As a glob­al soft­ware com­pa­ny with offices in more than 140 coun­tries, SAP has quite a few exec­u­tives work­ing toward the organization’s goals, each in their own unique way.

ASUG News is inter­view­ing SAP lead­ers for our new series, Meet an SAP Exec­u­tive, where we’ll share what these indi­vid­u­als con­tribute to the com­pa­ny and what this means for cus­tomers. In this first install­ment, we inter­viewed Bertram Schulte, chief dig­i­tal offi­cer for SAP.

Lead­ing the Charge to a New Dig­i­tal World

SAP tasked Schulte with lead­ing the busi­ness through a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion to make it eas­i­er for cus­tomers and part­ners to do busi­ness with the com­pa­ny. ​“A CDO is like a king or queen with­out a land, but charged with a sim­ple mis­sion,” Schulte wrote in a LinkedIn post. ​“The mis­sion is to make the com­pa­ny digital.” 

After work­ing in var­i­ous roles at SAP since 2005, he stepped into his cur­rent role to over­see the dig­i­tal cus­tomer strat­e­gy for SAP across sales, cus­tomer suc­cess, sup­port, and mar­ket­ing near­ly two years ago. ​“It’s a role that taps into my roots in mar­ket­ing, multimedia,and e‑commerce,” Schulte said. ​“It allows me to put the cus­tomer first. Just because SAP is a glob­al com­pa­ny doesn’t mean we can’t sim­pli­fy the buy­ing process and pro­vide top-notch ser­vice for every individual.”

Putting the Cus­tomer First

Schulte described him­self as the first advo­cate of cus­tomers in the dig­i­tal world. ​“I’m work­ing to bring togeth­er sup­port, prod­ucts, and con­sult­ing ser­vices on a glob­al lev­el so that the over­all SAP offer­ing makes sense to cus­tomers,” he said. 

The first part of his strat­e­gy includes a direct, omnichan­nel expe­ri­ence for com­mer­cial cus­tomers to pur­chase SAP and part­ner offer­ings via SAP​.com. The sec­ond part is to pro­vide that same expe­ri­ence for part­ners. ​“Cur­rent­ly, all SAP Busi­ness One orders are being done by one of our dig­i­tal stores so that the part­ners can pur­chase the licens­es that they resell via the SAP store,” Schulte not­ed. ​“We’re look­ing into doing this with oth­er prod­ucts as well.”

The third part of Schulte’s strat­e­gy began almost a year ago. ​“This was the trans­for­ma­tion of the SAP Cloud Plat­form to offer a con­sump­tion-based mod­el,” he said. ​“It puts the cus­tomer in the driver’s seat to pro­vi­sion their ser­vices and only get billed for what they actu­al­ly con­sumed.” This year, Schulte and his team are look­ing to enhance the port­fo­lio of avail­able prod­ucts, and to remove the upfront com­mit­ment from cus­tomers that’s cur­rent­ly in place.

No Room for Myths

Schulte recent­ly wrote an arti­cle on three myths about dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. The first myth he dis­cussed was that bet­ter tech­nol­o­gy does not auto­mat­i­cal­ly equal a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. ​“Although the tech­nol­o­gy piece is impor­tant,” Schulte said, ​“your dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion should start with your process and your cus­tomer in mind. And from there, think about what tech­nol­o­gy you need to achieve your goals.”

The sec­ond myth he addressed was that dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion only mat­ters to tech­nol­o­gy and soft­ware com­pa­nies. Wrong again. ​“It doesn’t mat­ter which indus­try you’re in,” Schulte insist­ed. ​“With any busi­ness, if you can con­nect the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence with the sup­ply chain, then you enhance that cus­tomer experience.”

The third myth he addressed is that dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions can wait. ​“Wait­ing is the worst thing you can do,” Schulte said. ​“There is a learn­ing curve for every busi­ness to under­stand what is and isn’t bring­ing val­ue to its cus­tomers and how to then build a strat­e­gy. You can­not start build­ing unless you get all the pieces in place.”

Data Is the Real King 

Mak­ing it sim­pler for SAP cus­tomers to find a solu­tion is a great first step. But Schulte cau­tioned that even with all the oth­er pieces in place, it won’t mean much if your data is not in order. 

“The one thing that cre­ates delays or the biggest headache for com­pa­nies work­ing on a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is their data foun­da­tion.” Tra­di­tion­al­ly, com­pa­nies are orga­nized in silos. That’s because in the past, things like pro­duc­tion, finance, and sales didn’t have to come togeth­er in real time to make the right offer to cus­tomers. That’s not the case anymore.

Schulte not­ed that even he had to think about bring­ing togeth­er cus­tomer data, sales data, and sup­port data for SAP in an effec­tive way so that he could sup­port a busi­ness process that SAP need­ed to opti­mize. ​“You need to address how you man­age your data in the com­pa­ny and how it’s struc­tured,” he added. ​“The over­all data mod­el across cor­po­rate func­tions is the most crit­i­cal com­po­nent to dri­ve a dig­i­tal transformation.”

Expand­ing the Ecosystem

We know SAP’s strat­e­gy for its own dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, and Schulte shared his three myths that should be left behind in 2018. But what’s ahead for this new year and beyond? 

“The one thing that I believe will become more and more pre­dom­i­nant for every com­pa­ny is hav­ing to fit into an ecosys­tem,” Schulte said. Busi­ness lead­ers shouldn’t lim­it their busi­ness plan to sell­ing or pro­vid­ing one thing, but rather a com­plete expe­ri­ence. ​“I believe that more and more com­pa­nies will dis­cov­er what their actu­al busi­ness plat­form is and the dig­i­tal means by which they are now able to bring that togeth­er in real time for their customer.”

This will be the dri­ver in 2019. ​“It always starts with the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, and then it trick­les through the whole sup­ply chain. And that actu­al­ly fits in very nice­ly with SAP’s strat­e­gy for build­ing an intel­li­gent enterprise.”

Join us at our nation­al or one of our region­al ASUG Exec­u­tive Exchange events in 2019 to net­work with oth­er exec­u­tives look­ing to get more val­ue from their SAP systems.