ASUG recent­ly held a web­cast for its mem­bers detail­ing some of the top insights from our 2019 State of the Com­mu­ni­ty study. If you missed it, ASUG Mem­bers can always lis­ten to the web­cast, or you can down­load our info­graph­ic with the top insights cap­tured in visu­al form.

We had a great turnout for the web­cast, and atten­dees asked some great ques­tions. Although we couldn’t address all of them at the time, I want­ed to make sure we answered some that we missed. I also want to offer a few insights from the study that weren’t part of the web­cast that may help you under­stand how your orga­ni­za­tion com­pares with oth­ers in the SAP user community.

More Ques­tions, More Answers

Q: Any advice/​best prac­tices for prepar­ing for an SAP S/4HANA tran­si­tion? What are oth­ers doing to prepare?

A: Great ques­tion, and you’re not alone in ask­ing this. Based on the research we’ve done across sev­er­al stud­ies, we have three tips:

• Build your busi­ness case now, if you haven’t start­ed already. This is a lengthy process that comes with plen­ty of complexity.
• Grow your staff and skills now. It’s impor­tant to know what you have and what you’ll need from a peo­ple per­spec­tive to han­dle the migration.
• Do the home­work to fig­ure out what needs to stay and what can go with­in your cus­tomiza­tions. SAP’s Readi­ness Check tool is a great way to start on this. But you should also con­sid­er this an oppor­tu­ni­ty to do your own audit to deter­mine what lega­cy code you can retire as part of the tran­si­tion. Many of the first adopters of SAP S/4HANA have opt­ed to fol­low best prac­tices for their indus­try and have vowed to keep their instance as ​“vanil­la” as possible.

There will be quite a few SAP S/4HANA pre­sen­ta­tions from experts and cus­tomers who have gone through migra­tions at SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence this year. You can even immerse your­self in a full day of learn­ing about SAP S/4HANA at an ASUG Pre-Con­fer­ence Sem­i­nar. 

Q: How is secu­ri­ty going to change after an SAP S/4HANA implementation?

A: This is a sim­ple ques­tion with a com­plex answer, because so much of that depends on the envi­ron­ment where you choose to run your instances of SAP HANA. Your secu­ri­ty can improve based on a cou­ple of fac­tors. First, cloud providers have made great strides address­ing secu­ri­ty con­cerns, to the point where many of these providers offer a more-secure envi­ron­ment than a com­pa­ny might have the resources to man­age in its own on-premise imple­men­ta­tion. Sec­ond, many secu­ri­ty breach­es are due to either a lack of defined roles among the IT/SAP teams at cus­tomer com­pa­nies or to lega­cy ABAP code allow­ing hack­ers a back door to enter crit­i­cal data sources. A cleanup of cus­tom code should help elim­i­nate these poten­tial risks and inspire teams to tight­en up their roles today to han­dle this new infra­struc­ture at their organizations.

Q: I would love to see more of a col­lec­tive voice to get infor­ma­tion back to SAP. Some of us have been on SAP for a long time and it would be good to iden­ti­fy trends and pain points that are con­sis­tent­ly being report­ed. We need to push SAP for more inno­va­tion and to address these needs.

A: This is more of a com­ment than a ques­tion, but the point is well tak­en. ASUG lead­er­ship has reg­u­lar con­ver­sa­tions with SAP employ­ees and exec­u­tives, as well as with oth­er glob­al user groups. We rep­re­sent the voice of the cus­tomer as we share what we hear from all of you. For exam­ple, we have pushed SAP to bring more clar­i­ty and trans­paren­cy to the con­ver­sa­tion on licens­ing. We wel­come your thoughts about what top­ics we should be dis­cussing with SAP leaders.

New Insights Revealed

There was too much good data to fit into one hour-long web­cast, so here are a cou­ple of extra high­lights that didn’t make the final cut:

SAP-Run Busi­ness­es Are Hiring

SAP cus­tomers are plan­ning plen­ty of new ini­tia­tives in 2019, and they are staffing up to meet the inter­nal demand. Sev­en­ty-one per­cent of ASUG Mem­bers plan to hire tal­ent for SAP projects this year, and 61 per­cent of those are expect­ing to look to con­tract work­ers in some form. We’ve already detailed that some of the most skilled help might live in the con­tract world, and it appears that SAP cus­tomers are test­ing that hypoth­e­sis. The con­tract tal­ent pool could be espe­cial­ly ben­e­fi­cial to help staff up for that SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion you have com­ing in the near future, so it’s time to start shop­ping for those resources now.

The Last Stop Before SAP S/4HANA

We’ve been hear­ing from some that a pos­si­ble step­ping stone to the SAP S/4HANA tran­si­tion could be to move first to SAP’s Busi­ness Suite on HANA. One use might be as a test­ing plat­form to work out any bugs before com­plet­ing a lift-and-shift to the full SAP S/4HANA pack­age. Yet only 25 per­cent of ASUG Mem­bers plan to take advan­tage of this option, and many may have been pre­vi­ous­ly unaware that this is even avail­able to them. If you’re con­sid­er­ing whether this will work for your orga­ni­za­tion, you can read an arti­cle on imple­ment­ing SAP Busi­ness Suite on HANA.

Make the Data Work for You

Now that you have seen the results for your­self, it’s time to take the insights you have found and apply them to your team. Have a con­ver­sa­tion about where you fit in as com­pared with oth­er SAP cus­tomers. Do your atti­tudes and behav­iors need to change? Do you have the resources on-hand to make the next phase of your SAP jour­ney a smooth one?

Final­ly, if you appre­ci­ate receiv­ing insights like this, you can help us build more of them. We’ll be start­ing our 2020 State of the Com­mu­ni­ty research in fall 2019, and all SAP cus­tomers and ASUG Mem­bers are wel­come to par­tic­i­pate. You could be among the first to receive a whole bun­dle of fresh new insights next year.

To catch up on what you missed, ASUG Mem­bers can lis­ten to the web­cast or down­load our info­graph­ic.