At the June ASUG Chica­go Chap­ter Meet­ing, ASUG mem­bers shared sto­ries of their trans­for­ma­tion suc­cess­es and chal­lenges, con­nect­ing with oth­er SAP cus­tomers and hear­ing from part­ners and ven­dors through­out a full day of keynote pre­sen­ta­tions, break­out ses­sions, and net­work­ing opportunities.

Held at Harp­er Col­lege in Pala­tine, Illi­nois, the strong­ly attend­ed June 15 event — over­seen by ASUG Chap­ter Coor­di­na­tor Kaaron John­son — kicked off with a keynote dis­cus­sion of Wal­greens Boots Alliance’s jour­ney toward a world-class scan-based trad­ing solu­tion, which earned the Busi­ness Inno­va­tor prize dur­ing the 2023 SAP Inno­va­tion Awards. 

From there, fol­low­ing a net­work­ing break, ASUG mem­bers select­ed one of three tracks to attend across mul­ti­ple sets of morn­ing and after­noon ses­sions, gain­ing key busi­ness and strat­e­gy insights from SAP part­ner- or ven­dor-led presentations. 

• Pyra­mid Ana­lyt­ics pre­sent­ed its Deci­sion Intel­li­gence Plat­form, an AI-dri­ven plat­form that allows users to direct­ly query data to SAP Busi­ness Ware­house (BW) and SAP BW/4HANA, and fea­tures deep func­tion­al inte­gra­tion with SAP BW, SAP BW4/HANA, and SAP HANA, from busi­ness hier­ar­chies and busi­ness log­ic to cur­ren­cy cal­cu­la­tions and mod­el parameters.
• Work­soft dis­cussed the mod­ern chal­lenges of S/4HANA migra­tion, shar­ing cus­tomer sto­ries, empha­siz­ing the role of automa­tion in both hybrid/​brownfield or green­field approach­es, and not­ing that empow­er­ing peo­ple with­in the busi­ness can accel­er­ate one’s under­stand­ing of processes.
• SNP Trans­for­ma­tions detailed Kodak’s jour­ney to SAP S/4HANA and the Cloud, a 12-month under­tak­ing that involved clean­ing and carv­ing out data, mov­ing to a mod­ern archi­tec­ture in Azure, and estab­lish­ing a new dig­i­tal core in SAP S/4HANA.
• BCC Dis­tri­b­u­tion and Preg­is dis­cussed bar­code automa­tion for inven­to­ry con­trol with SAP Inven­to­ry Man­age­ment and Ware­house Man­age­ment, focus­ing on SAP mobile scan­ning and pal­let bar­code label print­ing as applic­a­ble for SAP ECC 6.0, Suite on HANA, and S/4HANA environments.
• Vision33 dis­cussed two-tier ERP strat­e­gy and spe­cial projects toolk­its (for acqui­si­tions, sub­sidiaries, divesti­tures, incu­ba­tions, and autonomous divi­sions) for large enter­pris­es, cit­ing case stud­ies with Under Armour and Swagelok.
• Anurag Barua, Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion Leader at SAP Amer­i­ca, talked about expand­ing and accel­er­at­ing adop­tion of SAP S/4HANA with Embed­ded Analytics.
• David Bran­ley, Prod­uct Man­ag­er – Local­iza­tion Cross Prod­uct Strat­e­gy with SAP Glob­al­iza­tion Ser­vices, dis­cussed the SAP Soft­ware Local­iza­tion port­fo­lio, iden­ti­fy­ing local­iza­tion as a key strength of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
• VerNeil Mesech­er Jr., Sr. Direc­tor – Cus­tomer Engage­ment Events Liai­son, SAP North Amer­i­ca, dis­cussed the impor­tance of sup­port­ing each customer’s choice on their inno­va­tion path and the ​“No Cus­tomer Left Behind” strat­e­gy to pro­vide alter­na­tives to SAP S/4HANA Cloud migra­tion ahead of the 2027 dead­line on main­stream main­te­nance on core appli­ca­tions of SAP Busi­ness Suite 7.
• Barua dis­cussed SAP S/4HANA Cloud, pub­lic edi­tion, and its capa­bil­i­ties for accel­er­at­ing cus­tomers’ busi­ness transformations.
• And Wal­greens Boots Alliance detailed its SAP S/4HANA archiv­ing strat­e­gy for reduc­ing active data stor­age while ensur­ing prop­er process­es for sta­ble archiv­ing and data retrieval.

Final­ly, atten­dees at the ASUG Chica­go Chap­ter meet­ing heard from Chet Har­ter, SAP Sig­navio Cen­ter of Excel­lence, on the top­ic of build­ing an intel­li­gent enter­prise with the busi­ness process man­age­ment (BPM) tool, detail­ing the role that change man­age­ment has to play in ensur­ing the suc­cess of orga­ni­za­tion-wide process improve­ment. After clos­ing remarks and give­aways of select prizes, atten­dees con­gre­gat­ed to close out the meet­ing with a net­work­ing-friend­ly ​“SAP­py Hour” after­noon social. 

Anu­pam Jaisw­al, Engi­neer­ing & Prod­uct Devel­op­ment – Engi­neer­ing at Ecoservi­ty, attend­ed the Chap­ter meet­ing in hopes of con­nect­ing with peers and hear­ing from speak­ers. ​“It was a refresh­ing con­fer­ence for the ​‘net­work effect’ vis­i­ble in two dif­fer­ent dimen­sions,” he said. 

Fol­low­ing their keynote, Wal­greens Boots Alliance team mem­bers ​“used the con­fer­ence to net­work with oth­er cus­tomers about their expe­ri­ences, both good and bad, and also to share the prob­lems they’ve solved and are look­ing to take to more busi­ness areas,” Jaisw­al noted. 

In addi­tion, Jaisw­al react­ed pos­i­tive­ly to the event’s SAP pres­ence. ​“SAP showed not only the capa­bil­i­ties of their prod­ucts but also how net­work effects are tan­gi­ble with them,” he said, cit­ing the clos­ing keynote on SAP Sig­navio and its focus on how Sig­navio uses oth­er indus­try peers’ key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors (KPIs) to com­pare with cus­tomers’ KPIs and project areas of improvement.