the IT teams that we were we were engaging with in our in our projects, they weren't... They were about to go into these these long S4HANA transformation projects. They were going to take take years and keep them busy for years. And in that time, they weren't able to to work on actually improving the the business capabilities and the business usefulness of these of these SAP systems. And that actually is very, very harmful for for the business. Because if you can if you cannot build new features that make the business better, that slows everyone down. And that phenomenon is something that you see in in IT at large. Right?
00:07:27 · JP Haas
The there's always this gap between the business says I need a new procurement feature or I want to optimize my production process. But the time to implement to implement that and the time to value is is just way too slow. And that is really bad for the for the companies that are that are that are impacted by that. The example that I always go back to, and I really think of that every morning I get up because that's the driving mission statement of what we want to do. We we saw this defense company in Germany that couldn't make more tanks for Ukraine because working on optimizing the production line was not possible to do in a short time frame because the IT team was was busy with an S4HANA transformation. And that's that idea. The fact that businesses are slowed down by the fact that IT projects take too long. That is what's what's ultimately at the core of what's driving us to to do great work every day. We want to bring agility back to to the companies that we work with by turning IT from, in many ways, a slowing down function into an into an enabler of the business. And we should also talk about why that's not actually IT's fault. Right? And that maybe