SAP announced a new orga­ni­za­tion­al mod­el last week as part of its con­tin­ued dri­ve toward trans­for­ma­tion. The soft­ware giant revealed sev­er­al big lead­er­ship and orga­ni­za­tion­al changes as well as a renewed focus on a cus­tomer-first and fledg­ling ONE SAP strategy. 

ASUG sat down with Nico­la Leske, head of glob­al cor­po­rate affairs at SAP, to dis­cuss what these changes mean for cus­tomers and to bet­ter under­stand what’s new. To start, SAP Exec­u­tive Board Mem­bers Ste­fan Ries and Michael Kleine­meier have agreed with the Super­vi­so­ry Board of SAP SE to leave the com­pa­ny. Ries, who is the chief HR offi­cer and labor rela­tions direc­tor, will depart at the end of May 2020, while Kleine­meier, who leads the SAP Dig­i­tal Busi­ness Ser­vices, will stay on until April 30, 2020.

Accord­ing to the SAP news release, co-founder Has­so Plat­tner said of the two: ​“With­out Ste­fan and Michael, SAP would not be where it is today. I would like to thank them both for their many years of close collaboration.” 

The need for more col­lab­o­ra­tion as well as inte­gra­tion, how­ev­er, is the cat­a­lyst for these recent changes. ​“When Jen­nifer Mor­gan and Chris­t­ian Klein look at what they want to achieve, cus­tomer suc­cess is at the very top,” Leske said. ​“As you know, SAP has grown in the past five years, and as a result, there is over­lap. So, there is a need to step back and fig­ure out how to make a bet­ter expe­ri­ence for our customers.” 

A Cus­tomer-Focused Restructure 

With Kleine­meier step­ping down, SAP Dig­i­tal Busi­ness Ser­vices along with sales and any oth­er cus­tomer-relat­ed orga­ni­za­tion — includ­ing SAP part­ners — will now be bun­dled in one new group named ​“Cus­tomer Suc­cess.” Tak­ing on a big­ger role with SAP and man­ag­ing this group will be Adaire Fox-Martin.

“This restruc­ture doesn’t mean SAP is chang­ing how it thinks about ser­vices,” Leske said. ​“Instead, it under­scores the impor­tance of ser­vices and what cus­tomers need to be suc­cess­ful.” SAP intends to pro­vide a sin­gu­lar and sim­pli­fied expe­ri­ence for cus­tomers who inter­act with its sales and ser­vices depart­ments. ​“Adaire is tasked with cre­at­ing one end-to-end cus­tomer jour­ney,” Leske said. ​“It’s about break­ing up silos and bound­aries, espe­cial­ly as SAP gets more involved in the cloud world, where change hap­pens even faster.” 

Thomas Sauer­es­sig will lead prod­uct man­age­ment, devel­op­ment, and prod­uct sup­port. And Juer­gen Muller is tasked with deliv­er­ing one seam­less­ly inte­grat­ed data-man­age­ment solu­tion, in addi­tion to man­ag­ing SAP’s over­all plat­form and tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment and intel­li­gent technologies. 

“Both teams are real­ly com­mit­ted to sup­port­ing cus­tomers in their jour­ney to the intel­li­gent enter­prise,” Leske said. Their com­bined goal is to pro­mote intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies across func­tions and to focus on holis­tic inte­gra­tion. This over­all restruc­tur­ing will ben­e­fit SAP cus­tomers, accord­ing to Leske. ​“It allows for a seam­less expe­ri­ence between prod­uct devel­op­ment, sales, and ser­vices, all the way through to inte­gra­tion with SAP and non-SAP prod­ucts,” she added.

What About Qualtrics and CX Products? 

Although most of the Cloud Busi­ness Group was inte­grat­ed into the new orga­ni­za­tion­al mod­el, Qualtrics, CX Engi­neer­ing, CX Prod­uct Strat­e­gy, and major parts of SAP Con­cur will remain in their groups for now. 

This was a strate­gic deci­sion by SAP. ​“Qualtrics is still rel­a­tive­ly new, and it’s grow­ing incred­i­bly,” Leske said. ​“So, for now, Jen and Chris­t­ian don’t want to dis­rupt the busi­ness or the cul­ture that has made it so successful.” 

Even though Qualtrics isn’t fold­ed into one of the three groups men­tioned, SAP is ded­i­cat­ed to inte­grat­ing not only the plat­form across the SAP port­fo­lio, but also the teams that work across the board. Eric Stine, for­mer­ly chief cus­tomer inno­va­tion offi­cer for SAP, has moved into the role of chief rev­enue offi­cer for Qualtrics. ​“We will con­tin­ue to cross-pol­li­nate and fold Qualtrics into the mix, but for now it will remain inde­pen­dent,” Leske said. 

As for the remain­ing CX suite of prod­ucts, SAP recent­ly brought in Bob Stutz as pres­i­dent of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, and he is charged with accel­er­at­ing the devel­op­ment of the CX port­fo­lio. ​“Bob is very expe­ri­enced in this space,” Leske said, ​“and for now we’re going to focus on get­ting it to where it needs to be, and then we will reassess and decide on a path forward.” 

Focused on Six Solu­tion Areas 

In addi­tion to the orga­ni­za­tion­al changes, SAP announced six pri­ma­ry solu­tion areas includ­ing SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence, SAP S/4HANA, Peo­ple (SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors), Intel­li­gent Spend (inclu­sive of SAP Ari­ba, SAP Field­glass, and SAP Con­cur), SAP HANA and Ana­lyt­ics, and Qualtrics. The SAP Cloud Plat­form will serve as the under­ly­ing tech­nol­o­gy plat­form for all these areas.

The SAP board and lead­er­ship teams looked to find ways to match solu­tion areas with cus­tomer buy­ing cen­ters. ​“This is aimed to help SAP exe­cute on its goals and to be num­ber one in its tar­get mar­ket seg­ments,” Leske said. ​“It will help SAP pro­vide domain thought lead­er­ship inter­nal­ly and externally.” 

These solu­tion seg­ments are not new, how­ev­er. They’ve been a part of the SAP land­scape (in some form or fash­ion) for a while now. ​“SAP just want­ed to look at how to best com­bine and align them,” Leske said. 

Now, each of the six solu­tion seg­ments are paired with­in the SAP func­tion­al board area struc­ture. ​“It gives us the best of both worlds,” Leske said. ​“The goal of a func­tion­al board area struc­ture is to ensure best-in-class engi­neer­ing, sales, prod­uct man­age­ment strat­e­gy, and solu­tion man­age­ment sup­port and ser­vices across the entire com­pa­ny. With the solu­tion areas, we aim to strength­en cus­tomer suc­cess across our func­tions with joint teams that are real­ly focused on spe­cif­ic buy­ing centers.” 

Bot­tom Line: What Do These Changes Mean for You? 

When co-CEOs Jen­nifer Mor­gan and Chris­t­ian Kline stepped into their new roles, they both empha­sized a focus on cus­tomer suc­cess and inte­gra­tion. It appears that they are keep­ing in line with those goals and are now exe­cut­ing their plan. 

“Busi­ness­es today need inno­v­a­tive tools and tech­nolo­gies but also seam­less cus­tomer expe­ri­ences with their tech­nol­o­gy ven­dors and part­ners, so that they can take action when busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties arise,” said Geoff Scott, ASUG CEO. ​“The changes that SAP announced this week are great steps toward smash­ing down exist­ing silos at SAP and remov­ing com­plex­i­ty and inte­gra­tion chal­lenges, which should pro­vide a more sim­pli­fied and effi­cient expe­ri­ence for all SAP customers.”

The bot­tom line is that SAP says that there are now clear and sim­ple com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels, a uni­form appear­ance, and trans­paren­cy in terms of prod­uct strat­e­gy and inte­gra­tion sce­nar­ios. ​“SAP hears from cus­tomers that although they believe in the prod­ucts, SAP needs to do a bet­ter job in being present dur­ing the jour­ney to the intel­li­gent enter­prise,” Leske said. ​“Jen and Chris­t­ian are real­ly focused on chang­ing that both inter­nal­ly and externally.” 

ASUG mem­bers can join us for dis­cus­sions like this with ASUG lead­er­ship at one of our nation­al or region­al ASUG Exec­u­tive Exchange events near you to net­work with oth­er exec­u­tives look­ing to get more val­ue from their SAP systems.