Coming off the heels of SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference, SAP TechEd—held Sept. 24–27 in Las Vegas—is more than just a flashy event where you’ll hear announcements of the latest and greatest SAP technologies. SAP TechEd is for the people on the ground who are putting in the work to keep their company’s SAP systems working and meeting business objectives.
This is for the developers, engineers, architects, and other technologists who are looking to gain hands-on experience with live demonstrations from SAP experts and customers who know the systems and have worked with them to achieve similar goals.
This year, attendees can attend seven tracks, 32 learning journeys, and 600 sessions aimed at delivering best practices, how-to tips, and advice on building an intelligent enterprise. The ASUG education team has curated 80 of these sessions to help attendees master their SAP skills. In addition, ASUG will host the annual pre-conference seminars the day before SAP TechEd officially kicks off, on Monday, Sept. 23.
Choose Your Course
With nine full-day and two half-day seminars, there is something for everyone. Whether you’re seeking knowledge on business intelligence, data analytics, enterprise information management, or user experience, these deep dives are designed to provide you a better understanding of the latest SAP product functionalities and best practices for leveraging the technology within your own organization.
We sat down with presenters from three of the newest seminars this year, including tech evangelist for SAP C/4HANA Foundation, Jamie Cawley, who will be presenting “SAP C/4HANA: Understanding the Foundation and Future of the Integrated Suite”; Pushkar Ranjan, intelligent enterprise solution engagement, SAP, who will be presenting “Hands-On with IoT Using SAP Leonardo: Best Practices for Building IoT-Powered Business Processes”; and John Krakowski, Jr., SAP senior product manager, customer experience and solutions, and SAP senior product manager Evan Stoddard, both presenting “Hands-On with SAP Solution Manager: Adopting the Best End-to-End Strategy to Transition to SAP S/4HANA.”
We talked with the presenters about what makes these learning experiences unique and what you can expect to take away.
SAP C/4HANA Foundation
It’s been a little more than a year since SAP introduced the SAP C/4HANA platform. During the ASUG Pre-Conference Seminar, attendees can learn about the SAP C/4HANA Foundation, which is a way to bridge all the suite applications—SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, and SAP Data Cloud—together in a central location. You’ll get extensive insights into SAP C/4HANA Foundation and learn how to use it to set up and extend your SAP C/4HANA solutions easily.
“The C/4HANA Foundation provides customers a single view into entitlements and licensing information of all their systems including license number, expiration date, and entry points,” Cawley said. “It also has identity access management capabilities. The goal here is to really show users how to centrally manage their SAP C/4HANA suite and extend and integrate those systems together to build engaging customer experiences.”
The SAP C/4HANA Foundation is available to any customer who has any of the five suite applications. The seminar is geared toward solution architects, project managers, and product managers. “Customers or partners who are looking to extend the SAP C/4HANA suite, or maybe just people who want to learn more about technologies that the foundation is providing, should attend this seminar,” Cawley said.
The SAP C/4HANA Foundation serves two customers: admins and developers. Both will benefit from an overview, demonstrations, and question/answer opportunities. “The goal here is that attendees learn the capabilities of the SAP C/4HANA Foundation and how they can use that to create new and engaging customer experiences,” Cawley said. “With this knowledge, attendees can gain a lot. Our pre-conference seminar will help orient attendees on what is possible, and, hopefully, we’ll be able to get them thinking about how they can overcome their specific business challenges.”
The Internet of Things and SAP Leonardo
We know that SAP Leonardo is both a collection of some of the most promising intelligent technologies and also a way for SAP to work with customers to leverage these technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT).
SAP Leonardo IoT allows the modern enterprise to achieve a step change in operational efficiency by following Industry 4.0 methodologies and principles in the cloud. “And with this solution,” Ranjan said, “you can understand usage patterns and drive action from insight with customer-facing, digital IoT platform services and sensor data embedded in business processes.”
During this hands-on seminar, attendees will learn how SAP Leonardo IoT embeds IoT data into core business applications from SAP, enabling customers, partners, and SAP development units to develop tightly integrated IoT applications that drive new business processes and models.
The primary audience for this seminar is solution builders looking to harness the power of IoT technologies and methodologies. You’ll learn to create intelligent enterprise business processes to redefine the customer experience, increase operational efficiency, and reimagine business models and revenue streams.
“The audience will understand how SAP is powering up the intelligent enterprise of tomorrow by leveraging next-generation technologies like IoT, machine learning, big data, analytics, data intelligence, and blockchain, with a specific deep dive in IoT,” Ranjan said.
SAP Solution Manager
You may have already heard that you need to update to SAP Solution Manager 7.2 SPS08 by the end of this year. And you may already know that SAP Solution Manager is the complete application life cycle management solution for both SAP and non-SAP software. So, if you’re looking to make the move to SAP S/4HANA or looking to better run your SAP S/4HANA system, then this is the pre-conference seminar for you. You will learn the complete best-practice strategy for a transition to SAP S/4HANA. You will discover the tools you need to operate with SAP Solution Manager with Focused Build for SAP Solution Manager, and you will be positioned to adopt a systematic business process improvement methodology.
“SAP Solution Manager 7.2 is our one-stop shop, our single source of truth about all of a customer’s business processes,” Stoddard said. “It is the platform for implementing and running SAP S/4HANA. Focused Build for SAP Solution Manager is even applicable for managing ongoing changes after the initial transition is completed.”
This seminar is perfect for business technical and enterprise architects, as well as project and program managers who will walk away with best practices to accelerate their SAP S/4HANA transformation journey. “They’ll learn how to reduce complexity and decrease costs during their implementation, and they’ll take away an understanding of how to extend and leverage more of the end-to-end application life cycle management power and capabilities of SAP Solution Manager along with Focused Build for SAP Solution Manager,” Krakowski added. “Our goal is to help our customers improve their support and alignment with the latest agile and DevOps methodologies.”
More Learning Opportunities
There will be a lot fighting for your attention during SAP TechEd with all the live demos, hundreds of educational sessions, and numerous networking opportunities. You should take advantage of all of it. But you should also start off your experience with a focused day of learning, where you’ll learn from experts and customers and network with peers who are have the same intentional goal.
“The ASUG Pre-Conference Seminars provide an excellent opportunity for an immersive education experience,” Ranjan said. “Everyone will have on their agenda a goal to learn about how they can best achieve a digital transformation toward an intelligent enterprise,” Krakowski added. “The combination of learning content, demos, and hands-on experiences offered by ASUG will add to that learning objective.”
The ASUG Pre-Conference Seminars are really the only option for attendees to get a full-day, deep dive into the products and topics they'll be discussing the rest of the week. “Kicking off the conference by hearing customer insights alongside training directly from the SAP product experts is such a great way to set the foundation for the rest of your conference experience,” Kelly Dowling, manager of education at ASUG, added.
Register for one of the nine full-day or two half-day ASUG Pre-Conference Seminars taking place on Sept. 23 at SAP TechEd Las Vegas. ASUG members receive $100 off the ASUG Pre-Conference Seminar registration.