ASUG’s first-ever week­long vir­tu­al expe­ri­ence, ASUGFOR­WARD, took place online June 22 through June 25, 2020. Much like the ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence in Orlan­do, our vir­tu­al event fea­tured pre­sen­ta­tions from SAP cus­tomers, for SAP cus­tomers but this time across five areas of busi­ness focus. Only one focus area offered three days of pre­sen­ta­tions — that was IT oper­a­tions, a core area of inter­est for ASUG cus­tomer mem­bers. Oth­er areas of focus includ­ed sup­ply chain and man­u­fac­tur­ing, finance and pro­cure­ment, sales and e‑commerce, and employ­ee expe­ri­ence and HR. 

All three days of IT oper­a­tions ses­sions were host­ed by emcee Paul Kurchi­na, a for­mer SAP cus­tomer and a self-described con­nec­tor, ana­lyst, and indus­try cat­a­lyst. Kurchi­na joined his cop­re­sen­ters from Cal­gary, Alber­ta and kept the pace of the con­ver­sa­tion going through the week of dis­cus­sions with IT indus­try lead­ers, SAP cus­tomers, SAP exec­u­tives, and partners. 

Here are some of the high­lights of the week. 

IT Lead­ers Weigh in with Advice and Optimism

ASUG CEO Geoff Scott kicked off each day in a video con­ver­sa­tion with an IT leader. Scott checked in with each leader on how each of their orga­ni­za­tions is weath­er­ing the effects of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, as well as to ask about how their per­spec­tives have changed as a result of the rapid trans­for­ma­tions that have resulted. 

Archie Deskus, senior VP and CIO of Intel had just tak­en on her cur­rent role at the end of Jan­u­ary and bare­ly had time to meet her new team before trav­el came to a screech­ing halt. She empha­sized the impor­tance of speed of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­sid­er­ing what it real­ly takes for a leader to con­sid­er the well-being of their work­force. ​“You’ve got to start build­ing those key relationships…You can’t afford to wait. I think you lose time, you lose cred­i­bil­i­ty if you wait,” Deskus said. ​“When you have cri­sis, you do meet more frequently…A cri­sis brings you togeth­er in terms of how you sur­vive that crisis…You wor­ry about keep­ing your work­force safe — not just from a work­force per­spec­tive — but about the whole employ­ee — their health, how they’re deal­ing with their fam­i­lies, and their indi­vid­ual situations.”

Deskus also shared a mem­o­rable quote from Intel CEO Bob Swan that cap­tured a com­mon shared les­son of the week about the pace of inno­va­tion. ​“Our CEO, Bob Swan, has been recent­ly quot­ed and he encour­ages all of us to think about, ​‘How is it in moments of cri­sis that we’re able to get so much done so fast? And how we con­tin­ue that pace in a more nor­mal envi­ron­ment?’” She went on to say, ​“In cri­sis, we can over­come our process­es and poli­cies — all the things that typ­i­cal­ly get in the way of us to move fast…What we learn in cri­sis is that it may not be per­fect, but it’s bet­ter for us to just go than to be stuck.”

Changes Will Per­sist Beyond This Crisis

On day two, Scott spoke with Jur­gen Mueller, CTO and SAP exec­u­tive board mem­ber, from his home in Berlin where he’s been work­ing dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. Mueller shared how SAP sprang into action to cre­ate tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions for the gov­ern­ment and munic­i­pal­i­ties in Ger­many that were fac­ing unprece­dent­ed chal­lenges due to COVID-19. In one exam­ple, SAP built an app using SAP Cloud Plat­form that helped repa­tri­ate 250,000 Ger­man cit­i­zens who were abroad dur­ing the out­break and need­ed to return home. 

He described SAP’s respon­si­bil­i­ty to make it eas­i­er for its cus­tomers to do busi­ness, as well as the customer’s respon­si­bil­i­ty to look at COVID-19 as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to address ongo­ing busi­ness chal­lenges. ​“Almost two-thirds of our cus­tomers say their data land­scapes are too complex…How can we help them make con­fi­dent deci­sions with all of these data swamps we have created?…More than 50% of IT depts are over­whelmed by the demands they get from their busi­ness­es. So, how can we help IT depart­ments to act quick­er and become more flex­i­ble as well, because all com­pa­nies have become soft­ware companies?”

On day three, Scott con­nect­ed with Martha Heller, CEO of a top recruit­ing firm for IT exec­u­tives, Heller Search Asso­ciates. Recent­ly, she went on a lis­ten­ing tour with a who’s who of CIOs work­ing in indus­tries rang­ing from alco­holic bev­er­age pro­duc­ers to insur­ance to health care. Her two big a‑ha moments were that the cur­rent cri­sis is flat­ten­ing hier­ar­chies through­out tech orga­ni­za­tions as it now mat­ters more who has the infor­ma­tion lead­er­ship needs and how quick­ly they can get it. And that engag­ing via video plat­forms is democ­ra­tiz­ing inter­ac­tions among tech teams. She described, ​“I am hear­ing that video is cre­at­ing an egal­i­tar­i­an­ism or a par­i­ty in com­mu­ni­ca­tion where there wasn’t any. So, in a con­fer­ence room, you’re going to have the loud­er, more aggres­sive voic­es and you’re going to have the more demure voic­es, and often this is gendered…There is a par­i­ty that is hap­pen­ing because of video and there is a flat­ten­ing of the hier­ar­chy that is hap­pen­ing because of the cri­sis. To me, this is heart­en­ing if we can find a way to embed this or entrench this in our busi­ness­es going forward.”

SAP Cus­tomers Share Lessons on SAP S/4HANA, Inte­gra­tion, and Busi­ness Intelligence

The week was filled with help­ful insights from SAP cus­tomers about the work they’ve been doing at their orga­ni­za­tions. Some of these jour­neys were more recent, while oth­ers have been tak­ing place through mul­ti­year, mul­ti­phased projects. 

One time­ly pre­sen­ta­tion described Saud­er Wood­work­ing Company’s ​“do-it-your­self” tech­ni­cal con­ver­sion to SAP S/4HANA from cop­re­sen­ters Jan Arvay, VP of infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies, and
Pam Vocke, direc­tor of busi­ness sys­tems. Arvay and Vocke talked about how you should do your home­work, how prac­tice makes per­fect, and how it’s impor­tant to assem­ble the right team to go on the jour­ney with you. Vocke described the suc­cess sto­ry at the end of their efforts: ​“We were able to com­plete three prac­tice tech­ni­cal con­ver­sions and then we went live with SAP S/4HANA 1709 on Memo­r­i­al Day week­end 2019. From a project per­spec­tive, we were very hap­py that were able to meet the 72-hour down­time that the busi­ness had agreed to sup­port our project. And our cutover went very smoothly…The sec­ond night of our cutover, we had zero helpdesk calls. And we’re very hap­py to report that the project was done on time and with­in budget.”

Tack­ling a crit­i­cal top­ic for SAP cus­tomers, Bri­an­ca Mar­tin, senior staff tech­ni­cal pro­gram man­ag­er at Gen­er­al Elec­tric, described how her team built a cloud-based tool using APIs to mon­i­tor the per­for­mance of the inte­gra­tions with­in the company’s SAP ecosys­tem, that the team calls DIVE. Build­ing on Gen­er­al Electric’s long com­mit­ment to qual­i­ty process­es, Mar­tin shared the program’s Crit­i­cal to Qual­i­ty factors:

• The plat­form is tech­nol­o­gy agnostic.
• It sup­ports var­i­ous types of middleware.
• It lever­ages con­tain­er technology.
• It allows the team to quan­ti­fy how many trans­ac­tions were received.
• It accom­mo­dates user-based personas.
• It pro­vides trans­ac­tion details at-a-glance for end-to-end transactions.
• It needs to sup­port diverse environments. 

Two essen­tial com­po­nents of the solu­tion that her team built in were dash­boards to visu­al­ize the inte­gra­tion per­for­mance and a mech­a­nism for act­ing on any find­ings that did not always require man­u­al efforts. ​“What we want­ed to do was elim­i­nate that man­u­al effort and instead noti­fy a user on the shop floor if they had a pur­chase order fail,” Mar­tin explained. ​“We want­ed to have tar­get­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the user that we can attach trans­ac­tion­al details, so the user has all the infor­ma­tion they need to process the transaction.”

Anoth­er sto­ry of change-man­age­ment suc­cess came from Mustafa Mustafa, senior direc­tor of IT at Fer­rara Can­dy Com­pa­ny, who described how the IT team tack­led a big busi­ness intel­li­gence project while using it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to strength­en its rela­tion­ships with busi­ness lead­ers and users. Over what Mustafa described as ​“a six-year adven­ture,” the IT team has built a busi­ness intel­li­gence stack that includes SAP HANA Enter­prise Data Ware­house, Analy­sis for Office, Web Intel­li­gence, Lumi­ra for dash­boards for its lead­er­ship team, SAP HANA UI, and Ana­lyt­ics Hub to allow users a one-stop shop to view all reports. 

After invest­ing in this project, Fer­ar­ra has reduced its devel­op­er cost by 70% and has cut the amount of time it needs to build data mod­els by 90%. The key to the project’s suc­cess came from estab­lish­ing trust. ​“Trust comes from being able to state what you’re able to deliv­er and then being able to deliv­er it…We sit with our supe­rusers, we sit with our busi­ness own­ers, we sit with our C‑suite, and we under­stand where their goals are and we are advo­cates to help them attain their goals… We take an Agile approach and pro­duce short sprints that allow them to see the results and gen­er­ate val­ue. They see that val­ue and trust that we can keep pro­duc­ing them month over month,” Mustafa said. 

Part­ner Per­spec­tives on Key Tech­nolo­gies and Innovation

Through­out the week, var­i­ous part­ners joined with their cus­tomers to share how they’re pro­vid­ing key tech­nolo­gies to help dri­ve inno­va­tion. We heard from James Senecal, direc­tor of solu­tion archi­tec­ture at Tri­cen­tis, who explained how SAP cus­tomers can use auto­mat­ed test­ing to accel­er­ate both their reg­u­lar SAP release man­age­ment and their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion projects. On the trans­for­ma­tion side, he described how the expense, time, risk, and effort of test­ing is the num­ber-one bar­ri­er to inno­va­tion for SAP customers. 

Sandeep Cum­ba­mana­galam, busi­ness appli­ca­tions prin­ci­pal soft­ware engi­neer at Zap­pos had a con­ver­sa­tion with John Apple­by, CEO of Avantra, about how the IT team leans on its AIOps solu­tion to achieve its mis­sion of deliv­er­ing ​“WOW” to customers. 

We also heard the deputy CISO at Levi Strauss & Co., Steve Zalews­ki describe the company’s jour­ney to the pub­lic cloud, where it moved its devel­op­ment, QA, test envi­ron­ments to SAP HANA Enter­prise Cloud on Azure to take advan­tage of the infra­struc­ture, scale, and cost advan­tages of the pub­lic cloud. But those advan­tages meant los­ing some secu­ri­ty con­trols, which led Zalews­ki to solu­tions from Onap­sis. ​“All of a sud­den, I don’t own the entire infra­struc­ture, so how do I as a secu­ri­ty prac­ti­tion­er for Levi’s trust, but ver­i­fy that the entire infra­struc­ture is secure?” he said. 

A Week of IT Focus and Fun

Atten­dees had the chance to take a break to enjoy two musi­cal guests. On Tues­day, Tami Nielsen per­formed a rous­ing R&B set from her home in New Zealand. And on Thurs­day after­noon, three-time Gram­my nom­i­nee Ash­ley McBryde shared a short coun­try music med­ley with viewers. 

Although many pre­sen­ters men­tioned how much they missed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be togeth­er in Orlan­do for the ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence, ASUGFOR­WARD was a week of cama­raderie and opti­mism in the face of fierce chal­lenges to busi­ness and technology. 

If you missed our IT oper­a­tions ses­sions at ASUG­FOR­WARD, you can catch up by view­ing them on demand. ASUG mem­bers will have unlim­it­ed access to all of the week’s ses­sions on-demand, while non­mem­ber reg­is­trants can view them until Sun­day, June 28 at 11:59 p.m. CT/​Monday, June 29 at 12:59 a.m. ET.