Specialist
VP, IT & Enterprise Applications at Graham Group Ltd
Agenda
- Reasons for embarking on the switch to SAP (ETR: SAP) S/4HANA ERP (enterprise resource planning)
- Implementation process – S/4HANA roll-out, timeline and deployment method
- S/4HANA's strengths and weaknesses for customers
- RISE with SAP initiative and deploying S/4HANA in the public cloud
- Likelihood of customers taking on wider SAP products once using S/4HANA
Questions
1.
Have you completed the switch to S/4HANA? Are you still going through the process?
2.
What is the timeline for your S/4HANA switch? Was this all in one go? Did you do it in stages?
3.
Is everything now on S/4HANA, or are some elements still on ECC [ERP Central Component]?
4.
What do you actually use on S/4 HANA?
5.
Did you use the shift onto S/4 HANA and away from ECC as an opportunity to consider other ERP [enterprise resource planning] providers?
6.
Do you think it’s quite rare that customers would consider other ERP providers using an S/4 HANA shift?
7.
What were the drivers for you to undertake the S/4HANA switch?
8.
How would you compare the functionality of S/4HANA vs ECC?
9.
Is most of the benefit driven by the HANA database, or is it more that the software and processes have been improved relative to ECC?
10.
What do you think about standardisation vs customisation? What do you think of the standardised
approach of S/4 HANA vs the customised approach of ECC?
11.
Why is it more beneficial for a customer such as yourself to be on a more standard process rather than deep customisation? Does it require developer resources from your side and you can better spend your time elsewhere, or is it that SAP’s standardised processes get the same result with less hassle?
12.
Was moving to a more standardised approach something you were initially sceptical of, or was it more that the IT department wanted to move and the scepticism came from other departments such as finance and HR?
13.
Are you deploying S/4 HANA on-premise or in the private or public cloud?
14.
What made you deploy on-premise? Was it the only viable option?
15.
Is your plan to move over to S/4HANA and have that in a public cloud hosted environment?
16.
What is the environment you will shift S/4 HANA into for cloud?
17.
Will you be shifting everything over to the Azure environment, or are there certain elements of S/4 HANA that you will always want on-premise?
18.
What made you want to undergo the shift to the Azure environment only three years after shifting onto S/4 HANA?
19.
If you weren’t going through a hardware refresh, do you think you would still be undergoing the shift to Azure, or is that decision primarily driven by the hardware refresh?
20.
Given that the transition from ECC to S/4 HANA took six months, do you expect the shift to Azure to be much faster given you are already on the S/4HANA product?
21.
You said when you first made the S/4 HANA shift a number of years ago the cloud offering wasn’t quite at the level you wanted it to be. I often hear the cloud functionality is about 80% of the on-prem for S/4 HANA. How much do you think the product has improved?
22.
The RISE with SAP initiative was launched earlier in 2021. Is that compelling to you?
23.
When you started to think about the shift over to an Azure environment for S/4HANA, it seems neither SAP nor any of the implementers or consultants you work with suggested RISE with SAP. Have you not heard much from partners or SAP itself about RISE?
24.
What were the biggest challenges around the initial switch to S/4 HANA? Were these mostly internal or external? It seems the issues were not external if you didn’t use any consultants or partners.
25.
Did you say that during the implementation process you did it all yourself and didn’t use external
consultants? I thought earlier you mentioned that someone who worked with you didn’t understand the construction industry that well, or was that prior, on the ECC offering?
26.
What about the wider products SAP offers? Do you use or intend to use any of those?
27.
What do you think about the wider SAP offerings such as Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur and Qualtrics? Did you find it more compelling to take on some of these wider offerings once you had moved to S/4HANA?
28.
Are there any other products you’re evaluating from SAP? You mentioned RPA [robotic process
automation], a couple of R&D projects and that Signavio might be interesting.
29.
How important is the integration element for you? Do you think SuccessFactors is better than Workday, or have you found they’re similar offerings, but it’s the integration you can get with SuccessFactors being part of SAP that really gives it the edge for you? How do you balance the integration of being part of an SAP ecosystem relative to how you actually evaluate the point product itself?
30.
It seems your company is a fairly large one with a fairly mature IT team and budget, and that integration is particularly important to you. Do you think the integration element is not something a mid-market firm would focus on, while enterprise customers find that value compelling?
31.
What are your concluding thoughts on SAP? How are you thinking about your future spend on it?
32.
Have you observed any changes around SAP’s customer centricity since Christian Klein took over as CEO?
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