In this ASUG Talks episode, we talk with Bob Bucy, N.C. State Uni­ver­si­ty Teach­ing Sup­port Spe­cial­ist, about his career and aca­d­e­m­ic pursuits.

ASUG Talks: Can­did Career Conversations

Episode 12

Jim Licht­en­wal­ter:

I’m excit­ed today to be joined by Bob Bucy. Bob, thank you so much for join­ing me.

Bob Bucy:

Glad to be here.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

Bob, to kick things off, I’d love to know about your cur­rent role and the work you do each day.

Bucy:

I am cur­rent­ly in a role sup­port­ing sup­ply chain sys­tems for a glob­al diag­nos­tics com­pa­ny. The pri­ma­ry focus in that role is on SAP, but it includes sup­port of oth­er con­nect­ed sys­tems. In today’s world, SAP is sel­dom the only sys­tem involved in any com­pa­ny of any size and inte­gra­tion is a com­mon theme.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

Has work­ing in inte­gra­tion some­thing that you’ve always been doing or is that rel­a­tive­ly new?

Bucy:

There’s always been some lev­el of it over the years, but it’s changed over the years. Cer­tain­ly SAP orig­i­nal­ly was cre­at­ed as one piece of soft­ware that was going to run your com­pa­ny and that has evolved over the years and inte­gra­tion has become a more promi­nent theme in the SAP ecosystem.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

Even by SAP’s includ­ed more work on inte­grat­ing with oth­er solu­tions so what you’re using on SAP and what you’re using on maybe anoth­er soft­ware solution.

Bucy:

They rec­og­nize that this trend is not going away, and they’ve embraced it with things like BTP.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

Let’s talk about when you first encoun­tered SAP. Where were you in your career when you first encoun­tered SAP?

Bucy:

I was actu­al­ly a cred­it ana­lyst in a man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny, so a finance per­son. And I’d been involved in oth­er tech­ni­cal projects in that depart­ment. I was actu­al­ly hired part­ly for my finan­cial expe­ri­ence and part­ly for my tech­ni­cal apti­tude because I was kind of cred­it analyst/​first line tech­ni­cal sup­port in the department.

When that com­pa­ny was putting togeth­er their first SAP project, they went around look­ing for peo­ple from every area of the busi­ness to rep­re­sent their area on the project and they looked for those with more tech­ni­cal apti­tude. They came to me and asked me if I would be part of this project and I was a bit of a com­put­er geek and build­ing PCs and stuff on the side. And I was kind of like, oh cool. Get to play with new soft­ware, this sounds like fun. Had no idea what I was get­ting into. Not only that, but they asked me to do it part-time. That pret­ty much turned into two full-time jobs for a year and a half.

It was the hard­est thing I’d ever done, but it was also the most reward­ing thing I had ever done. And it became pret­ty clear by the end of that project that I had a much more promis­ing future in SAP than as a cred­it ana­lyst. I pret­ty quick­ly found my way to a role on an inter­nal SAP project at IBM.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

How do you piv­ot from cred­it ana­lyst to work­ing in the SAP ecosys­tem? Is that some­thing you talked to your supe­ri­ors about? Or did they already know that you had the acumen? 

Bucy:

None of us get­ting into that project knew any­thing about SAP. They actu­al­ly gave us all a pho­to­copy of an arti­cle out of the Wall Street Jour­nal explain­ing what SAP was and that was our intro­duc­tion to SAP. And then we had our first orga­ni­za­tion­al meet­ing with the project team who start­ed explain­ing more about what SAP was. So, it real­ly was based on the peo­ple that, first of all, had good knowl­edge of their busi­ness area. So, they under­stood what the busi­ness need­ed, but they also had a demon­strat­ed apti­tude for jump­ing into new things like SAP and mak­ing it work.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

Along this the same line, since you first start­ed using SAP, how has the orga­ni­za­tion, its soft­ware, its pri­or­i­ties, shift­ed and changed over the years?

Bucy:

Like many things, I think it’s moved in cycles. Those orig­i­nal five guys at IBM, their vision was the best of breed era. That was when you bought your big iron from IBM. And then you start­ed hang­ing appli­ca­tions on it and had an army of pro­gram­mers and write inter­faces and Cobalt to put them all togeth­er. And they had this vision for this one piece of soft­ware that did every­thing. The Swiss army knife of busi­ness appli­ca­tions. And when I got into the SAP world, it was a core appli­ca­tion that had all… It had finance and sales and man­u­fac­tur­ing and all of the oth­er things that it need­ed to have to run a business.

And then that start­ed evolv­ing. And when we got into the my SAP and they start­ed rolling out the dimen­sion prod­ucts. And then we had sup­ply chain man­age­ment as a sep­a­rate appli­ca­tion and sup­ply rela­tion­ship man­age­ment as a sep­a­rate appli­ca­tion. And that went on for the next 10 plus years until S/4 start­ed real­ly maturing.

And now they’re com­ing full cir­cle and bring­ing those things back into the core S/4. Now, instead of hav­ing your sep­a­rate sup­ply chain man­age­ment serv­er with extend­ed ware­house man­age­ment, now extend­ed ware­house man­age­ment is part of the core S/4 appli­ca­tion. Now plan­ning is part of the core S/4 appli­ca­tion again.

So, it’s all come full cir­cle. And there’s obvi­ous­ly now the much greater empha­sis on cloud tech­nol­o­gy. And true soft­ware is the ser­vice prod­ucts, which is I think, prob­a­bly the biggest dynam­ic change in the SAP world. Because when I start­ed, it was all on premise appli­ca­tions sit­ting on a serv­er. So, now we true soft­wares of ser­vice products.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

Can you talk a lit­tle about a par­tic­u­lar­ly note­wor­thy or chal­leng­ing SAP project that you worked on? I’d love to know some of the specifics and then how you were ulti­mate­ly able to be suc­cess­ful on that project.

Bucy:

I think the most chal­leng­ing project that I worked with was rolling out a glob­al tem­plate to a site that had been acquired a num­ber of years ear­li­er. It had been four or five years ear­li­er, but there’d nev­er real­ly been any­thing done by the acquir­ing com­pa­ny to inte­grate that site into the cul­ture of the com­pa­ny. And when we still got there, they still viewed them­selves as the oth­er company.

And they’re like, we’re not com­pa­ny XYZ. We’re com­pa­ny ABC. And I’m just like, well, I’m sor­ry, but the sign on the out­side of the build­ing now says com­pa­ny XYZ. But they just did­n’t want to embrace that. And they still retained the cul­ture of their pre­vi­ous com­pa­ny and had a lot of resent­ment over being acquired in the first place. And it’s prob­a­bly the great­est lev­el of con­flict that I’ve ever encoun­tered in a project. It required a lot of diplo­ma­cy, a lot of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, all of that I could muster.

We tried to focus on sell­ing the ben­e­fits of the project and how it was going to ben­e­fit the site to be more inte­grat­ed with the rest of the net­work of the com­pa­ny that they were now a part of, which has turned out over the years to be exact­ly the case for that site. It’s dri­ven more busi­ness to them. They’ve ben­e­fit­ed huge­ly from that inte­gra­tion into the sys­tems of the acquir­ing company.

And most impor­tant­ly, there were peo­ple there who embraced the change, right? And those that actu­al­ly embraced the change, their careers have ben­e­fit­ed from it. They were the ones that were smart enough to say, hey, you gave me lemons. I’m going to make some lemon­ade. So, it real­ly was the best learn­ing expe­ri­ence that I’ve ever had in orga­ni­za­tion­al change man­age­ment on a project.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

Change man­age­men­t’s just so hard. Do you have any rec­om­men­da­tions or what did you all do to ensure change a management?

Bucy:

I think a lot of it boils down to real­ly lis­ten­ing, to hav­ing empa­thy with the peo­ple who are going to be using the sys­tem that you’re even­tu­al­ly going to imple­ment and actu­al­ly real­ly under­stand­ing their con­cerns because nobody likes change. It’s uncom­fort­able to every­body. Every­body right out of the gate feels threat­ened by change.

And so, you have to real­ly work to sell the ben­e­fits of what you’re doing and show them how it’s actu­al­ly going to help them. There’s no such thing as too much communication. 

One of the things that I tell peo­ple a lot is peo­ple have this idea that the only peo­ple who are real­ly sales­peo­ple are those that have sales in their job title. And the real­i­ty is that we’re all salespeople.

We all go to our jobs every day with ideas that we want to try and sell to our cowork­ers and sell to our man­age­ment because we believe they’re going to be in the best inter­est of the com­pa­ny. And so, that’s just a mind­set that I take into any kind of a project like this.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

You have to sell ideas and you have to approach it the same way that as you’re sell­ing to a cus­tomer because how else are you going to get an idea off the ground if you can’t sell your inter­nal organization?

Bob, I want to piv­ot for a minute. As I was lurk­ing on your LinkedIn page prepar­ing for this pod­cast, I noticed that you were a lec­tur­er for a semes­ter at North Car­oli­na State Uni­ver­si­ty. Would love to know about how you came about that oppor­tu­ni­ty, what it was like and what exact­ly you were lec­tur­ing about?

Bucy:

So, I’ve known Dr. Maryanne Brad­ford there for a num­ber of years and she teach­es ERP class­es, both under­grad­u­ate and NPA lev­el there at NC State Uni­ver­si­ty. She’s the per­son who brought that top­ic to the uni­ver­si­ty. She’s been teach­ing in that space for over 20 years. And I’d been a guest speak­er for her over the years. And she came to me actu­al­ly a cou­ple years in advance, actu­al­ly spring of 2017, to say that she was plan­ning to take this sab­bat­i­cal. She need­ed some­body to teach the class who actu­al­ly under­stood ERP and SAP because they are a mem­ber of the SAP Uni­ver­si­ty Alliance.

And I’d always had an inter­est in teach­ing, but I’d nev­er real­ly act­ed on it. And it was actu­al­ly Maryanne who real­ly saw my poten­tial to do it and gave me the kick in the pants that I need­ed to do it.

So, I taught the course the way Maryanne teach­es it. I see it as much more of a busi­ness course than an IT course. It actu­al­ly sits with­in the account­ing depart­ment in the [inaudi­ble] Col­lege of Man­age­ment. And so, while we cer­tain­ly want stu­dents to get a good dose of SAP, I think the main ben­e­fit of the class is the focus on good busi­ness process, as well as prac­ti­cal advice on pack­age and ven­dor selec­tion and the impor­tance of stan­dard­iza­tion wher­ev­er possible.

And it’s always great when we get feed­back from stu­dents. There was one stu­dent we had in spring of last year who was one of our real­ly, real­ly good stu­dents. I hap­pened to see her birth­day come up on LinkedIn. So, I sent her a note. Hey, hap­py birth­day. I hope the job’s going great and every­thing. And she came back and said, hey, all that stuff I learned in that class… Because she’s actu­al­ly in audit now at KPMG.

And she’s like, I’m doing IT sys­tem audit on SAP sys­tems. So, a whole lot of stuff that I learned in that class is real­ly helpful.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

That must be so grat­i­fy­ing to have some­one say that to you.

Bucy:

Yeah. That was pret­ty cool. Def­i­nite­ly makes it worthwhile.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

But you work right now in sup­ply chains.

Bucy:

Yep.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

Obvi­ous­ly right now we are in a time where sup­ply chains are in great flux. I guess my ques­tion for you as some­one who works specif­i­cal­ly in this space, how are you see­ing orga­ni­za­tions lever­age tech­nol­o­gy to not only improve, but also bol­ster their sup­ply chains?

Bucy:

I’m kind of on the fringes of that and not nec­es­sar­i­ly in the trench­es with our sup­ply chain man­age­ment peo­ple in my orga­ni­za­tion who are every day try­ing to fig­ure out where to find a ship­ping con­tain­er or how to get what­ev­er from point A to point B. But cer­tain­ly I think that what I see is tech­nol­o­gy that was already in use just became more important.

So, for exam­ple, third par­ty logis­tics was already some­thing that’s cer­tain­ly been a stan­dard prac­tice in life sci­ences where I work, and I think it’s become a stan­dard prac­tice for pret­ty much everybody.

I think that third-par­ty logis­tics con­tin­ues to be extreme­ly impor­tant and that com­pa­nies are prob­a­bly lever­ag­ing the exper­tise of the real­ly big 3PL providers even more than they were before all of this stuff happened.

SAP cer­tain­ly con­tin­ues to raise the bar with prod­ucts like extend­ed ware­house man­age­ment. I point that out because if you look at my expe­ri­ence on LinkedIn, I’ve spent a lot of time in the ware­hous­ing space. So, that’s some­thing that’s near and dear to my heart.

Obvi­ous­ly, plan­ning has become real­ly huge dur­ing this time peri­od, prob­a­bly big­ger than ever before. Demand dri­ven MRP is a grow­ing top­ic in the plan­ning space. There’s oth­er prod­ucts and appli­ca­tions out there besides SAP that spe­cial­ize in that, but SAP cer­tain­ly become aware of the impor­tance of that method­ol­o­gy and my under­stand­ing is have bol­stered the capa­bil­i­ties around that in IBP.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

Great. Bob, you’re obvi­ous­ly such a wealth of knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence in the SAP ecosys­tem. What advice do you have for oth­er IT pro­fes­sion­als who are either encoun­ter­ing SAP for the first time, or are enter­ing their careers in the IT space? How do you rec­om­mend that they under­stand the ecosys­tem and dive in?

Bucy:

I think a com­mon theme that I see among IT pro­fes­sion­als is there’s a ten­den­cy to see SAP pri­mar­i­ly as a tech­ni­cal exer­cise. And I think that’s a mis­take. And I real­ize that I work in IT now. Fun­da­men­tal­ly I view myself as a busi­nessper­son who just hap­pened to learn some SAP along the way.

And I view ERP as the com­bin­ing of busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy to achieve a desired busi­ness out­come. So, I would real­ly encour­age oth­er IT pro­fes­sion­als to embrace SAP as a busi­ness exer­cise and real­ly work to build rela­tion­ships with their busi­ness cus­tomers who are going to be using the sys­tem to real­ly under­stand the busi­ness process­es and how the sys­tem is being used.

So, I was once asked to help improve the receiv­ing process in a com­pa­ny. And when I went and start­ed talk­ing to the peo­ple that worked in receiv­ing there, I decid­ed I real­ly need­ed to spend some time with them. So, I met one of the senior mem­bers of the team one morn­ing and spent the morn­ing unload­ing trucks with her. And allowed me to see some short­com­ings in the RF trans­ac­tions that they were using that we were ulti­mate­ly able to improve upon.

There’s just so many things about how your busi­ness cus­tomers use your sys­tem and basi­cal­ly the prob­lems that they have with it that you’re nev­er going to know about sit­ting at your desk. There’s so many things that you just can’t learn sit­ting at your desk. You’ve got to get out in the busi­ness with the peo­ple who are using the appli­ca­tion and fig­ure out what works and what doesn’t.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

Great. Bob, last ques­tion for you. You are an ASUG vol­un­teer, very involved in the ASUG com­mu­ni­ty. I would love to know about your ASUG ori­gin sto­ry and what you do and how you’re involved in, how it’s helped you through­out your career?

Bucy:

So, I first, I think, dis­cov­ered ASUG, I think maybe around 2000, 2001. And I just hap­pened to attend a local meet­ing because it was close to the office. That was help­ful, but it did­n’t real­ly get plugged into it at the time. It was a few years lat­er that I went to my man­ag­er and said, hey, I think this is some­thing we should con­sid­er being part of. And my man­ag­er agreed and embraced it, found the fund­ing for us to join. And it was actu­al­ly around, I think maybe, 2008 to 2009 time­frame. I was at one of our meet­ings at NC State Uni­ver­si­ty, which is some place that we’ve fre­quent­ly had our spring meeting.

And that’s where I met Maryanne Brad­ford, who came to our meet­ing to share with us what she was doing, teach­ing ERP there at NC State. And she was ask­ing for vol­un­teers who’d be will­ing to come and be guest speak­er in her class as well as to con­tribute to her textbook.

So, I took her up on that and I start­ed being a guest speak­er pret­ty much every semes­ter and start­ed out with actu­al­ly a ware­house man­age­ment pre­sen­ta­tion I would do about ware­hous­ing and SAP because that was my focus at the time. I did start mak­ing some small con­tri­bu­tions to her text­book and that increased from edi­tion to edi­tion along the way. That’s just one of many impor­tant rela­tion­ships that go back to some­body that I met at an ASUGG meeting.

And I just can’t stress enough how impor­tant it has been, the num­ber of peo­ple that I have met and the pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ships, as well as just the per­son­al friend­ships that I’ve devel­oped over the year that have been huge­ly ben­e­fi­cial through­out my work­ing years. Get­ting involved as a chap­ter vol­un­teer, which I think was around 2009 or so, just gave me more oppor­tu­ni­ty to do that. And frankly, just more oppor­tu­ni­ty to be of ser­vice to my fel­low SAP peo­ple in the Car­oli­nas and has just giv­en me a plat­form to help peo­ple, to con­nect peo­ple with infor­ma­tion they need­ed occa­sion­al­ly with jobs, which is very reward­ing. It’s safe to say that I real­ly don’t think I would be where I am in my career with­out the involve­ment and the rela­tion­ships that I’ve built over the years at ASUG.

Licht­en­wal­ter:

Well, that is encour­ag­ing to hear. And on that ster­ling rec­om­men­da­tion note, I think I’m going to bring this pod­cast to a close. Bob, thank you so much for join­ing me today and shar­ing your perspective.

Bucy:

Well, thank you for hav­ing me. I’ve real­ly enjoyed it.