With atten­dees and the entire ASUG com­mu­ni­ty eager for the ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP S/4HANA® and SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) Con­fer­ence to get under­way March 7 – 9, here are some late-break­ing ses­sion pre­views and pre­sen­ters’ con­fer­ence insights.

ASUG spoke with Farzana Dumasi, PM of IT, City of Mis­sis­sauga, on key themes for the ​“Uti­liz­ing SAP Tools as You Adapt to Dis­rup­tive Change” ses­sion and with Saranya Raj, Lead, SAP Cen­ter of Excel­lence (CoE), City of Rich­mond Hill, who will present the ​“SAP S/4HANA Jour­ney at the City of Rich­mond Hill” session.

Hap­py Destination

Dumasi plans to dis­cuss the ​“long and ardu­ous” but ​“ulti­mate­ly hap­py to reach des­ti­na­tion” involved in the city’s brown­field migra­tion to SAP S/4HANA — an effort extend­ed from late 2019 to the sec­ond quar­ter of 2021. In addi­tion to SAP S/4HANA, the city’s SAP envi­ron­ment includes HCM, SAP Con­cur, and SAP SuccessFactors.

“I am most excit­ed about pre­sent­ing all the prepa­ra­tion and plan­ning that was com­plet­ed even before we had ini­ti­at­ed the project and how we had to do a com­plete shift when the pan­dem­ic struck in March 2020,” Dumasi said.

Accord­ing to Dumasi, the SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP com­bi­na­tion event pro­vides an essen­tial ​“plat­form to net­work and learn from each oth­er as we may all be fac­ing sim­i­lar chal­lenges and issues, so we do not nec­es­sar­i­ly need to rein­vent the wheel.

“I am inter­est­ed to learn more about SAP BTP to see if or how we can adopt it to dri­ve change and achieve the desired out­comes,” Dumasi added.

Mid-Sized Cana­di­an Pub­lic Sec­tor Customer

Not­ing ses­sion sim­i­lar­i­ties as well as dif­fer­ences, Raj said she will dis­cuss the City of Rich­mond Hill’s SAP S/4HANA green­field imple­men­ta­tion that ran from 2019 to 2022. Raj will high­light ​“the ben­e­fits of our CoE, which is led by the busi­ness and sup­port­ed by IT;” lessons learned in the upgrade project ​“from the per­spec­tive of a mid-sized pub­lic sec­tor enti­ty;” and chal­lenges faced in build­ing a robust CoE.

In prepar­ing for the con­fer­ence ses­sion — which she said will be inter­ac­tive and fun — Raj added that she became ​“amazed at how far we have come from the ter­ror-filled days of cutover and go-live to steady state. I am excit­ed to share what we have learned and want to use this oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn from oth­ers as well.”

Raj said she will empha­size the co-depen­den­cies and nec­es­sary col­lab­o­ra­tions. And ​“SAP imple­men­ta­tion is not an IT project, but it is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between busi­ness and IT. The busi­ness and IT stake­hold­ers should have rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence. While pre­vi­ous SAP expe­ri­ence is ben­e­fi­cial for the busi­ness users, it is a must for the IT stakeholders.”