Our Thoughts for Customers After Attending FKOM 2020
The Experience Still has Us Thinking of Forward Strategy and Perspective
By Clay Thomas, Principal SCMO2
Every January, SAP brings together their various sales groups, partners and “escorted” customers to share their messaging for the coming year. This is also a time where SAP may shift their customer accounts around to accommodate both strategy and personnel changes. We in the supply chain arena were fortunate this year to see continued stability in who our respective account representatives will be in 2020.
What we would like to emphasize specifically though, beyond the official messaging that may be coming through other various social channels, is what your SAP contacts and partners (such as us) will be communicating through the year. Much will be made of the “Forward Together” slogan and the focus on SAP being an ERP company at its core. You may even notice a de-emphasis on the move of said ERP function to cloud tools from their legacy/on-premise tools.
Less will likely be made of the more subtle reality that “peripheral” cloud tools like Integrated Business Planning (IBP) or Ariba SCC have not only come into their own, but their open-cloud integration unlocks real standalone value for implementing. So you no longer need to completely displace your on-prem system landscape. Or, these tools can serve as a compounding value-add in your business case for shifting the ERP load to S/4 HANA or even Suite on HANA. Prior messaging stressed moving onto S/4HANA as the priority.
On the whole, we see SAP accommodating a pivot towards supporting an evaluation of each customer’s landscape and recommending an approach that best fits those needs. A refreshing shift away from trying to drive wholesale adoption of their “SAP cloud only” vision. Likewise, SCMO2 is further expanding their breadth in tools to provide even better forward-thinking evaluation of needs and the implementation skills required to make it all happen.
We have been around since the early days of SAP R/3 and first wave of advanced planning tools that integrated your operations and supply chain systems. Today, we continue to seek ways for these systems to add value to your organization. Forward Together is all we’ve ever known and we remain optimistic this new decade will be even better than the last two we spent working together.
