Tech Driven Business

Dive into the future of enterprise data with the latest episode of Tech-Driven Business. Mustansir Saifuddin welcomes Shawn Brown, of SAP, for Part 1 of an in-depth exploration of the SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC). If you're navigating the complexities of data management and analytics within the SAP ecosystem, this episode is unmissable. Shawn breaks down the fundamental 'why' behind BDC, revealing how it's engineered to drastically reduce data preparation time, cut costs, and empower businesses to make faster, more accurate decisions. Tune in to understand how you can your team can take advantage of all that BDC offers to SAP customers looking to unlock true value from their data. With over two decades of experience in SAP solutions, Shawn Brown currently serves as Senior Director for SAP's Center of Excellence. Known for expertly identifying customer needs, Mr. Brown excels in presenting tailored solutions involving Business Technology Platform, Business Data Cloud, S4HANA, and Business AI. A proven leader in demand generation and partner relationship management, Mr. Brown has successfully driven initiatives that enhance customer experience and streamline cloud solution adoption. Renowned as a thought leader and strategist, Mr. Brown frequently shares insights with CIOs and business influencers, fostering strong, trust-based relationships across multiple industries.   Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Shawn Brown:  Mustansir Saifuddin:  Innovative Solution Partners  X:  @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:00] Mustansir Saifuddin: Welcome to Tech- Driven Business, brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. I'm honored to have Sean Brown of SAP join me to kick off an essential two part series to unpack a topic that's on every SAP user's mind. The Business Data Cloud or BDC. If you're looking to understand how BDC can transform your data landscape and drive real business value, you are in the right place. [00:00:32] . [00:00:32] Welcome to Tech- Driven Business, Shawn. How are you? [00:00:35] Shawn Brown: I am good. I'm good. Things are going well, staying busy. [00:00:38] Mustansir Saifuddin: That's awesome. That's awesome. So glad to have you on our show and I'm really excited for the topic that we are going to discuss today. You ready for it? [00:00:47] Shawn Brown: I am. I'm excited as well. [00:00:51] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah, so I, I know we had talked in the past a couple of times and right now , the hot topic everybody's talking about from SAP and in general is the whole idea, the concept, and now the actual product called Business Data Cloud and what it really means for SAP customers. I like to use this time to dig deeper into this conversation and have a better understanding of exactly what this brings, what kind of landscapes that are changing with this new product, and to expect, you know, if you're a customer interested into, in going forward with BDC. [00:01:28] Shawn Brown: -. [00:01:28] Sure. That sounds great. Yeah. [00:01:32] Mustansir Saifuddin: Awesome. Okay. So I think every time we, we have this new products, right? And SAP is really good about and talk, people talk about rebranding and all that. Let's talk about the why of why should SAP customers adopt BDC. What is different about BDC that SAP customers should be asking that question. [00:01:53] Why? [00:01:55] Shawn Brown: Yeah, this is, this is my favorite question to start. Anything in the space that is outside of packaged solutions, you know ERP, HR Supply Chain and, and the capabilities we have in those areas because the why is something that it, it should be the driver for everything. Right? And, and for BDC, I would say the first thing we wanna talk about is it's a, it's a new product. [00:02:24] But it's an evolution of everything that we've been doing for years. It's, it's capabilities that our customers already know about. And it's taking all of the capabilities that we have offered over the time that we've been, been in the data and analytics space. And it's the, I call it a next generation, right? [00:02:45] It's the next generation of what was. And so when we get into the why. I would say the first thing that we really gotta say is, is the reason for BDC is it is to short circuit the amount of time it takes to prepare from data to finally analytics and planning and all the steps in between, where we're often times organizations see it as this, this wheel that. [00:03:15] They start with the data that's in the source system. They're gonna extract a, transform it loaded profile it, catalog it you know, press governance on it. Maybe make it in, you know, in a marketplace setting. Organize it so that it can be easily digestible, create some standard analytics, and then now we can actually start analyzing it. [00:03:34] And the why is really about reducing the amount of time it takes to go around that whole wheel of, Data all the way around to analytics and planning and reduce the amount of prep time and increase the amount of analysis time. Because if we think about how much time a person gets to analyze the [00:04:00] data, let's say for example, and this is a, this is actually a number that is, has been verified with numerous customers and with, the analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester and TDWI is that it takes as much as 70% or more of the actual workload and investment to go from data to analytics. That's not, so that means the analytics is just 30% or less of the time. So if we think about how much each question costs. You have to add in all of that cost that even deliver up the analytical or, or deliver up the, the data in a way that it can be analyzed. [00:04:45] So BDCs goal is to shrink that time of preparation and actual delivery of data for the analyst purpose or for the AI purpose, or for any application purpose. Shrink it as much as possible so that, the questions that are asked are cheaper, and essentially we can ask more questions. We don't have to continue to reformat the data, deliver the data in a new way to get to the final answers that we're trying to seek. [00:05:20] So I would say savings and costs. Savings and money. More data, more, more analysis time. That's the why for BDC. [00:05:31] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah, it totally makes sense. I think one of the things that while you're talking about this that stuck out for me was, we always talk about time value, right? And, especially when it comes to analytics, It's such a critical part of any organization's path forward and the numbers that you're just sharing from Gartner and other resources, [00:05:51] where if the majority of the time is gone into the data collection, the data refinement, all that, there's no time left or a very minimal time for your analytics part, which makes it really difficult for organizations to make quick decisions. So I think what I'm hearing from you, the why: the time value becomes very important in this case. [00:06:13] Shawn Brown: Correct. Absolutely. [00:06:16] Mustansir Saifuddin: That's good because that kind of takes me into this conversation, like, Hey, benefits. When you have that, why understood, what are some of the benefits that BDC will provide to SAP customers who want to go on the journey? Because benefits is really the reason why it will make sense for them to move forward. [00:06:33] Shawn Brown: For sure, for sure. And this is the one that's always interesting for organizations because they're focused so much on the actual preparation of the data that oftentimes the benefits that they can glean from all of that effort are, are fleeting, so they look at the, the overall effort and they go, oh yeah, there's, there's a lot here that is really based on, on how much it took to get here. [00:07:01] And the faster we can deliver the capabilities for analysis purposes for any AI purposes, the faster we can make decisions. The faster we can adjust based on those decisions. And so when you think about the speed at which organizations operate, to be able to answer those questions faster is probably the number one benefit that you can get. [00:07:27] And then you also get into accuracy. What, what questions are we asking? And if we don't have to go through this rigorous effort of moving data from all of these source systems and joining it all back together, and then building all that business context. Data integrity, is that a, a concern? It is for most organizations, they're concerned about what this looks like at its end state. [00:07:57] And the other thing that still [00:08:00] exists in the world of business, especially in the analytics space, is the typical spread marked problem. Where people just take the data that they're looking for, they extract it out of whatever solution it's been delivered to them. Maybe it's cheap cloud storage on flat files, or maybe it's been all dumped into an ODS, an operational data store, and then they're accessing the data as they like. [00:08:26] If they don't understand the details of the data and the relationships that occur with the data, and they don't have the original business context that the data came from in its source system, then if they do extract it to whatever they like, then somebody can walk into a meeting with one version of the truth and another can walk in with another version of the truth. [00:08:48] They all can believe that they're accurate. They all can argue over why their version of truth is correct and the others is not. So the confidence in the data is the other thing. We take away a lot of those concerns, because when you have it coming from those source systems and the preparation of that data has been provided in this case by SAP, for SAP systems, at a minimum, you're going to have much more confidence that the data [00:09:17] is delivered to you in a way that respects all of the integrity that it came from. That the accuracy of the data is as accurate as it was entered into the business application upon which it was the source. So the speed of delivery, the accuracy of the data. These are, these are major advantages that you get with regards to using BDC versus [00:09:43] the, the older school, I'll call it older school 'cause I'm an old guy. The old days of Bill Inman and star schemas and relational database systems that we created. These massive data warehouses. It's an older school thought, and it was one that was born outta this idea that we had to get the data from those source systems because we couldn't query the source systems at runtime. [00:10:06] All those things contribute to, to today where we're curating the data for you. It's been curated by SAP from all SAP systems, so if you have any questions about the quality of the data, in that case, you then you should have questions about the quality of your data in its source. there's a bigger issue, so speed of delivery, accuracy of data. [00:10:32] Those are probably my, my two top benefits that customers are going to get out of this. [00:10:38] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. That makes total sense. I think one of the things that really stuck out for me was the whole concept of end-to-end governance . Does BDC do a better job? And how, is that integrated to this whole BDC realm of the different pieces that makes up BDC? How is data governance and security working within those parameters? [00:11:03] Shawn Brown: Yeah. So in BDC, you're getting role level security on all the data. At that point then you're asking questions like, where do I, how do my users access the data? What are they allowed to see? What are they not allowed to see? All those capabilities can be integrated into BDC. You, you can deliver all of those capabilities directly within BDC. [00:11:27] You start off by setting up some broader, who's the, who's the group? What systems are they accessing? So if I'm in finance and I'm looking at finance data, I probably have access to let's say S/4HANA as the backend system that is storing all this data. All the users within the finance team that have access to S/4HANA can have access to that space of data. [00:11:55] And I use that word space because this is a concept that, again, there's nothing [00:12:00] new. We've invited these concepts into our thinking a while ago, and now it's just another generation of what we're doing here. So that idea of a space is I can include the data that is necessary for a line of business hr, finance, supply chain, and that's what they can see. [00:12:20] And if I need to, all of the rest of the data is accessible through BDC. It's just a question of whether I want to provide the rights to access those other data sets to another line of business, for example. So if I said I wanted to join let's say expense information that's in Concur with employee information, that's in success factors, I can easily join those data sets [00:12:48] bring in forward, from one space to another. And decide at a row level and column level, what individual data set I need to join across groups or individuals, if you will. [00:13:06] Mustansir Saifuddin: I think that's super good because that's where a lot of the questions come in. You know, every time you do move your data from one environment to another environment that you need to have your own new set of governance and security and, it can be role level security or whatever else you wanna do, [00:13:21] you have to kind of redefine that. It seems like it's all built into the BDC portfolio. You're leveraging your source system objects and then be able to apply the same rules that you may have built in. [00:13:37] Shawn Brown: Yeah, the, the analogy I always liked was it's kind of like, and I don't know if they're really like this. I mean, maybe there are not. I just remember old movies that you'd have these Japanese styled homes and they were like, the walls that were almost paper thin, that you could, you almost felt like you could just push your hand right through the wall and just grab something that was in the other room. [00:13:57] I liken it a bit like that in terms of spaces. The spaces are separated in that way with a, a level of access that is very simple to provide when necessary, but distinctly in separate spaces, separate areas, so that that's the benefit. That's the simplicity of being able to access data from any LOB or any third party for that matter. [00:14:23] If you wanted to access that third party data in BDC to any other data that's in BDC as well, whether it's finance, hr, supply chain, whatever it may be, warehouse inventory, whatever it may be. [00:14:38] Mustansir Saifuddin: Totally. Now, since we talked about the benefits, let's look into the details. Like what steps are involved if someone wants to take on this journey and move to SAP BDC? [00:14:53] Shawn Brown: Much of that begins with where are they right now? Let's take a few different scenarios? if a customer is, let's say, already using some SAP solutions, I would say, let's go with the most rudimentary that has been around for a while now for SAP. Let's talk about, they're using HANA Enterprise. [00:15:09] They've, they've been taking a lot of data from their SAP systems and dropping it into HANA Enterprise on-prem. This is a natural next step to that on-premise approach where you said, all right, I, I don't necessarily wanna be in the position of housing systems like this myself and my own data centers. [00:15:28] I want to put them into the cloud. This is a simple transition , to take the data from a HANA Enterprise, drop it into BDC and start using that data in essentially what would be a component of BDC, Datasphere. But it's built on HANA Cloud. And HANA Cloud is built on the same technology that HANA Enterprise is built on that in terms of its capabilities, what it can do. [00:15:52] It's a natural transition for that case if you're talking about a customer that's already using let's say another old product from [00:16:00] SAP, BW. Right. BW has been a really challenging one for a lot of organizations because they've had such value and such benefit by using BW to access data in SAP with those BW extractors. [00:16:14] And in many cases, they've built a lot of and invested a lot in BW in the framework itself. Creating their own objects, creating their own cubes, creating asos, DSOs and so forth, depending on what versions of BW you're on. Not necessarily wanting to just abandon that investment. There's another great example of is, once you're, once you're at least BW 7.5 and above, we make it very simple for you to go ahead and take all of that in BW investment and move it directly into BDC in its format, in its same format as a BW environment. [00:16:54] BW for HANA, same thing, move it right into BDC, it would be in a cloud-based environment that way as well. And essentially all of those connections back to the source systems still persist. When we talk about how do we take advantage of the investments you have, that's where you say, all right, well, I can access them through the BDC framework in [00:17:16] BW that is now part of BDC and use it for whatever purpose I leave it in BW in that case, or I can start taking those particular assets that I have in BW and using the data product generator that is now part of BW embedded in BDC, I can then change those assets in BW to data products. Which is the lowest level form of data that we have in BDC, and in this case, just for those that may be listening and wondering, am I copying the data? [00:17:51] Yes . And we can come to this in a minute as to why you're copying the data, but we are copying the data from its source system, and we would be copying the data from BW as well, where we wanted to make it a data product in BDC. And we can talk about why that is in a minute. 'cause it's a shift. It, it's a bit of a shift in terms of what we've talked about in the past with regards to a whole play the data where it lies, federate versus materialize [00:18:18] that data in, what was Datasphere, which is now part of BDC. That idea of moving those assets from BW into BDC as data products, over time allows us to decommission those, those deployments of BW. So that's the benefit is, we now have a path for BW customers to migrate to BDC, [00:18:45] not give up those assets that they've created and leveraged for so many years in BDC, and then over time decommission BW altogether. Or, if you're really interested and you really like using BW, keep it. That's the other benefit of moving a BW 7.5 environment to BDC is, you're gonna get three more years of mainstream maintenance. [00:19:09] And for example, for BW/4HANA, we're pushing that end of life date all the way out to 2040. That's a long time that you can hold onto that BW environment if that's what you choose to do. But the benefit of BDC is that we're going to give you the mechanism to actually migrate it over and then as your backend systems, particularly like S4 changes, [00:19:31] you're gonna need to change a lot of what you're doing from a BW extraction anyway. Don't do it in BW anymore. Do it in BDC. Now, those are some of the SAP scenarios, but some of the ones that I get as well are, we already have a strategy with our SAP data. We're pulling it into S3 buckets. [00:19:55] Azure Data Factory, Snowflake , all of these third [00:20:00] party extraction destinations and why would I go ahead and use BDC in that case? And the reality is, you have to ask yourself this question where we started in the first place. How much time and energy are you spending going from data all the way around that wheel to analytics? [00:20:20] If you're like the typical organization and it's north of 70%, 80%, 90% as a CIO, I heard last week talking about this, 90% of their time is spent just moving data to get it prepared for analysis. How much do you want to continue to do that? And nobody likes to be looked at as a cost center. Everybody likes to be seen as somebody that is providing value to the organization. [00:20:50] If you're part of an organization and you are seen as a cost center, because the amount of energy it takes to get the data from where it sits to where it needs to be is exorbitant, nine tenths maybe of the overall cost of asking those questions. That's not a great place to be. If you can shrink that as much as possible, then you can actually live up to some of those things that everybody would like to say. [00:21:19] Like, data is the new gold, data is the new oil. The value of data is, is immeasurable. We can do so much with our business because of the data. We could be a data-driven organization. All of these things can become possible, but not so easy when nine tenths or eight tenths of the cost, it's just getting the data where it needs to be. [00:21:44] That's the big thing that needs to be focused on as it relates to some of these ideas that let's go ahead and do the, what I still call old school extract, transform, load, model, profile, catalog govern and, create all of the overhead that is necessary to actually deliver those analytics back to the organization. [00:22:07] And if, you're in a part of your organization where you think it's good enough for me to just extract all the data and drop it over here and let the business go have fun, that's another one where you're not providing additional value to the organization. [00:22:19] What the business community really wants is they want curated data that is business context aware, that is in a position to help them answer questions out of the box, push button. An actual software as a service. That's what we've got with BDC. So this idea that of you've already got a strategy in place, [00:22:44] it might be working right now because you did a ton of work to get you where you are. But here's the kicker. It's probably all going to change, maybe not next year, but maybe two years or three years, maybe the next time you do some major upgrade and we've become more efficient in terms of how we store the data in the business applications, or, [00:23:12] any of the other business applications that you use, they change their underlying architecture in how they are actually storing the data in those source systems. Guess what just changed with your data strategy? Potentially everything. And we have customers that this has happened to them. Where I've walked into a huge SAP customer and I had a conversation with him where I said, we're gonna go ahead, and this is before we had two separate entities of BDC and BTP. And I walked into this session with the customer and said, here's what we're gonna do. [00:23:43] We're gonna go ahead and tell you everything that we can do in the space of data and analytics and everything within the platform space. And the customer said, I don't think we really need to hear about your data and analytics strategy, because we're pretty well set on that. And I said, I want to talk to you about all these things and I need to talk to you [00:24:00] about this one as well. [00:24:01] This one's not negotiable. I need whoever's responsible for data and analytics to be in the room to discuss this. And that person did arrive and that person pretty much felt like they had everything figured out. They didn't wanna, engage in the conversation at all. Pretty much arms crossed throughout most of the most of the meeting. [00:24:19] And we finally got to a point where they said, all right, I can see that there's some benefits, you know, to how this works. But I'll tell you, they were on ECC on HANA. And so fast forward six months and they're negotiating the RISE opportunity with S4/HANA in a private cloud and RISE, and they now realize that everything needs to be changed. [00:24:50] It's good that we had this conversation with them about how you can access the SAP data through, at the time, Datasphere, which is now Business Data Cloud, because they now understand that for them to be able to get access to the data in the way they want, the fastest way they want, and for the fact that we're curating all that data for them, and then providing them out of the box insights with our insight apps. [00:25:14] This is pretty much a no brainer in their part. They knew that they had to explore it, and they knew they had to explore it for the SAP centric question, but also for the non SAP centric question where they want to pull smaller data sets to non SAP capabilities because we are gonna curate those scenarios through data products that will allow them to pull that data into those non SAP scenarios. [00:25:40] So this, these are some of the big plays, we've got that existing SAP solutions, we've got that non SAP centric approach. And then, ultimately, if you haven't got to the point that you're deciding what you're going to do or you haven't don't have a very mature data strategy, maybe you're a growing company, at some point you're going to need to go ahead and start asking those data and analytics questions. [00:26:05] Just know that it's very expensive, as I've said before, to move the data from one place to another, place it there, do all of those things that we've talked about in the past, and then deliver analytics, just pull it out of the box. The last comment I'll make is "that pull it out of the box" sometimes that's not as useful as we think it is. [00:26:25] If I said, you have to dig a hole, it's 10 feet deep and you started from ground level, you have 10 feet to dig. But if I gave you something that got you 50% of the way, I dug five feet for you, I dug six feet for you, would you rather just dig five more feet or four more feet, or would you just rather start from ground level and dig 10 feet on your own? [00:26:48] That's the value that we were trying to demonstrate through BDC. [00:26:53] Mustansir Saifuddin: Good explanation. And I think it is really clear that a lot of times conversations come up about SAP customers talking about their on-prem, their legacy systems and how they will benefit from BDC, but your examples went beyond HANA Enterprise to other non SAP solutions where customers have already been on the journey and they don't see the value at least at this point. [00:27:20] But, after seeing the example you use, it's very logical for them to start thinking in those terms. Also saying, Hey, I simplify my landscape? Still get , if not same, at least, the value that whatever else that BDC brings to the table, like the whole AI capability, all of that can be leveraged by adopting this platform. On a personal note how do you stay on top of, you know, this changing technology world, and business at the same time. How you keep up with all this? [00:27:58] Shawn Brown: Yeah, as you [00:28:00] might imagine in the space of SAP, oftentimes it's hard enough just staying on top of all of the different options we have and different things that we have in terms of technology. So one of the ways that I like to keep up in, in the SAP space is called the BTP Talk podcast, which is a pretty good one. [00:28:18] It actually goes to a number of different you know, platform and data analytics related scenarios. Data skeptics is another pretty good podcast that I get a kick out of. There's another one I'm trying to think of that I use from time to time as well. [00:28:32] Analytics Power Hour. That's it. Yeah, the Analytics Power Hour is another good one. And, I've been paying attention to Tech-Driven Business as well too, so I like this one too. But, you know, the thing that I've been finding too is that, these days, things move so quickly and we think we know where we're going and then something comes along and, and change makes us change direction again. [00:28:53] And AI has probably been the biggest driver to that. The thing that I would say that that it's probably most interesting in terms of how I've changed how I operate is I actually ask AI to provide resources for me on particular topics. For example mid early last year there was a lot of talk about vector engines and knowledge graphs. [00:29:14] And the easiest thing I found to really kind of get a little bit more, versed on the topics was AI itself. I started asking for resources and, and I'll use for example, ChatGPT in some cases I like using Grok as well. From time to time they seem to provide a little bit different types of approaches and levels of interaction. [00:29:35] I kinda like how, grok will ask me follow up questions, which is pretty neat as well. But that's a great way to learn about topics that you are wanting to become more versed in or learning where the resources are to find those topics. So those, those are some of the things that I like to use. [00:29:58] Mustansir Saifuddin: Great list of ideas to kind of keep up with the changing, I mean, just everywhere around us. taking from AI to just carries to anything else. A lot of conversations going on so many different directions. How do you even keep up with them? So I'd like your suggestions, and I know we've talked about a lot of different things today. What is the one thing or one takeaway that you want to leave our listeners with? [00:30:24] Shawn Brown: Hmm, probably in, in the audience of that are responsible for data and analytics. If you're a CDAO, or an analyst or somebody that's responsible for enterprise wide analytics: I would focus on two things because these two things are probably the most important to the people that you serve, your business community. [00:30:50] Point number one is, they want analytics quickly. They want to be able to ask questions quickly. They don't wanna wait. They don't want to say this report, these data sets that you've provided me, they look really interesting, but I'd like to add this and this and this, and when can I have that? [00:31:12] If you can't say you can have that now, then you're taking too long. The other point is. We need to stop being looked at as a cost center. We need to stop being looked at as a place that is a necessary evil. We gotta ask questions of the system. We've gotta extract data everywhere and put it in someplace that we can start answering questions or even not even doing to the extent of actually providing the analytics out of the box. [00:31:40] Instead, we're just providing data sets for people to access. We need to be able to offer real value to the business community. Those are the ones that are footing the bill. Those are the ones that are actually paying for everything. So we need to be in a position to deliver it very quickly, [00:32:00] and it needs to not be expensive, and it needs to be accurate. [00:32:06] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely [00:32:07] Shawn Brown: Those are the elements I think are the key takeaways. That's really the foundation of what we're doing with Business Data Cloud. That's the whole purpose behind it. [00:32:16] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely great advice and a great way to sum up the session. It's been a great conversation. There's so much to gain from this product and, and direction, that SAP's taking. I'd like to thank you very much for joining us today in our show, and look forward to having further detailed conversation with you. [00:32:36] Shawn Brown: Thanks, I appreciate your time as well. [00:32:39] Mustansir Saifuddin: Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business, brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. We have covered the critical why behind BDC, the immense time and cost savings it promises, and the tangible benefits like enhanced speed and accuracy for SAP customers. Sean's key takeaway? Focus on delivering analytics quickly to your business community and strive to offer real accurate value moving away from being seen as just a cost center. [00:33:15] . We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or X. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

Ever wonder how to truly get business and IT on the same page, moving beyond strategy documents to real project success? In this latest episode, Anuya Sheorey of Nikola Automotive joins Mustansir Saifuddin to dive into how to lead teams across diverse landscapes, focusing on how to bridge that critical gap between high-level goals and daily execution. Anuya shares firsthand experiences and the framework used to align everyone from the C-suite to the front lines. It's more about the people than the technology. Anuya Sheorey is the Head of Program Strategy & Enterprise Solutions at Nikola where she leads high performing teams to enable rapid scale-up through ongoing delivery of critical capabilities across manufacturing, operations, finance, sales and service. As a strategic technology leader, she is passionate about connecting business strategy with technology execution and has a proven track record in orchestrating enterprise-wide digital transformations in diverse industries such as insurance, transportation, electronics and utilities to drive growth and operational excellence. Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Anuya Sheorey Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners Twitter:  @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript: [00:00:00] Mustansir Saifuddin: Welcome to Tech Driven Business, brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. I'm honored to have Anuya Sheorey of Nikola Automotive, join me to discuss how she leads teams across diverse landscapes, focusing on how to bridge that critical gap between high level goals and daily execution. Listen in as Anuya shares a framework she uses to align everyone from the C-Suite to the front lines. [00:00:31] Welcome to Tech Business. How are you? [00:00:34] Anuya Sheorey: I am doing great, Mustansir. Very good to see you. [00:00:37] Mustansir Saifuddin: Thank you. I'm so excited to have you on our show . We'll be focusing on or talking about leading teams and working across business and IT landscapes, and I know that's your sweet spot. That's your area of expertise and how this all relates to a project success. [00:00:56] I would like to discuss your real life examples. It would be good to, to get some insights into that. [00:01:02] Anuya Sheorey: Absolutely glad to be here and talk with you about my experiences. Will be wonderful. Thanks. [00:01:08] Mustansir Saifuddin: Alright, I think one of the things that I always like to, to start with is your experiences. Based on your experience. You've seen a lot it can be very challenging to get business and IT folks on the same page. Right. Especially your C-level strategy team how you align them with the folks who are actually doing the work. [00:01:32] What are some of the ways you have been able to break through those silos and bring those projects to fruition? [00:01:39] Anuya Sheorey: Yeah, so as a company, and when we were smaller, Nikola was smaller. We were very agile and nimble, right? It was very easy for us to just have a strategy in place and make sure that those strategies are executed. As we started down the path of scaling rapidly it was important for us to make sure that we maintain that nimbleness, but at the same time, we wanted to make sure that we were able to bridge that gap between strategy and execution that you just spoke about. [00:02:08] Right? How do we make sure that there is end-to-end ownership and improved line of sight? For the enterprise goals, right? The project was successful, but how do we make sure that it's, moving the needle in terms of what the organization is trying to achieve? You know, do we have buyin from cross-functional teams? [00:02:26] Are they prioritizing the work? All of them working in the same direction and drawing in the same direction, if you will. And so the other thing to that to add is also are we focusing on the outcomes as opposed to individual tasks? Oftentimes, teams get so focused on individual tasks and individual KPIs. [00:02:48] So just to give you a soccer analogy, for example, are we measuring how many times the ball was passed or are we measuring how many goals were made? You know, so all of that has to come together very nicely as well. And so to help with solving some of these challenges, we decided to shift our operating model [00:03:09] from a project to a product centric framework. Now, this is used often in software product companies, right? But how do we use that kind of a framework in a company like Nikola was the challenge that we kind of were working through. And so we created these self-organizing cross-functional teams. That were perpetual, constantly working on business outcomes and continuous improvements. [00:03:34] And so the way we define these product teams were in terms of value streams. Now, some of your listeners may be familiar with this value stream, kind of a framework which is used in manufacturing and Lean Sigma kind of a model. And the way we define value streams for the purpose of our product stream was a sequence of activities [00:03:56] that were, that are needed to be taken to respond to a customer [00:04:00] need or to deliver value to the customer. And so in our case, we defined three distinct journeys. We defined a truck journey, a customer journey, and an energy journey because Nikola is a truck manufacturing company and also we dispense hydrogen. [00:04:17] We are an energy company as well. If you look at the truck journey, what are some of the operational processes needed to support manufacturing a truck? So right from designing a truck to when it rolls off the factory floor, that's the truck journey. Similarly we identified right from the initial contact to the customer to when we service the customer, [00:04:39] that's the customer journey. And similarly for hydrogen dispensing capabilities, we identified the energy journey. So we created 11 to 12, I am gonna say different product value stream kind of teams that spanned across the enterprise. And we had an owner from the business. It was staffed with SMEs who were actually cross-functional. [00:05:01] So it was not bound by organizational structure or divisions within the company, but it was defined by the value stream really, and of course IT as well. Then this team was responsible for maintaining a backlog of items, and improvements that they worked on, whether it was training needed, whether it's a enhancement from an IT perspective needed or just ways of working that needed to be improved to continue to work on the improvements in value stream. [00:05:30] So that was kind of the framework that we used. To bridge that gap between strategy and execution and the role that the governance. So we had a governance committee that worked along with these different value stream enterprise wide. They were responsible for communicating the strategy. Where do we want to see the organization go? [00:05:51] And these product value streams then decided. How do these, their value streams contribute towards that enterprise goal? So that's kind of the bridge between the enterprise goals and the goals of the value streams. And so the product owner then was really the voice of the customer or the subject matter expert that decided what needed to be done to achieve those metrics. [00:06:13] And then the IT team took that on and decided how to deliver. [00:06:19] Mustansir Saifuddin: I think you mentioned a couple of very good points. You know, focus on teams. And, and you know, based on some of the experiences I've had I know cross-functional teams is a great way to get things done because now we are knowledge based from all the different parts of the organization. But how do you keep that balance between who makes the call and how this call is executed across the business and IT teams? [00:06:48] Because, you may have, sometimes the business may take a lot more focus, or, their focus can be a, a bit different than a technology perspective. Or IT may have a different view on that. Did you run into any of those challenges during your journey? [00:07:05] Anuya Sheorey: So I think the beauty of this whole framework was that there is no longer business and IT here, right? It's a value stream team. So it's a team that is working on challenges to make the value stream more effective. So they would map out the as is business process for that value stream and say, okay, what are some ways to improve things here? [00:07:26] Then that really drove the backlog for the team and I think the product owners were responsible, the one person responsible for prioritizing, this is the thing that we will focus on. But then what drove the constraints for how they would prioritize was the goals that came from the enterprise. [00:07:45] Right? Why should we be doing this came from the governance committee, and so that helped align the different teams as well, because oftentimes we also had initiatives that span beyond a value stream, not just one value stream. So how do you make [00:08:00] sure that you are aligning all the different value streams to work and draw in the same direction? [00:08:05] That was the goals framework that helped with that. [00:08:09] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah, absolutely. And I was about to go to that point that, you know, your value streams can crisscross, and when you have, those overlaps is where the friction comes into play, and how do you manage all those, all those challenges. Right? So, great, great answer. Kind of leads me into my next ask over here. [00:08:25] More than often you find yourself as part of their decision making process. Data and analytics is front and center of this, because that's what allows you to make those decisions based on the information you have available. What are some of the top factors that stick out for you when you look at having an SAP S/4 system and, you know, wanting to do analytics and reporting solution for your organization? [00:08:51] What is your take on it? [00:08:53] Anuya Sheorey: Yeah. At Nikola, initially our priority was just enabling the core functionality that would help with the rapid, rapid scale up and transformation of the business. So we quickly realized that if we had to grow as an organization, we needed a more robust data and analytic strategy in place as well. [00:09:10] And so while SAP was our backbone for operational data finance, manufacturing, inventory, we did have peripheral systems and sources of data as well. And I think that's what got us talking to Mustansir when we initially met, is how do we go about doing this? You were a great partner and we talked about, how have you seen this play through you know, several options we were considering at that time? [00:09:33] How do we make sure that we are able to democratize access to the data and at the same time ensure that we are not constantly having to touch it every time we change something in SAP because that's not the easiest thing to do. And so that's kind of was our thinking for deciding which solution to go forward with and what should be our strategy long term from that point on. [00:09:57] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah, I think that's a great view of that situation. 'cause , I remember when we had that discussion and I find myself a lot of times in those conversations where you have your backbone system, SAP or any other ERP systems for that matter, but you also got to have other peripheral systems from CRM to any other manufacturing system, et cetera in your landscape. [00:10:22] And the goal or the challenge usually for businesses, I'm looking at the overall organizational data and I, I want to do some analytics on top of that, not my financial system or my supply chain system alone. It's a mix of information that I'm looking at, so it feels like you are able to look at a collective data set and then make those decisions. [00:10:46] Anuya Sheorey: absolutely. [00:10:48] Mustansir Saifuddin: That makes sense and that's good because, based on your experience, I know you've worked in a variety of industries and technologies, How have you been successful leveraging third party resources to support your teams? What is the formula that you use? [00:11:04] Anuya Sheorey: Yeah, unfortunately it's not a formula, but it's more a partnership. I've worked in diverse industries. Insurance, transportation, electronics, utilities. One of the key differentiating factors for extended partner relationships that have worked for me in the past have been the ones where companies have stepped up to co-create the innovative solutions with us. [00:11:25] They are able to bring in best practices to the table, guide discussions, make themselves trusted advisors in the process. These are the companies that have embodied, true partnerships for us, and we've built long-term relationships with some of these companies. [00:11:42] Mustansir Saifuddin: I think that's super interesting. You use the word partnership more often it gets overlooked when you are working with customers, a lot of times the conversation comes up as, the SI is doing the implementation or the or an outside third party is being brought in to help us with this [00:12:00] technology transformation. [00:12:01] But the concept of partnership kind of sets aside that whole idea of a third party. Working as a team trying to create something. And you saw that partnership successful based on your past experiences? [00:12:15] Anuya Sheorey: Yes, and I have seen that is the only kind of relationships that have been successful because oftentimes if you think about companies as SIs that there is a lot of things that get lost in the translation. There is handoff and a lot of communication challenges that come to it. [00:12:33] Whereas if they are involved from the beginning, they are true partners in the success of the initiative that makes it a successful partnership and a program, and it's a win-win for both really. [00:12:44] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. I think the the end of the day is it's not about the technology, it's about the actual business benefit of it. And the way you, you described , the relationship I think is what really comes out , as a finished product at the end of the day. Right. From the business perspective. [00:13:03] So, so I know we've been talking about technology and business and all that. We all know we are living in the, this AI world. Everything is moving super fast. The world is changing by day by hour. How do you stay on top of everything that's going on? [00:13:22] Anuya Sheorey: I love doing it, that's why. So I am an avid learner. I am a continuous learner and a reader as well, so I tend to take up assignments that I know nothing about with the objective of learning, because that drives me. Personally I'm always on the lookout for classes reading, whether it's books or podcasts or blog posts newsletters of some leaders, thought leaders that I follow. [00:13:46] And so that's kind of what I do for my teams. I have followed a similar thing that I've been asking them questions. What did you learn today? Do that even at home where we have that conversation. Dinner table, what did you learn today? Whether it's from your day-to-day work or whether you read something interesting. [00:14:02] And I think that's kind of what helps me stay up to date as well. [00:14:08] Mustansir Saifuddin: Do you think that that that learning is allowing you to get to your next level faster than you anticipated? Or have you seen that, that drive in learning helping you move forward? [00:14:21] Anuya Sheorey: I would link, I would like to think so. But I think it also helps me do a better job at whatever role that I'm operating in or whatever task that I'm undertaking as well, because I have heard perspectives of other people who've gone through similar things, learn from their lessons. I have a wider pool of mentors to draw from, from that perspective as well. [00:14:43] Mustansir Saifuddin: It always helps to have a mentor, right? So that's, that's one thing that you can always appreciate when you're going through your journey. I know we talked about a lot of different things today. As we coming to the end of our session, I, I'd like to have one key takeaway that you want to leave our listeners with today. [00:15:00] Anuya Sheorey: Yeah, so as we think about how to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, which has kind of been the theme of this podcast here. The way I look at it is any transformation effort at the end of the day, is all about people. You need inputs from them , they are closest to the work being performed. [00:15:17] You need collaboration and buy-in cross-functionally across the organization for people who are going to execute on some of those strategies. And you need them motivated and ready to embrace the change that goes along with any transformation effort. As we saw in the example of the product framework of what that did, was it empowered people to take on some of the work to take on some of those challenges, and it had a two-pronged benefit as well. [00:15:43] They were the ones identifying the changes that were needed. And also since they were involved in the decision making process, it's kind of the IKEA effect, right? People, if they're involved in making a product, they have pride in it and that is easier buy-in from those people as well. And [00:16:00] so any transformation is less about technology. [00:16:02] It's more about people. [00:16:06] Mustansir Saifuddin: I think I, I don't often hear this thing and this idea about it. and, and everybody's excited about the transformation and the technology, and of course it's exciting but we tend to leave the people part out [00:16:21] Anuya Sheorey: Mm-hmm. [00:16:21] Mustansir Saifuddin: or, or minimize that. But I think what I'm hearing from you is you keep the people upfront and center, then everything around it kind of blends in or kind of smoothly moves forward. [00:16:35] Anuya Sheorey: Absolutely. [00:16:37] Mustansir Saifuddin: Well thank you so much for joining me today. I would love to continue the conversation, but we gotta come to our end. So thank you so much. [00:16:44] Anuya Sheorey: Thank you, Mustansir. Glad to be here. [00:16:46] Mustansir Saifuddin: Thank you for listening to Tech Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Breaking silos and bridging strategy and execution can be challenging for any organization. A new US key takeaway. Any transformation is less about technology and is more about people. We would love to hear from you. [00:17:10] Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or X. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this latest episode, Geoff Scott, of ASUG, rejoins Mustansir Saifuddin to discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of AI within the SAP ecosystem, specifically focusing on the impact of partnerships like SAP and Microsoft's collaboration on Copilot and Joule. Listen in as we explore how these advancements will shape enterprise operations in 2025 and beyond, and why you can't afford to ignore this technological shift.to discuss what is required for businesses to be successful with Gen AI as they prepare for the future.  Geoff Scott, is CEO and Chief Community Officer of ASUG, believes that the connections ASUG makes for our members have the potential to become career-defining relationships that inspire innovation and success for their organizations. His forward-thinking leadership prioritizes helping our members make the most of their investment in SAP technologies. To that end, Geoff works closely with customers, members, the SAP Executive Board, and the extensive partner ecosystem to amplify the voice of the SAP customer.   Past positions include CIO for TOMS Shoes, where he led the implementation of SAP: CIO at JBS; and senior leadership positions at Ford Motor Company. Before becoming CEO, Geoff was an ASUG member and served on the board. Geoff has served on several philanthropic boards and is the founding member of the Denver CIO Executive Council.  Connect with Us: LinkedIn Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  X:  @gscott16 @MmsaifuddinYouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript: [00:00:00] Mustansir Saifuddin: Welcome to Tech Driven Business, brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. I'm honored to have Jeff Scott, CEO of as a, rejoin me to discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of AI within the SAP ecosystem, specifically focusing on the impact of partnerships like SAP and Microsoft's collaboration on copilot and Joule. [00:00:26] Mustansir Saifuddin: Listen in as we explore how these advancements will shape enterprise operations in 2025 and beyond, and why you can't afford to ignore this technological shift. [00:00:39] Mustansir Saifuddin: Thanks for coming back on our podcast. Geoff, it was really nice to have you back. You remember, you know you came on last year and we dove into this whole [00:00:48] Geoff Scott: Oh. [00:00:49] Mustansir Saifuddin: gen AI topic. Everybody remembers that, you know, it was a very hot topic last year and, you know, everybody was going in that direction. Now, fast forwarding everything to this year and say, Hey, what is going on? And this year, SAP has had some major announcements, as we all know about the partnerships that we leverage the power of AI within the SAP ecosystem. And what I see with the majority of SAP clients using Microsoft in the enterprises. There is a lot of opportunity in SAP and Microsoft , you know, the whole partnership, especially around copilot and SAP Joule. I believe it'll make a big impact. [00:01:30] Geoff Scott: I'm surprised you have me back. I was very nervous. It's a year later. I was like, okay, this is never gonna happen again. I, I disinvited myself from future podcasts. [00:01:39] Mustansir Saifuddin: Well, I have you back [00:01:42] Mustansir Saifuddin: on. [00:01:43] Mustansir Saifuddin: and I am telling you that it is more exciting than what we were talking about last year, and I think this is what I want to get some thoughts on, Hey, what's going on? What's your take on how these partnerships are coming together and what are we going to see in 2025? [00:02:01] Geoff Scott: Well, the good news is that what we see in 2025 is no apparent slowdown in any of this technology. You know, but what's interesting is we, in the SAP space, [00:02:13] Geoff Scott: are not necessarily meeting that challenge head on, and we probably are not moving as quickly as we should to capture the amount of opportunity that's out there. I, I think AI is real. It's gonna continue to evolve at a furious pace, and that necessitates that we as technology practitioners determine how we best leverage that technology. [00:02:36] Geoff Scott: You, you talked about Microsoft Copilot, Joule, right? I mean AWS. Bedrock , Google Gemini, you know, now we've got, other LLMs popping out all over the place. Right. , deep seek . Which just popped up very quickly. So there's just, a tremendous amount of movement here and it's really hard [00:02:57] Geoff Scott: to stay abreast of it. And I think the opportunity to jump in and start leveraging this is mission critical and what I think it really necessitates, and you talked about some announcements from SAP that I think double or triple down on this notion that AI is here, so if you really want to take your SAP data and make it AI enabled using Joule or using any other series of tools, [00:03:24] Geoff Scott: it's gonna necessitate that we as technology practitioners start to do some fairly radical things with our data. Number one is we start to de-customize everywhere we can and move the responsibility for code back to SAP so that they are responsible for figuring out how to make the AI work, not us. [00:03:42] Geoff Scott: So [00:03:42] Geoff Scott: , [00:03:42] Geoff Scott: how [00:03:42] Geoff Scott: do we over time de-customize and how do we over time think about the necessity of adopting SaaS based solutions such as SAP's Public Cloud? Many of our of our community members are implementing private cloud right [00:04:00] now through Rise which is great, but ultimately if we recreate all those customizations downstream, then we have to figure out how to make them AI enabled, and I think that's where we're gonna find ourselves under continuing amounts of stress as the business innovates faster and faster. [00:04:17] Geoff Scott: We typically in the SAP ecosystem, think about our innovations on a stair step model. And what I mean by that is we do an upgrade, we sit on that upgrade for a couple of years, as long as we possibly can. You know, and then we do an upgrade again. And the challenge I think that's gonna present is that there's so much innovation happening and, all these things are moving at such a speed that if we're not continuously innovating, [00:04:39] Geoff Scott: we are gonna find ourselves further and further behind. I, I'd like to see our SAP data be the sole source of truth inside our enterprises and an innovation gold mine. [00:04:49] Geoff Scott: And to do that, I think we have to de-customize. I think we have to be able to, innovate faster. I think we have to be able to look at this data, do a lot more work around archiving and getting the old stuff, swept up and moved out. Master data is gonna become a major, major opportunity for all of us. [00:05:05] Geoff Scott: And if we do all those things really, really well. We will have a fighting chance at making our enterprises very savvy. And on top of the latest trends versus trying to perpetually catch up. [00:05:16] Mustansir Saifuddin: It's a race, the way I look at it, and I think , you summed it up very well, and I think that leads me to my question into this whole topic of collaboration. Let's take that right now. What would you tell your SAP users about the power of Microsoft and SAP's collaboration? [00:05:33] Mustansir Saifuddin: How will it positively impact their day-to-day operations? Let's start with that. [00:05:38] Geoff Scott: Well, I, I think you set this up really well. We, we know from an ASUG research perspective that most SAP customers are also Microsoft customers. And that partnership has gone back almost as long as SAP and Microsoft have been in business. You know, there's some pictures I've seen of Bill Gates and Hasso Plattner, the two founders of both organizations working together early on. [00:06:04] Geoff Scott: So this is a partnership that goes back a long, long time and it's a tremendously powerful partnership. And it indicates to me that these are organizations that work very well together, very closely together and collaborate. I mean, almost everyone I know who works in SAP also uses Excel spreadsheets, also uses PowerPoint slides, [00:06:23] Geoff Scott: also creates Word documents. I do these almost every single day. It makes perfect sense to me that a tool such as Microsoft Copilot and SAP's Joule would be working in harmony together. And I think we're seeing some interesting innovation from both organizations where they're able to demonstrate that. [00:06:39] Geoff Scott: I saw some really cool, rag based technologies, a few weeks ago where a copilot can reach out and grab some data from SAP and bring it back. Likewise Joule is being able to show some similar capabilities. For most customers, as much as we'd like to have one AI tool, I just don't think that that's going to be the way this works. [00:06:58] Geoff Scott: I think we're gonna have multiple, which, which makes the enterprise architect's role that much more challenging because they're gonna have to figure out how to integrate these tools, when these tools are best used, how they're used, and how do we as as organizations, get value from them. [00:07:15] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. And if you take this a step further, right? The hype around Agentic AI, everybody's talking about agents. What are you seeing in the marketplace? What, what is your take? [00:07:25] Mustansir Saifuddin: How are SAP users benefitting from Agentic AI within their organizations? [00:07:31] Geoff Scott: As it relates specifically to the SAP ecosystem, my. My perception, maybe right or wrong, probably more wrong than right, is that many of them are investigating and researching. I haven't necessarily seen any specific in production, customer running, agentic AI using SAP dot dot yet. Is it coming? [00:08:00] I think it's coming. [00:08:01] Geoff Scott: Has everyone figured this out yet? No certainly SAP's talking about it. I saw some presentations from the AI team at SAP led by Philip Herzig where they're demonstrating a lot of this. And I think it's gonna be very interesting to watch how agentic, you know, agent-based AI starts to manage tasks. [00:08:19] Geoff Scott: And I'm very keen to see how this works. [00:08:24] Mustansir Saifuddin: It's still very early on in, in this space where a lot of SAP customers are thinking about using it. But [00:08:32] Mustansir Saifuddin: how [00:08:32] Mustansir Saifuddin: do we really find a use case that is really beneficial to the organization at least from a investment standpoint, the time standpoint , and the value add you get as a, as a result of this application basically. [00:08:47] Geoff Scott: And I think the, the potential challenge with agentic AI is it also has to be reasonable from a, you know, a what is this agent, what is this agent's tasks? One of the things that we all know about the SAP ecosystem is we exist here because our businesses are complicated. Someone used to say to me, if, if you didn't need to run SAP, you wouldn't. [00:09:11] Geoff Scott: Right. So you know, most of the organizations that run SAP are of a, a sufficient size and scale and complexity, whether that be that they're multiple businesses running, they have international components, the business makes a complicated product that has a lot of configuration to it, right? There's reasons why these organizations are running SAP. [00:09:32] Geoff Scott: So that kind of then begets the next point, which is, an agent based AI. It's going to have to be fairly complicated in order to handle all of those different, particulars of a business. So I, I think it's gonna be interesting to watch how organizations slice that down to make it so that they can demonstrate some success early days without making the agents so complicated that they basically can't function. [00:09:58] Geoff Scott: You know, even some of this agent AI we talk about that seems like really simple. Like, Hey, I want to go out to eat at a restaurant tonight. Have agentic AI make a reservation. When you break that down. How does it do that? what type of food do you want? [00:10:13] Geoff Scott: I don't know. Maybe Italian, maybe French, maybe American. What about what time do you want to eat? How far away do you want to go? And so much of that is, is left to our brains to just on a whim, we make these decisions. How do you have that conversation with AG Agentic AI, right? Where it says, Hey, you know, here's a reservation at Italian restaurant at six 30. [00:10:32] Geoff Scott: Nah, well, 6 45, nah. Well, what do you want? Not Italian. Well, what do you want instead? I don't know French. No. You want a burger? Nah, I don't feel like a burger tonight. I mean, oh my God. I mean, it's exhausting. [00:10:47] Mustansir Saifuddin: Let's take a step up, right? Let's, let's talk about from SAP customers, you know. Everybody's getting on this [00:10:55] Mustansir Saifuddin: What word of advice would you have for SAP customers when they get further into the journey with AI? Like, what are the things that they should be looking at? [00:11:03] Geoff Scott: First and foremost, take the time to experiment, right? I mean, if you're not using these AI tools every day start. And this has taken me a little bit of time to warm up to, I'm finding now that, I have enough, road underneath my tires that it's hard for me to do new things, [00:11:22] Geoff Scott: 'cause I'm fairly, you know, set in my ways. But if I don't, use these tools to do things, I'm just not, I'm not learning. And so I. As an example, I'm recording a podcast tomorrow with a couple of fellow ASUG board members, and last night I needed to get them some prep materials. [00:11:40] Geoff Scott: I uploaded three or four documents into Claude and I said, please look at these three documents and I need to brief the podcast participants on what they say. And it looked at all three documents and it coughed up a pretty darn good summary. [00:11:55] Geoff Scott: Perfect? No. Pretty good. Yes. Was it [00:12:00] easier that I didn't, I didn't have to go and look at each document and figure out what to say. I could take a look at its summarization and determine if that was something that I wanted, that I thought was accurate and something that I thought we could share. And the answer was it was pretty good. [00:12:15] Geoff Scott: That was a great experiment. And then I said, okay, now create the podcast questions. And it did it. Now, are we using all of them? No. Did it give me at least a starting point? A hundred percent. And by the way, for the people out there was like, oh my God. He put that into, he put that into Claude. Oh my God. What about the security things? We own a subscription to Claude. So it was in a subscription. It was, it was in our protected space. It was public information. So, you know, but you gotta think about those things, right? [00:12:42] Mustansir Saifuddin: . [00:12:42] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. And I think the one thing that you hit upon is time to value, right? When you look at these tools, these technology aspects of how it can make things faster, better . But it brings up another point, like when, when you look at these, these use cases, everything is about data. What you feeding into the model. [00:13:07] Mustansir Saifuddin: So, you know, from a data perspective, I know a lot of customers doesn't matter, SAP or other technologies, and especially in SAP you know, either struggle with clean governed data and kind of makes it very difficult. So what, what's your take on that in that space? You know, especially when they are ready to go to the AI [00:13:32] Mustansir Saifuddin: journey, but they have some work to do. [00:13:34] Geoff Scott: I think there's a tremendous amount of work to do on this, and this kind of comes back to a part of our earlier dialogue that I think that data has to be right. Right. If, if we're gonna succeed in this future AI enabled world, the data that is being accessed, from your SAP systems, whether through some sort of rag or wherever you're doing, it has to be accurate. [00:13:57] Geoff Scott: So the archiving perspective of this has to be right. And you know also what has to be right is your ability to get master data correct. So if you have the same customer in your SAP system, this is an easy example, five times. Well, you now have increased by factors, the likelihood that the answer that pops back is wrong. [00:14:18] Geoff Scott: So, you know, we've been talking about this for a long time, that your SAP data has to be accurate, has to be right, and SAP data is very accurate at the time that it was entered. I think this is one of the brilliant things about SAP. And where we as SAP, you know, professionals spend so much time is getting the data into the system correctly from the get go. [00:14:41] Geoff Scott: The problem is it doesn't age so well, right? It's not like a fine wine. It can sometimes get a little stale and old and if we're not also getting it broomed out. The challenge we run into is it could be part of a , hallucination that we're not aware of. And if all of a sudden people are looking at this data and making broader based decisions on it, and the decision processes was flawed and the data's flawed, we could be making a lot of really bad decisions. [00:15:12] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah, absolutely. Data and analytics is very near and dear to me. So I, I know that whole conversation about getting The data clean, having that value around data, right. Which drives a lot of those those results out of the tools that we [00:15:28] Mustansir Saifuddin: want to apply. Especially. [00:15:30] Geoff Scott: It's all gonna come down to data at the end of the day, right? The data wins and the accuracy of the data wins. And the more that we're gonna use these tools to summarize and roll up, the higher the risk that that summary is inaccurate because the data underneath it isn't right. [00:15:49] Geoff Scott: We had this conversation in an ASUG executive exchange forum last week. And I think most people are starting to recognize that , if you have been [00:16:00] deferring your archiving routines, now might be a good time to get some of that back under control. [00:16:07] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah, [00:16:08] Geoff Scott: Most of the models right now, the L lms right, are based on data that doesn't, that the, you know books, fueling [00:16:15] Geoff Scott: research reports, fueling these LLMs that that data has been around for a long time and is, and has stood the test of time. Most of our SAP data, you know, has to be thought of through a very specific lens. But I, I think it's critical, a hundred percent critical. [00:16:33] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah. So let, so let's take it down a, a notch, right? From an ASUG perspective, how have you seen ASUG members approaching realtime data analytics moving to the cloud? I know ASUG does a lot of research on this. What have you seen? What, what do you see in this year? [00:16:49] Geoff Scott: So I think, you know, almost everyone is having cloud conversations, which is the beginning of this, because I don't think you can innovate at scale if you're not thinking about moving into the cloud. You know, the other thing is, is that most of these solutions, if you think about the innovation curve, mostly solutions are gonna appear first in the latest additions of your software. [00:17:08] Geoff Scott: So if you can't start innovating at a faster and faster cycle, move out of the stair step you and I discussed earlier, moving to a constant innovation framework, you're gonna find yourself further and further behind because if you want to take advantage of innovation at scale at the time it's released or near to the time it's released you need to be on the latest versions of software. [00:17:27] Geoff Scott: The hard reality of most of our ecosystem is we are not. And if we are not, that's where this stuff is gonna appear first. Will it make it down to other versions of the software? Yes. Is it gonna be on SAP's first order priority to do that? No. They're gonna want to make sure where they get it out [00:17:44] Geoff Scott: to market fast and they're gonna look at their latest versions of the software to do that, where they're the most comfortable. You know, there's this question, why can't I run AI in my on-prem data center? Well, you could, but you're gonna have to do all of that lift by yourself. And that becomes a very costly exercise that unless you're the bigs of the bigs, is probably outside of your budget to do that. [00:18:08] Geoff Scott: So if you want to do this with some degree of economy, you have to be in the cloud, you have to de-customize. You have to think about your SAP implementation as a SaaS service, push accountability and responsibility for code and business process back to SAP, right? I mean, I, I think that, you know, what has AI told me, loud and clear at a volume level of 11? [00:18:30] Geoff Scott: We as SAP customers now more than ever, need to stop customizing and moving responsibility for code back to SAP, 'cause if we don't, we are never gonna be able to keep up. .In, in addition to that, that many of us over these years have outsourced our application maintenance services. We rely on consultants to do most of the work we need done, right, so we're not even in control of the productive resources necessary to make this stuff a reality. [00:19:05] Geoff Scott: We are project managers. We are business analysts, right? We don't necessarily know how to write code to do this, and if we're gonna have to rely on outside resources every time we make one of these moves, that's gonna be super costly and super slow. [00:19:22] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah. I hear you. [00:19:23] Mustansir Saifuddin: and I know the ASUG community hears that [00:19:26] Geoff Scott: But we have a lot in our ASUG community, right, who have been around for a long time that says, well, you know, my job is an ABAP programmer. What do you want me to do next? Or I'm a basis person and I don't like this. And I'm like, you are some of the people that are in , the best position to retool and relearn. [00:19:42] Geoff Scott: We're all gonna have to relearn. And, you know, is your business's, joy in life to have you produce more ABAP code or figure out how to get that ABAP code out, move it to SAP and say, congratulations, SAP, you're now responsible for this. Here's what I need this business process to do. Right. [00:20:00] And using your, using ASUG to help you influence that business process, instead of you saying, well, I'm gonna just take it and twist it to my own needs. [00:20:08] Geoff Scott: Even with me saying that, I still think that there's a lot of distance that SAP has to travel, by the way, I don't think they have this figured out. I don't think that they'll look at this and they go, yep, we got this. You just, you know, trust us. No, I think in certain areas they have this well done. [00:20:23] Geoff Scott: In other areas they do not. So what's the best thing we can do? Help them get there faster, influence them, participate in your ASUG chapter meetings, have a voice, talk about where you're hitting challenges. How do we need SAP to make better business processes? How are we gonna use the, you know, the tools that they have, like Lean IX and Signavio to help drive some of this? [00:20:48] Geoff Scott: That's to me where this is gonna need to happen. I would much prefer to have SAP struggle to keep up with business process than have. 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 customers do it on their own. It doesn't scale. [00:21:03] Mustansir Saifuddin: No, it doesn't. And I think, and that's a fair point, right? And this is where the value of ASUG comes in. And, and I mean the journey is long, but the, the path is there for us to follow. [00:21:14] Geoff Scott: I, I, yeah. [00:21:14] Mustansir Saifuddin: Right. And that's the, [00:21:15] Geoff Scott: I think the journey is long and the journey is more important than ever. It's time to get off the couch and go out and start walking, and then when you can walk, you can run, then, you know, then you can sprint. And I think , that's kind of the, the message that we're giving as ASUG is this isn't gonna slow down for you, you're gonna have to catch up to it. [00:21:32] Mustansir Saifuddin: No, I think, and that's the message. A lot of people are hearing loud and clear now, especially 2025 has brought in that that whole concept of either you go along with it or you're gonna be left behind. [00:21:44] Geoff Scott: Or, or, or at some point you're going to have to catch up, and the question is, is how much lifting are you gonna have to do to get there? I, again, I don't think this is easy. I, I don't think that there's , a magic pill we can swallow, you know, that that cleans us all up and we're all perfect. [00:22:01] Mustansir Saifuddin: No. No, for sure. And I think I, I know we talked about a lot of things today and we can keep on talking and the journey keeps on you know, is it's a [00:22:11] Geoff Scott: It's journey. [00:22:11] Mustansir Saifuddin: it's, [00:22:12] Geoff Scott: Yeah. [00:22:12] Mustansir Saifuddin: ending, but what, what is the one key takeaway that you want to leave with the listeners [00:22:18] Geoff Scott: One key takeaway [00:22:18] Mustansir Saifuddin: as we wrap up? [00:22:19] Geoff Scott: it. [00:22:20] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yep. [00:22:21] Geoff Scott: Spend time experimenting and learning this stuff. Get comfortable being uncomfortable with these tools. Use them. Think about how your business can benefit from them. Spend some time, you know, in BTP learning how to access these LLMs through your BTP interface. If you're having a challenge getting a business case written to move from your ECC environment to S 4. [00:22:46] Geoff Scott: Talk to us at ASUG, we will help you with that. Go to a chapter meeting and ask others how they made that investment work. Spend some time, you know, if you don't have a, a license for copilot where you and I started this afternoon, ask your IT counterparts to have access to copilot, use it. [00:23:04] Ask it questions, engage in iterative rep iterative prompts. These are things I think the, the faster we get comfortable with these technologies, the better off we as technologists will have light bulbs go off and say, oh, I, now I get how I can really put agent AI to work. Right. And I'm not gonna listen to just, you know, Microsoft, you know, talk about it or SAP talk about it. [00:23:24] Geoff Scott: I actually have some ideas. And these are good ideas and I'm excited, I'm excited to share 'em. Get out of the stands and on the field. [00:23:32] Mustansir Saifuddin: And who better do it? I mean, I think I, I love , your closing, right? Especially when you are looking at your own business, your own technology, and your way of doing things. Who better can come up with , a solution , or see the applications of these co-pilot Gemini, no matter what I mean, type of tools you can use. [00:23:51] Mustansir Saifuddin: But these are , the ways you can innovate, right by looking at the processes. [00:23:56] Geoff Scott: Yes. Someone told me that they set up two agentic AI bots [00:24:00] and the two of them constructed a podcast and it was pretty good. So withstand zero. I'm worried that next time you and I meet, it's not gonna be you or I, it's gonna be our agentic AI counterparts, some version of us. [00:24:14] Mustansir Saifuddin: and yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I think it is here. It's going to be here at some point, so might as well embrace it. [00:24:22] Geoff Scott: Yeah. Absolutely. [00:24:23] Mustansir Saifuddin: Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Embracing innovation is no longer an option, but really a necessity for enterprise success. Geoff's key takeaway? Proactive experimentation with AI is crucial for SAP users to discover its business benefits. Engage with tools like copilot and Joule, participate in ASUG, and push for cloud migration to stay ahead of the rapid technological changes. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or x. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes. I.

In this latest episode, Lisa Smith joins Mustansir Saifuddin to dive into the world of SAP transformation and process improvement. Lisa shares how to leverage SAP to streamline supply chain processes, optimize business operations, and drive significant improvements. Listen in as Lisa dives into the importance of business objectives, alignment, effective change management and so much more. Lisa Gonzalez Smith is a trusted global procurement leader transforming global end-to-end supply chain processes and driving organizational change management. Lisa is a seasoned source to pay executive with over 30 years in global automotive procurement (Direct & Indirect) and a proven record of delivering SAP Ariba global programs at Ford Motor Company on budget and ahead of schedule with state of the art, cloud-based technology LinkedIn: Lisa G. Smith Innovative Solution Partners Mustansir Saifuddin X @mmsaifuddin Episode Transcript: [00:00:00] Mustansir Saifuddin: Welcome to Tech Driven Business, Lisa. How are you? [00:00:38] Lisa Smith: Doing great, Mustansir. How are you? [00:00:40] Mustansir Saifuddin: Doing wonderful. Thank you. I'm so excited to have you on our show. And today we would like to talk about SAP transformation and process improvement and what other person can talk about that? , Especially in the context of supply chain processes. [00:00:56] So I really look forward to this session with you. [00:01:00] Lisa Smith: I certainly appreciate the invitation to do it, and I'm excited to be here, and thanks for the opportunity. I enjoy being able to share some of those learnings and have these these fun discussions, so. [00:01:11] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. So let's get into it. You know we talk about companies leveraging SAP. When you talk about leveraging SAP to identify and eliminate, basically the idea is inefficiencies in the supply chain processes. How can they do that? what's your take on this? [00:01:29] Lisa Smith: Well, I think, you know, first of all, great technology can be used to really drive change around how business gets done. So defining what's important for the business to have going forward. Defining what is important and what they need then allows for SAP's technology to drive how that gets done. But with that, there's a lot of change to those processes, or if you really want to transform the business, there should be and, but with that, you need to be mindful of the [00:02:00] change impact. [00:02:00] That comes along with that. The change that impacts the people, be it internal employees, be it external with suppliers, for example, and you want to bring those folks along on that journey and get them excited about the change, right? One of the things that I find is tremendous is being able to leverage SAP's technology to streamline, commonize and simplify processes across the enterprise. [00:02:25] And it has the great. breadth and depth in order to do that. And that process capability depth and breadth allows for that to happen. And so it allows you to then ask yourself as an organization, why can't we do business, for example, the same way everywhere, unless there's a legal or regulatory or tax reason why do we have to be different? [00:02:48] How can we simplify this? How can we take some of that inefficiency out of the process? And the software can really help drive that. [00:02:56] Mustansir Saifuddin: That's excellent point. I think what I'm hearing from you is as much as you can commonize your processes and be able to keep the system as simple as possible. Allows you to leverage the, the capabilities a lot more [00:03:11] Lisa Smith: Yeah, especially with cloud technology to get the, the lifts and the upgrades and take advantage of those. Definitely. [00:03:18] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. That kind of leads me into this discussion about, you know, everybody talks about metrics when we talk about SAP driven process improvements especially, what are some of the key metrics to measure your success in those scenarios? [00:03:35] Lisa Smith: Well, I think regardless of what functional area that you're looking to improve be it in finance or procurement or supply chain you know, manufacturing, inventory, wherever, I think it's important to start with what are the objectives for the business? What is it that you're wanting to achieve and accomplish? [00:03:52] Whether it is additional incremental cost savings, whether it is operational efficiency improvement, whether it's better [00:04:00] compliance and controls or faster days to close or better forecasting lower inventory levels, whatever those metrics are, I think it's important to use the business objectives to drive that and then determine what success looks like. [00:04:17] What are those objectives? How are we going to measure those and determine those up front in your process in your, future state design? If I want to improve on time sourcing by 25%, like, let's say, or lower raw materials inventory by 10%. You know, that's a clear objective. Now, how am I going to measure that? [00:04:39] What's my format or the actual calculation tactically to measure that? And then , you can understand those. And the reason it's important to understand those up front in the process is because that helps ensure as you're designing your future state business process in the software and the software starts to be configured that you drive those outcomes based on those metrics. [00:05:03] So what are those metrics that are important to your business to achieve success and implement those very clearly with a way to measure and then use those to guide the future state process design. [00:05:20] Mustansir Saifuddin: Interesting. So it seems like you're using your business KPIs and kind of molding it into what SAP can do for you in those key metrics. [00:05:29] Lisa Smith: Right. And there's a lot of embedded , kind of inherent KPIs that are part of that process. And then, of course, with the incremental, A. I. capabilities and the analytics capabilities and so forth, you start to bring those metrics to light much much more quickly than perhaps in a, previous state, especially if that previous state was manual or very heavily reliant on Excel and things of that nature, which I'm sure there's a lot of companies that experience that. [00:05:58] Mustansir Saifuddin: No, absolutely. I think you hit up on a [00:06:00] very good point over here. I mean, analytics is one of my areas and I know that it is so important in this SAP implementations that you have a very, I mean, there's a robust set of analytics that comes to the system. But based on your business requirements and your measurement or the KPIs that you're looking at it can play a huge role in your success. [00:06:23] Lisa Smith: Yes, absolutely. It can jumpstart or serve as a catalyst for those metrics. Many of those metrics are already from a common sense point of view. There may be incremental ones that you want and the data exists to allow for those to be created. And so there's a lot of flexibility in that space. [00:06:40] The quality of built in compliance exists because it is moving processes from one step to the next and doing so with quality and embedded foolproofing mechanisms, similar to an assembly line, For example, when you're doing quality checks, as you're assembling parts on a, product, for example, you have the ability to understand the outcome. [00:07:02] The embedded process capability that exists, has a built in quality and with that the analytics that come along with it. So those analytics are being driven by quality information and quality and disciplined processes. If that makes sense. [00:07:18] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. And I think I like the comparison you gave with the assembly line. It's so true. It's everything. It flows in a, in a very. seamless manner. So it's like you don't even notice how this next process is going to take over. It's just from a business standpoint. It makes it so much easier. [00:07:35] Lisa Smith: Right? [00:07:35] Mustansir Saifuddin: For folks who are dealing with it day in day out that not only the analytics part, but, the different functions being able to communicate freely [00:07:46] Lisa Smith: Exactly. Yeah. And share the actual data, share the real time data. Allow the, source data to drive analytics, but it's a consistent set of source data. That is across the functional areas, [00:08:00] although their metrics might be different and what they derive from that data, it may be different. [00:08:04] It's based on that same quality of source information. And I think that's a really impressive capability to be able to bring to the analytics table and and bring that discipline to the analytics. [00:08:19] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. Kind of leads me into this next discussion. You know, everything needs change management. Change management is one of the big topics, right? When you are doing an SAP transformation, especially in a global organization, where you have to deal with cultures, where you're dealing with languages different way of doing things how do you go about doing it? [00:08:41] Lisa Smith: Well, my first two words are very carefully. The change management aspect of any you know, implementation like this or call it transformation, the change management is as critical as the business process as the software, those other elements it is critical key to a successful adoption and a successful outcome, but it starts with having the case for change, because what you're doing is formulating a vision for folks to help them understand this is where we want to go. This is where we want to be, you know. In the future, so many years from now and so forth. So what is that case for change? What's driving us to need to move to this next level? And if people understand the why, okay, that case for change, they're going to be far more open to considering and actually start to get excited about it. [00:09:32] And I think that. Is also very important to have that message in that case for change articulated by the senior leadership from what I call a top down perspective and a top down advocacy, because that message sets a tone for the organization and it filters through the organization and it's very important part. [00:09:53] I had a very strong set of C suite leaders that were very much [00:10:00] advocating for this. And so they were able to articulate that message. And then we could take that and embrace it with what I'll call a bottom up approach with the affected stakeholders. So who are those stakeholders? Understand the different what I call personas. [00:10:16] Are we talking about requisitioners, or buyers, or manufacturing operation people, or finance analysts? Who are, who are the stakeholders that are going to be affected or impacted by this? And understand their cultural differences. From a culture standpoint, whether it's across regions or countries, whether it's across functional areas, You know, how messaging and how that change is impacting someone , in Europe versus Asia Pacific, very different. [00:10:45] And so how you package the information and package the communications is important as well. And to nuance or tailor that accordingly. nuancing and tailoring also for the functions. It's what. Maybe how manufacturing perceives it may be very different than how marketing would perceive it or IT would perceive. [00:11:03] And so how do you tailor again to the nuances of a particular functional area as well? If you can understand that impact and what the technology is going to do to their respective business processes, then you can say, well, what input do I need from them to ensure I take into consideration what's necessary and , Now, how we do it, they look different. [00:11:26] And we'll assess that impact and create a strategy around that, but I need to make sure I consider what is needed for their, you know, for them to do their job successfully. And so when that's understood, then you can help them understand the change, keep them tied into what's happening, keep the communication flowing. [00:11:47] And it gets them excited about a new way of doing business. And you can start to get creative about the way things are communicated using. You know, animated personas to help illustrate the from and to condition or [00:12:00] communication broadcast. Various things can be implemented and deployed. To give one example, when we had a very wide span of, of particular personas in this case, requisitioners that had to be communicated to, and they were very different because every function in the company requisitions, we held virtual office hours and we held them in local languages. [00:12:20] We had the training materials, in the local language because somebody on the manufacturing floor may not be proficient in you know, one, one language, let's say English. So we had the materials in local language and so forth, depending upon the personas. So those are the things that need to be considered to help re respect that input from , the folks who are impacted and then be able to, to communicate it in a very clear way that resonates for them. [00:12:47] Mustansir Saifuddin: I think that's a great advice and a great takeaway, especially when you're dealing with the folks on, on ground, you want to make sure that you're able to reach , to them the way they can consume the information and be able to train accordingly. So now that's very helpful. On a personal note, how are you staying on top of changes, now we are talking in the AI age, both business and technology are, are rapidly changing. So how do you keep up with these kind of change? [00:13:19] Lisa Smith: Well, my youngest son would tell me I don't, but in, in reality, what's important to me is understanding that the continual evolution and innovations that are happening inside of SAP's technology, for example, and cloud technology in general. And I think there's so much out there. Yeah. SAP has tremendous webinars, you know insights, podcasts, things of that nature that can be, very illustrative of what's going on. There's a lot of information in various media forms that I use. But there are webinars, and also I do a bit of Googling and, you know, YouTube demo watching and those kinds of things. Also I think , their solution integration partners, their solution integrators also bring. [00:14:00] A lot of insights around what's happening. What are the trends in the business? What's happening in this industry? What does that mean in terms of leveraging the technology? So it kind of brings the technology and the business together. To understand where things are headed, be it, what are some of the new challenges of chief procurement officers, for example, in a post COVID society. You know, very different than a pre COVID condition perhaps. [00:14:26] And so those kinds of strategic understanding, as well as what is the technology doing to support that understanding is largely available. So I do a lot of that just out of interest, [00:14:40] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah, no, that's the only way right now to keep up is just be aware of what are , the mediums available to you and have that tenacity to go and get that information from wherever you can get and keep up with the changes in technology. [00:14:56] S4HANA is top of the mind, a lot of companies these days. How can companies ensure a smooth transition to S4HANA? And especially when you talk about S4HANA, it's a big undertaking. How can you minimize disruptions to your operations? Can you elaborate on that? [00:15:15] Lisa Smith: Again, I'll use that "very carefully" answer, but I think the first thing is it's important to prioritize risk mitigation first and foremost, you never want to jeopardize the business or disrupt the ability to provide the goods or services , that the company is charged with, providing. [00:15:33] And you can't take it all at once either. How can I sequence this? If I establish a longer term vision or a view or a road map, okay, where I want to be, I have to take it in a series of steps. And perhaps some of those steps can happen in parallel. Some need to happen in a particular sequence because of interdependencies. [00:15:53] Some may be able to, as you learn, you might say, gosh, I should do this instead first and then followed [00:16:00] by X. I learned a lot of those things as we went through deployment and the ability to kind of flex and be a bit more agile, I think is important, but sequencing things in order to try and gain the optimal value as quickly as possible, while you mitigate the risk. It's a delicate balance, but that's probably one of the , more important principles, if you will, to have top of mind in terms of how can I glean the value quickly while I de risk the business? And in order to do that, I think you need to have very clear timing milestones and deliverable milestones. [00:16:37] And there needs to be a very good disciplined program or project management process, that is enabling that to take place. And you need to do that in order to ensure that the timing is kept. And also to contain the cost. Otherwise, you can start diverting off on different paths and the scope starts to creep and the money starts to keep moving, up you know, , on the scale and the timing continues to shift out. [00:17:09] So it's really important to keep, the clear timing with the deliverables and have a governance of project management to control that very very tightly. And then the other one I mentioned is, is governance. That is critical as you're changing these processes. And you're perhaps completely eliminating a policy or preparing a new policy in order to do business a different way. Then what governance do I need to have in place so that I escalate those decisions quickly so that I'm not being. bound by or, you know, delayed by lack of policy decision making, lack of policy change approval, for example on the program. If I know I need that policy change in order to configure it this way, I better start having the governance or I better have the governance in place to be able [00:18:00] to escalate that quickly if it requires certain levels of approval within the organization. And then readying the organization for change. That's one of the key attributes to ensuring a smooth transition. Having a robust cadence of communication, a repeated cadence so that people know what to expect. It can be at a relatively high level. [00:18:22] And as they get close to their respective deployments, it becomes more granular. The communications, the training materials, the virtual hours, things of that nature become more granular as they get closer to their respective deployments. And then , I employed something that Toyota taught me. They referred to it as PDCA and plan due check act. [00:18:43] And so I have a detailed plan, not just about the program milestones and deliverables, but everyone's role and responsibility and all of the things associated with making that implementation happen or get to that achieved outcome and execute to that plan. Have the controls on the status through the project management or program management and the governance that I mentioned. Then act and adjust accordingly if, and when needed, which inevitably it will be needed. [00:19:14] You have to adjust course, but it's really a PDCA continual loop of plan to check act as you move through the life cycle of a program. [00:19:27] Mustansir Saifuddin: I like it. I think that's very useful, especially when you are In this cycle, if you want to make sure that every small piece is covered and the only way you can do it is having the right governance, having the right plan in place. And then, of course, the checks and balances at each and every milestone. [00:19:44] We talked about a lot of different things. I would like to leave the session with what is the one key takeaway you would want to leave with our listeners today. Can you share that? [00:19:56] Lisa Smith: Yes, I would. It's going to be 2. 1 is [00:20:00] embrace the technology to allow it to propel your business forward for a long term sustainable outcome. And do that with an open mind to changing process. And leverage that technology to drive that simplified process and understand the impact from a change perspective that comes with it and manage that in concert, because when you do, the success can be absolutely tremendous. [00:20:28] It can be transformational. But the two go together. [00:20:32] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. Great advice. Thank you for coming on our show. It was real pleasure to have you join us today. [00:20:38] Lisa Smith: Well, likewise, I really enjoy the conversation and certainly it's an exciting space. There's tremendous opportunity for companies you know, that are looking to find whatever those objectives are, improved efficiency, cost reduction all the different things, the disciplines that , can really level an organization up to the next stage. [00:20:58] And the next level in a, in a longterm way. So it's great fun. And I really appreciate the opportunity to be able to, to have the conversation. Thank you. [00:21:07] Mustansir Saifuddin: Thank you. [00:21:08] Thanks for listening to Tech Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Lisa shared valuable insights that apply to all areas of an enterprise. Her key takeaway? Embrace technology to allow it to propel your business forward while effectively managing the change impact to ensure a smooth and successful transition. [00:21:34] We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or X. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this latest episode, Mustansir Saifuddin is joined by Barry Sjostedt and Julea Ferrera to take a look back at what has transpired since SAP SAPPHIRE 2024. Was it all hype or was the conference content applicable to clients and partners like them? Listen in for an engaging conversation on what still resonates months later and suggestions for organizations on how to navigate the SAP ecosystem and leverage conferences like SAP SAPPHIRE. Julea Ferrera is the Founder of J. Ferrara Consulting Solutions, Founding Director of Techqueria x MKE and is on the America's SAP User Group WI Board of Directors. She has worked in Business Transformation as a Technofunctional consultant in a variety of different companies globally throughout the years promoting lean process and operation excellence through community impact. Barry Sjostedt is a Business Operations Consultant specializing in Finance and Organizational Excellence, having collaborated with numerous global organizations to drive lean processes and optimization through innovative technology solutions. His expertise spans various business areas, uniting teams for enhanced collaboration and future success. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrysjostedt https://www.linkedin.com/in/juleaferrera https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/midwest-tech-week/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/asug https://www.linkedin.com/company/techqueria-x-mke https://www.linkedin.com/company/isolutionpartners https://www.linkedin.com/in/mustansirsaifuddin X : @mmsaifuddin IG:@asug365 @midwesttechweek Learn more at www.isolutionpartners.com   Episode Transcript: [00:00:00] Mustansir Saifuddin: Welcome to Tech Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Now that several months have passed since Sapphire 2024, I invited Barry Sjostedt and Julea Ferrera to share their insights on the post Sapphire landscape, including the role of AI and best strategies for navigating the S4 journey. [00:00:26] Listen in for the customer and service provider viewpoints to see how your team can stay ahead in the ever evolving SAP ecosystem. [00:00:38] Welcome you both. How are you? [00:00:40] Julea Ferrara: Doing pretty good. [00:00:43] Thank you for having us. [00:00:45] Barry Sjostedt: Yeah. Good seeing you both again. [00:00:48] Mustansir Saifuddin: I know we were all at Sapphire back in June and it was a great event and I thought, Coming out of the event I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about [00:01:00] the experience and the reality. You know, that's what I wanted to cover in this show because I think it's always good to look back and see where we have come and where we are heading in the future. [00:01:12] There are a few observations that I would like to share with you both and then like to open it up for your take on. How have you seen things unfold over the past couple of months and where do you see the direction in the future? So I know that the Sapphire event itself this year was full of learning and networking and it was great. [00:01:33] And it was filled with opportunities as well as it was a bit of an overload of information as you can tell by the amount of information being shared and a lot of different things that were happening during the conference. Now, if I look back, it is in our rearview mirror. I think this is time that we talk about and revisit what we got out of Sapphire and see what resonates with different [00:02:00] people. [00:02:01] Just like you, who touch the SAP ecosystem. Coming back to some of the content. Sapphire, we focused on Gen AI. That was like the the theme that was going on in different sessions, different conversations, and on the show floor, in the presentations, and those networking events. [00:02:20] Gen AI, Juul, You know, SAP talked about some key partnerships with their hyperscalers like AWS, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft. I mean, you name it, right? We also talked about CleanCore, what that means, and a lot more. So, I know there was a lot of things were covered. And based on my experience, I would say some folks even thought that it was a lot of hype. [00:02:47] So, that brings me to you both, and, this conversation today. And I'd like to start with what did you get out of the show and where do you think we are heading? So, let me start with you, Julea. You know, when you left Sapphire, [00:03:00] what was top of your mind? And what was your first action step after coming out of the conference? [00:03:06] Julea Ferrara: I first went to honestly, LinkedIn, and I'm a part of BTP a lot of group sessions shared groups on there to kind of understand, like, different polls. A lot of people put a lot of different polls out there to understand the five different pillars with BTP and where we're at, and 100 percent across the board was on AI. [00:03:28] These last few weeks, since Sapphire, it's been again, a big thing around the AI aspect. I think, yes, there's a lot of hype around it, which is exciting. But as much as I love A. I. I still believe we have to tell the A. I. what to do. So it's what I see missing is people having those general conversations in the S. [00:03:50] A. P. space of how do we do that? What do we work with to do that? A lot of amazing tools. The problem is I don't think people understand like where to [00:04:00] go to get everything set up. So , I realized the importance of all working with all these partners and vendors to get, to understand and having really the ASUG network, the ASUG pre conference conversations were great to help you get [00:04:15] those things set up for your data processes for the AI to work. Barry, what did you think? [00:04:23] Barry Sjostedt: Yeah, I mean, it was a lot. I think, you know, going in there from a focus standpoint, you kind of almost had to know what you were looking for. My feeling is cloud is really the big initiative. I was trying to learn a little bit more about their positioning, you know, what they're really truly trying to accomplish. [00:04:43] And, you know, at the end of the day is my strategy aligned with theirs? My view of it is slightly different from yours, from, you know, you're a customer, whereas I'm trying to assist the customer. So of course I had that slightly different view. AI, [00:05:00] I think. It's AI is more of in its infancy. [00:05:05] It's here. It's evolving. It's quick and it's going to happen faster. So what they laid out is Kind of more as this is what's to come but we know having worked in the space for quite some time. It's It's really not super efficient today, and I agree with you. Where are the resources going to come from where? [00:05:28] They're already trying to look for resources for people to transition and still transition over from ECC to S4. So from my perspective, we're looking, you know, at where SAP is going, and more importantly, where are organizations going? What's most important to them? Who's going to what sessions? [00:05:51] As are they in the same sessions I'm in and who's in the sessions that are in, let's say cloud facing or cloud alignments, you know, and what's more [00:06:00] important to them. Because what's important to you is different than what's important to another organization. And let's say, you know, not all Molson Coors, but let's say something in a you know, a small manufacturer. [00:06:17] So there's a big difference there, and I think it's layered. [00:06:21] [00:06:21] Julea Ferrara: Yeah, you do have a great point. The one thing I have learned by going to Sapphire over these years is everybody tends to take their IT department. And you have a little bit more understanding of, like you said, Barry, Hey, we're more concerned about the cloud aspect. [00:06:40] When companies, customers send their people there, they need to send more of their business teams out there, business process teams, and that's not really happening. So the biggest encouragement I offer is you need to have more of your business functioning teams [00:06:56] to attend because they hear, they hear all these [00:07:00] hype words and around AI, they're ready to go. They don't realize that we have to still do all this work. Ahead of time. And there that's the gap that I see is people don't understand, okay, you have this available. This tool can do all this stuff for us. And I see a lot of different industries keep buying the tools and tools and tools, but they don't understand all the data and all the business processing that needs to be done with that for that automation to work. [00:07:30] So. My biggest takeaway for any customer and send more business functioning groups to those conversations. Sapphire being that. [00:07:40] Barry Sjostedt: That's such a great point. It really is, working with all different aspects of businesses. And this is not just kind of in this circumstances, but just, you know, from years of experience. [00:07:52] There is such a vast difference between the person who's in IT, who gets the complete and total understanding of, how it works, [00:08:00] and how I'm gonna put it into your system, to the individual actually using it, and is it functionally sound for their day to day. And it's almost, you know, sometimes I feel that the representatives that they send to some of the shows, it becomes that telephone game, when they get back to the organization and say, "I saw the coolest thing ever." And then the person sitting at the desk saying, yeah, but only one aspect really kind of helps me. [00:08:27] It's great. But overall for the organization, does it fit the need for where we're going not just daily, but in the future? How are we going to accomplish that? So, yeah, I mean, that's a great point. I enjoy meeting several different people from several different areas. And I think that's kind of where I think I really like more from an ASUG point of view. [00:08:50] When you start to get a little bit more granular in some of the smaller shows, you get to meet the users and understand where their difficulties is in that chain of how it can [00:09:00] go up and it can benefit the organization as a whole and not just one instance. [00:09:06] Mustansir Saifuddin: You both made a great points on this particular conversation. [00:09:11] One thing that I've seen, and this is what is going to persist going forward, especially when we are transitioning from the current environment customers are in, either you take your ECC environment or on prem or whatever the current situation is from their ERP to their data and analytics to any of the technology that they're currently using in their organization is having that path available to them. [00:09:38] You know, having that advisory kind of role, someone who is capable of understanding their current landscape and then walking them through the path to the new technology, to the generative AI type of discussions because the path has to be clear. Because you're not jumping to the [00:10:00] new technology, you know, in the next move. [00:10:01] You're going through those steps to make sure that you are getting to the destination in a way that is helping and benefiting the business, right? In the end of the day, a customer is looking at ways to make sure their systems are running flawlessly. You know, their path to technology and future trends is aligned with what their business strategy is. [00:10:24] That brings me to my next question So Sapphire is in the back view mirror now. A couple of months into it and the dust has kind of settled down How has your outlook changed since you left Sapphire? Barry, I would like to start with you this time. [00:10:41] Barry Sjostedt: For me, my outlook hasn't changed a lot . Having, you know, done a little bit of research prior to going to Sapphire and what we were looking to accomplish. [00:10:54] It's really kind of the same thing. My follow up from the show and the outlook [00:11:00] is, I'm a little bit more focused on some of the, the technology, obviously cloud was being one of them for us. The onset of BTP and trying to roll out the different portions of what they're, you know, trying to make it bigger and better, but really it's much of the same. [00:11:20] How am I going to be able to help organizations and align with their strategies? And really try to help them to make these moves. I mean, we, you know, we've made mention, you know of some of the the people having to move over, whether it's just to S4 or being a part of the Rise journey, or Hana cloud for that matter, How can I help be a value and a benefit for the organizations to make these moves? I always turn back to my past experience of just working in operations. Operations is costly for [00:12:00] groups. It's a cost. How do you defray that cost? How do you make that cost as small as possible to help the profitability in the future? [00:12:08] How can I make, that process more lean and a more efficient, saving more money for them to make this upgrade. Because these upgrades are costly. And that's what we see a lot of is, our focus is solely on this. And it's like, yeah, however, if you have terrible process today here, you can upgrade, but you've just upgraded to another terrible process. [00:12:36] And you just paid a lot more money to do a terrible process. So again, it's getting that mindset. So for me, not a lot has changed in that aspect. I think it's just more of understanding what the messaging is and also aligning with the organizations to make sure they understand what the messaging [00:13:00] is and is it being, is it being relayed from that show to Julea, just like you said, to your business people, to your end users. [00:13:10] If I'm at a slightly larger organization and I'm going to send people down to Sapphire, I'm going to have that mindset of a divide and conquer. And I am going to pick, do you know what I mean? Three groups. I'm going to have an IT, I'm going to have a finance, I'm going to have an end user group. [00:13:28] Do you know what I mean? And I'm going to say this is what I would like to find out. And then All three groups collaborate when they get back. What did you find out? What did you learn? And then once you do that, I think you're really on the path to making the best decision moving forward. [00:13:45] Do we do this? And in what order do we do this? What is most financially advantageous to the group? So we're prepared not only today, but we're prepared for tomorrow when we have to make yet another jump or do we do [00:14:00] it incrementally? That's smart. [00:14:02] Mustansir Saifuddin: That makes sense. [00:14:03] Julea, what's your take on it? I mean, have you seen any change in your perspective after this couple of months? [00:14:11] [00:14:11] Julea Ferrara: Generally, you don't. Again, it's all hype. It goes back to more the cloud perspective and automating. Different aspects and going to the AI route because again not everybody understands that you're putting additional costs onto the problem you already have of upgrading and everybody's too worried about the maintenance side of things. [00:14:33] Instead of fixing the issue right now, everybody's more focused on the tool . The business sees, Hey, you have all these awesome tools. They push and the business gets what the business wants. They have the money. They can say , Hey, I want these tools. And then you have these complicated webs. [00:14:50] I liked the point that you said, bring your finance person, bring your business person. People forget, is bring your data people . Your data people need to be a [00:15:00] part of these conversations. That is one group I do not see a lot of, data people. Yeah, maybe on the analytics side, but you need your master data governance team there. [00:15:10] I think security is another one. [00:15:13] Mustansir Saifuddin: Thank you for sharing your thoughts on that. This is very good to hear the two perspectives. And that was the whole idea of this conversation was to get what you have seen from your point of view, and then how it has progressed since that event happened. [00:15:29] So from your purview, where do you see SAP customers heading when it really comes to this S4 journey we all talking about and a 2027 deadline from SAP? [00:15:39] Julea, what's your take on it? I mean, this is coming up quickly. [00:15:44] Julea Ferrara: Yeah. I see a lot of people scrambling. Again going back, they just, what do we do? Are we taking all the initial steps that we need to, all the checks and balances ahead of time? It kind of goes back to what [00:16:00] I'm previously referencing is people are scrambling. [00:16:03] They're focusing on the tool to get it done and not really understanding that they need to be more involved. And this is where I plug in the ASUG: ASUG plug is even part of your S. A. P. membership is the customer excellence team that you can tap into to help you. And that's where my recommendation seeing those pre conferences, I was like: if you want to work with bigger, like Deloitte and Accenture and EY, to help navigate these things, you still need small providers to come in, to really understand your landscape a little bit more, to help guide those teams. [00:16:41] Those are the disconnects I'm seeing, and I think if you get the mapping and all that stuff done ahead of time, you're in, you're aware of what maintenance fees and stuff. People are there to guide you through all that. And not enough customers know about those benefits. [00:17:00] As being a part of an ASUG membership where you're amongst a group of all these subject matter experts who can guide you, you know, it's, it's full of customers, partners, and vendors, not everybody realizes that. [00:17:13] I mean, I'm still. Been trying to get that out as a champion myself. [00:17:18] Mustansir Saifuddin: That is great. [00:17:20] Barry Sjostedt: Well, pressure's on, isn't it? Right? I mean, that clock has been ticking. There's been that push and I think that some of the early adopters obviously had some pains and let's also remember COVID was slammed right in the middle of this. [00:17:38] So I know that they went from, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was 2025 was the original date. I think they're two years out considering the COVID and I don't know if that's enough. The last time that I checked, I want to say that there were still 68 percent of [00:18:00] organizations still on ECC. [00:18:01] I could be wrong on that number you know, obviously, but that's quite a bit. So now we're going to have this mad dash in two years. My concern becomes resources. These organizations if they're not adopting earlier and stuff, are they doing the right thing? Piggybacking off what you said Julea too is you know I couldn't stress enough of using, you know organizations like the ASUGs and the education. And more importantly the peer to peer contacts and I can't tell you how many people I have talked to here in the new england chapter. Use the people who have already moved over. [00:18:39] What approach, what would they do different? If they had to do it over again, spend time on this, clean up this, don't do this. And there I agree again, Julea, it's just that I think that the smarter organizations are taking a step back, they're taking a look and doing just kind [00:19:00] of what I said before. [00:19:02] Thanks. What we have internally. Clean up. I mean the clean core concept is really kind of what I was talking about a little bit more about being lean. let's clean up what we have now clean up some dead data clean up some stuff that we have to do so when you actually make that transition You're not bringing over junk. [00:19:23] You're actually starting and think about the cost and I mean we promote that a lot here. As we're doing our projects, is that working with a documentation, organization, and optimization that we do is if we can assist you to clean up that whole entire area within your documentation, you're not bringing that stuff over. [00:19:46] I mean, I know we've saved organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars in just migrations and think about that. That can go to what you're moving over. This is just one small piece, one small [00:20:00] area of your SAP ecosystem. Think about where else you can clean up. So again, I think that the smarter organizations are really taking a harder look at that move and what makes sense. [00:20:11] And does it make sense if I'm going to do just do S4? Do I do S4 cloud? Do I do it all at once? And how do I do that and how do I go about it? So. Yeah. I think really organization is the key and communication is really big, internally and externally, and who works best for your organization. [00:20:33] You have some of these larger groups, they might be more suited to work with you. But there are a lot of smaller groups that need kind of more boutique, more hand holding, more understanding, and more experience in that area. Someone working on a multi billion dollar corporation, might not be the best fit for a smaller organization. [00:20:58] You know what I mean? That's revenue under a [00:21:00] hundred million. And there are all different levels for that. I think it's going to be interesting to see over the next couple years. I'm starting to see a smaller shift kind of on my end from an interest standpoint of I think that people are learning from the smaller groups and that peer to peer contact. And I actually couldn't encourage that enough from my end. And Julea and Mustansir and we're being part of these organizations is where you kind of get the most benefit. [00:21:25] Talking to each other, get an understanding. And it's amazing how willing people are to help each other in this capacity. I really enjoy that part of the, the group of the organization. [00:21:37] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah, totally agree. [00:21:39] Julea Ferrara: I've seen different industries who rely on SAP education to only be in the IT department. You talk to business departments and they're like they solely rely on IT creating the documentation, putting everything together, and really not going [00:22:00] in to do transactional work or understand what they're doing versus they're relying on the reports that are coming out. And my biggest takeaway to customers, the ones that are successful is you have SAP education throughout your whole organization. [00:22:18] Not just your IT department. So if you're doing integrated business planning, it needs to be a part of the whole integrated business planning teams conversation to, like you said, Barry, going back to that documentation, cleaning up the data, cleaning up the process to then move it all over. The hard part is people don't know how to educate others. [00:22:44] And that's why we have great groups like ASUG. I said, you don't have to leave the company to learn other best practices. So focus on educating your people and having that organizational change management process set there for [00:23:00] everyone. [00:23:00] Mustansir Saifuddin: I think that's a great takeaway, I think, from both of you, and you touched upon it, right? [00:23:03] I mean, it's all about peer to peer education, just learning and utilizing the resources available to you to be more prepared before you get on the journey. And the journey is going to be challenging for folks who have not gone through all the work that you folks mentioned about doing the homework, cleaning up, getting your house in order. [00:23:24] All those things are important for you to be successful in this journey, right? And I know we covered a lot today. What would be one key takeaway that you would both want our listeners to leave with? Julea, please start from your perspective. [00:23:38] Julea Ferrara: I know a lot of people are going in the AI route and we're talking data, process and then, big key takeaway is utilize the networks that you have, to come together, share. When it comes to the A. I. aspect of it all: to have the greatest prompting you can. Describe your [00:24:00] scenarios as descriptive as possible when you are building out the AI for these tools. If you leave things very blank, if you leave things very from the box add your operations to that, consider your operational changes, consider the process, and then consider what the software does. [00:24:22] Cause you can customize to that and utilize the SAP excellence center, utilize ASUG. Get some smart, smaller partners in to understand your landscape. If you're a big company to help get those SOWs going in the right direction that work for you and you're not just putting money out the door and out the door and out the door. And you're creating more webs of Disarray, focus on those avenues and I think you'll do, you know, do do really well. [00:24:54] Mustansir Saifuddin: Great. Barry, what's your take? [00:24:57] Barry Sjostedt: I can't stress enough the [00:25:00] peer to peer, partner, collaboration, communication network. I think that's the most helpful. People like to talk about their accomplishments. People like to talk about what works, their successes and how it works. The more you get to know people and the more you kind of get yourself out there and you get more in these groups, you know, they're not afraid to talk about, yeah, we tried this and it didn't work. [00:25:29] And they explain why. Then that relationship continues. And between reading and trying to collaborate on linkedin, which I try to use a fair amount. I try to share as much as I can so that people can learn more about their space . Whether it's the people that I follow or the people that I am connected with I think there's a lot of value in there. But again, it's that research And I agree with you Julea. [00:25:52] It's just vetting out What is best for your organization? What I've seen a lot of is that you have organizations that [00:26:00] come in and say, Oh, don't worry. We have that. We have that solution for you. That's in our portfolio. Well, great. [00:26:09] Does it work? Do you know what I mean? Like, you know, it's great that you have it in your portfolio, but is it a right fit for us today? At the end of the day, if you actually have something in mind and you have a project in mind, take a step back and say," Hey what are the best ones out there right now?" [00:26:26] And let's look at three, four, five and find the best fit with your organization. You know what I mean? We're a good fit for you as you are for us because that means we're setting you up for success. [00:26:39] We're a valued partner and we're going to move forward with you. And I think oftentimes it gets lost because people are trying to sell. People are trying to put stuff in there. It's all great if I put something in your system, But if a year or two later, it doesn't work, [00:26:54] it's bad. It's bad for both of us. Bad for business. Bad for reputation. And it doesn't work. That's [00:27:00] no good. So the combination of that peer to peer contact and understanding and having a true understanding Of your organization and what fits best for your needs for your groups and that comes with communication and collaboration. [00:27:13] Julea Ferrara: I say there's a lot of as for supply chain groups. There's a lot around the finance groups. There's the latest and greatest, and that's where I'm getting a lot of my information from. So I suggest customers do the same as well. Go in those groups and learn, like you said, peer to peer. [00:27:30] Barry Sjostedt: Well, you know, and that's funny. When you mention the latest and greatest here, it's great, right? You take a look at it, and is it a good fit for you today, right? Maybe not. But I think the key is, is that by looking at the different organizations, who is set up the best for you to make that move. [00:27:45] So if you are in fact on ECC today and you want to fix it, is that next step for you S4 and will that solution or that particular idea move over to S4 in an easy [00:28:00] transition.. Or is it more of a, well, since you're going on this version, the next version is going to be twice as expensive to make a move. [00:28:08] And I see that a lot too. Whereas, you know, and it's nice part about stuff that we will do here is that it doesn't matter what version you are on and it's an easy transition. You can just bring everything over once you're ready to move. And I feel that's a true valued partnership. Is that we're, we're looking to move forward with your roadmap and we are aligned with all versionings of SAP. [00:28:33] There's that nice collaboration, right? We're collaborating with the organization. But we're also just going to be right along with the roadmap. If they're going to move forward, we have the capability of moving forward with you and it's not at an outstanding cost. A better ROI at the end of the day. [00:28:50] And ultimately that's what you want. You got to look hard at that. [00:28:53] Julea Ferrara: Yeah. What people don't do is discuss the how together. [00:28:58] Barry Sjostedt: Right. Yep. [00:29:00] No, that's exactly right. [00:29:02] Mustansir Saifuddin: I think this is great and great takeaways from both of you and I think that this is where the real value comes in from sharing this kind of format with listeners so they can get, Hey, what is really out there and what should be focusing on in order for me to be successful in my organization and in the future I want to move forward to. [00:29:24] Thank you again both of you for joining the session and it's been a great conversation. Look forward to talking to you in the future Thank you again for joining us today. [00:29:34] [00:29:34] Mustansir Saifuddin: Thanks for listening to Tech Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solutions Partners. Barry and Julia shared their unique perspectives to give a 360 view of SAP Sapphire. As we heard from both of them, the key to success in navigating the SAP ecosystem lies in collaboration, [00:30:00] communication, and a focus on business processes. [00:30:03] Don't hesitate to leverage the resources available within the SAP community and seek guidance. from experts when needed. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or X. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. 

In this latest episode, Carla Sarti, former VP GBS - Lear Corporation, joins Mustansir Saifuddin to share what she's learned in her decades of experience, with both business and technology, about how businesses and teams can be successful in any IT implementation. From teamwork to fundamental project management, to supplier relations, Carla dives in to highlight quick takeaways that you can implement to make an even bigger impact with your IT implementation. Carla Sarti was most recently the Vice President of Global Business Services at Lear Corporation – a position she held since April 2018.  Prior to this position she was Vice President of Non Production Purchasing and Director of Shared Services.   Prior to Lear, she served as Account Executive at ACS, a Xerox company (now Conduent) where she acted as chief strategy officer and Director of Sales for many large accounts in the Finance and Accounting Outsourcing area.  She spent five years at Delphi Corporation in numerous roles of increasing responsibility including managing the SAP environment after implementation and working as a Lean expert for the Cockpits business.  She also worked as a plant and divisional financial analyst at TRW and an operational auditor at the Budd Company. Connect with us: LinkedIn Carla Sarti Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter:  @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript: [00:00:00] Mustansir Saifuddin: Welcome to Tech Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Carla Sarti, a seasoned executive, shares her insights that any team can use for leading successful IT projects. From understanding business processes to the importance of transparency, teamwork, and supplier relations, Carla reveals the key ingredients for project success. [00:00:30] Welcome to Tech-Driven Business Carla. How are you? [00:00:33] Carla Sarti: I'm great. Thanks for having me. Great to see you. [00:00:38] Mustansir Saifuddin: It's great to have you on our show. And I'm glad that , you took the time out to share some of your thoughts and leadership with us today, [00:00:46] Carla Sarti: Absolutely. [00:00:48] Mustansir Saifuddin: so our topic is going to be Secrets to successful IT projects. How does it sound to you? [00:00:55] Carla Sarti: Amazing. It's 1 of my passions. [00:00:58] Mustansir Saifuddin: I know, I know. And I think that's going to be something that it will be very helpful to our listeners, especially in this day and age where technology is changing so fast. There are so many different options available. And I. T. Is in the middle of all of this. Let me start with this. You know, I want to set the stage. [00:01:15] So let's begin with this. Can you share some background on how you How did you find yourself leading I. T. Projects you started your career in a totally different arena? [00:01:29] Carla Sarti: Absolutely. So, yes, I have a business degree of my MBA. I started in audit and very specific businesses, purchasing finance, et cetera. But technology was always something that I was very curious and passionate about. When I was a co op at TRW, the vice president of finance came to me one day and I'm going to date myself a little bit here, but we were on Lotus 1, 2, 3, and he had a disc in his hand and he said, Carla or little kid or whatever he called me. [00:02:00] Here's a disk of Excel. I would like all of our reports moved from Lotus 1, 2, 3, put on Excel and let's review them next week. And I said, okay, let's go. And so I taught myself Excel and I really started to understand the power of technology. And that's just such a basic example. Right. So while I was still a co op, I got involved in an SAP implementation and That really opened my eyes to what technology can bring, and I've been into it ever since. [00:02:32] So different functional groups I've been in, I've always brought best in class processes along with the technology side, because I think it is, it goes hand in hand, but I've done everything from SAP, Coupa, SharePoint, RPA, and now dabbling in AI. [00:02:50] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. You know, it doesn't matter matter where you start? You know, even having a business degree, like you mentioned technology is always with you and it's around you. So you got to either embrace it and you got to go with the flow or you're going to fight it, right? So I, I like the approach that you mentioned that, you know, your first inital foray into this whole technology area was just, you know, just of the iceberg, right? [00:03:14] You got into this thing and now Years later, you are much ingrained in this whole technology stack. So, let's talk about your experience. You have decades of experience. What do you see as some key factors that contribute to the success of IT projects, which is so important? [00:03:33] Carla Sarti: So I'm going to start with the assumption that before you implement any sort of technology, You've really understood your business, right? And where are your business processes? What needs to be cleaned up? You're not just bringing in technology to bring in technology because I don't think that's ever usually successful, but so you've done that and then you've really understood again, the current processes. [00:04:01] The gaps that you have and what is your success criteria? I think a lot of people, a lot of companies don't look at what success looks like at the very beginning. And they say, Oh, okay. Yeah. We're just going to implement this. We heard it's the best solution and they don't think through, what are we trying to achieve? [00:04:19] That, that really starts dictating what a successful project looks like. Then you through the whole. Project. You obviously have to have the right team members on the project, having an executive sponsor that can break down roadblocks. I've seen projects that the best ones typically have a business person leading them. [00:04:44] Because they understand what's trying to be accomplished. Not that IT can't lead projects and they are definitely very integral to the process. But typically, when a business person runs them, they're implemented quicker. The understanding is there. The right process mapping has been done, et cetera. So you've got the right people. [00:05:07] Probably have suppliers in the mix, because what company has all that skill set on hand? So you have to have the right suppliers. And then through the course of it, you have to have the right governance. So the communication process, the transparency of where the project truly is, because as you know, IT projects are not a hundred percent foolproof, right? [00:05:33] Something always happens in any kind of project, whether you're building a house, you're, you're baking a cake or whatever it is, something goes wrong and you've got to have the right transparency and communication. To understand what to do next, then obviously you could have the best tool in the world. [00:05:51] The best project. It's going great. You have to have change management methodology and processes embedded in the project because if people aren't going to use it. What does it matter? Right? And I mentioned Excel when I was a co op, a lot of people still use Excel and you could put in the best shiny new toy technology. [00:06:13] People are comfortable with Excel. So you've got to explain to people how their jobs going to change and give them the appropriate training to make it a true success. In the end. [00:06:25] Mustansir Saifuddin: For sure. And I think you touched upon a lot of it. Some very key points. You know, starting with a champion, you know, has to be a business. How do they currently do the job? How can they do it better? You know, governance, such a key piece. You need to have that in place, change management, you know, I've been in technology field for so many years. [00:06:44] That's one thing that we know. If there is no good change management in place, It doesn't matter what technology, what kind of resources or what kind of supplier you're using, it doesn't go well. The end user needs to be on board. They need to really be part of the whole implementation process in order for them to adapt and then be the voice of the new tool because they are the ones who will be actually living with it, doing it on a daily basis. [00:07:15] So great point. [00:07:15] Carla Sarti: And people get scared. I mean, they get really nervous when a new project's coming, right? And especially in the age of AI, people think they're going to lose their jobs and companies need to do a really good job explaining. No, no, no. So you do this today, but tomorrow we need you to do that. And actually you'll probably be more fulfilled doing. [00:07:36] The new, but it's just that, that way of explaining and coaching them through it and not just dumping something on their lap. [00:07:45] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. And that's the key, right? How is it helping the real users of the system that this implementation or this piece of software doesn't matter? You're doing an E. R. P. implementation. You do some kind of data analytics project or any other systems that you're putting in place. It is there to help the business move to the next level. [00:08:08] How can we be more profitable? How can we make it easier for our customers to deal with us? different scenarios, right? And this and all of these are bundled together to give you the next level of the best, right? How can you do your job a better way than what you're currently doing? So totally agree with you. Now you touched upon one key fact, right? The idea of finding the right supplier. So how do you find the right supplier to support your initiatives? Can you share examples of successful IT projects? Where your supplier collaboration was very effective. [00:08:44] Carla Sarti: Finding the right supplier is key to the equation. I've always looked for a valued, trusted business partner. And. You know, there's, there's a lot of ways to get there. And I think a lot of it is being up front in the initial RFP process. [00:09:03] And you've got to have as much information for the supplier as possible to bid on because what you don't want is. Death by change order later because they didn't understand the project. You didn't understand the project as the business. That breaks down a relationship really, really fast. So again, more of that transparency, the collaboration. Some of the best projects I've had and I can't go into a lot of detail on them, but we implemented a tool in 18 months at one of my companies and really the success of the project was a lot. [00:09:39] on the supplier side. We brought somebody in with a great skill set in the tool that we were building. They had a road map. They had this amazing design methodology and the right questions were asked. The right people were brought by us as the company and, you know, we got off to a great start when things did go wrong. [00:10:02] They were very, very transparent. They said, okay, we need to get together. Let's pull everyone together. Let's get these questions answered. And they didn't hide things. We didn't hide things. It was probably the best project I've ever implemented. And that's what it takes. Again, that collaboration, transparency, and that win win from both sides. [00:10:25] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. I think you touched upon all the things that a successful project should look like, especially from a practices point of view, the strategy point of view and the relationships standpoint. Right? All of these work together and. You know, I, I just use the example of many different projects that I've done. [00:10:44] And, you know, especially when you're working with clients, transparency up front really helps. It sets the stage and make sure that both the client and the supplier are on the same page. And when you start off with that approach, things, like I said, things can go wrong, but you have a plan in place how to mitigate those issues, how do we get on the same page and make sure that whatever things that are an obstacle to the project are taken care of working collaboratively versus, you know, us versus them. [00:11:18] Carla Sarti: Right. Exactly. That's the last thing you want to get into in a project. It's already complex enough, [00:11:24] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah. And, like you mentioned earlier, right, that always something that comes up. You, you have the best of the intentions, but it can be a business challenge. There can be a technology challenge. There can be integration challenges. All different factors play a role into things can go in a different direction very quickly. [00:11:46] Carla Sarti: right? Oh, we didn't know this site had this approval process in here. And oh, this one has a different one. You find things as you get the project going and you have to be agile. You have to be flexible. You can't have. You know, the last thing you want is a supplier that's like, Oh no, you know, this, this is what we were brought in for. [00:12:06] I mean, we can talk about commercials, but you know, let's just all collaborate and get it done. That's where you need that trusted relationship because you don't want the supplier thinking, Oh, okay. They're going to ask me to do this for free. And you don't want the customer to be like, okay, they're not going to be able to do it. [00:12:23] So you've got to have that open dialogue going. [00:12:26] Mustansir Saifuddin: For sure. So, on a personal note, how do you stay on top of this fast changing pace of technology? What's, what's your secret sauce? [00:12:36] Carla Sarti: I've always been a constant learner always right? I mean, and I think being a co op at 18 years old, really drove that in me. It was the time, I kind of want to date myself it was the time when computers were kind of just starting to be used and I saw people just fumbling with the mouse. I mean, think of that in today's day and age, right? [00:13:01] I mean, back then people were fumbling with mice. I was like, oh my goodness, I never want to be in a position where, I'm not kind of at the forefront of technology. And I'm just a learner anyway. So, you know, whether it be books podcasts really from a technology standpoint, I think is what keeps me up to date. [00:13:21] I love the podcast. It's called All in One it's for billionaires that. Actually have very different views on things, whether it be politics or technology or science, and they talk about everything under the sun. Nvidia actually has an AI podcast. It's called the AI podcast, and then there's AI today. [00:13:44] And then being in GBS and shared services, a lot of my career, I stay on top of those things with SSO next. And they talk about technology, tons of technology within that realm as well. I read tons of articles on LinkedIn, the Wall Street Journal, and then definitely leadership books. I know that's not necessarily technology, but. [00:14:05] When you're talking about leading people again through change, and, you know, the best way to be collaborative, I find that to be extremely helpful. Patrick Lencioni is one of my favorite authors The 5 Dysfunctions of Team, one of my favorite authors. Favorite books. And he writes very much like fiction. [00:14:23] So it's really easy to get through. I don't know if you've ever listened to or read Jocko Wilnick's books, but he has extreme ownership and a couple others, phenomenal books, right? I mean, just kind of look at yourself in the mirror and it, it goes to project management, so extreme ownership. Am I doing everything I possibly can to be successful? [00:14:44] Have my team be successful. So really good one for project management. Mustansir. [00:14:50] Mustansir Saifuddin: Nice, I think you've got a whole slew of resources available at your fingertips that's good. I think like one thing that I really liked about your approach, I mean, you've seen it all, you've played different roles, It's refreshing to see someone like you in your space that you still find yourself as a student, you know, still keep on learning and be able to keep yourself ahead of the curve. [00:15:12] And I think that's the key, right? The different roles we play depending on what you're doing your daily job, but at the same time, looking around and seeing what else is going around you. We live in the space of, and the times of Gen AI. AI being disruptive and how it will change our lives. It's already is changing, you know how do you stay ahead or at least keep up with the technology? [00:15:39] I think is the key to your success. So that's what it seems like you you've been very much in tune with it. [00:15:46] Carla Sarti: Absolutely. One of the coolest things I ever did was reverse mentoring. So I had someone younger in the organization mentoring me, right? And then it helps you get into their shoes and understand what drives the next generation. What tools and technology are they using? It's really fascinating. And of course I, I use my kids too. [00:16:08] You know, I have a 19 year old and a 17 year old and just understanding: How they think, what they're looking at, what they're using, chat, what's GPT 4 all about. You know, you got to stay on top of things. [00:16:21] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah, they are the best teachers. I mean you think about technology I mean this younger generation is amazing and how they are adapting and all that. Let's get into the conversation about you know, we talked about successful supplier collaborations very key, right, important but what are some of the common challenges companies face? [00:16:41] With IT suppliers during a project. Can you share some ideas on thoughts on that? [00:16:49] Carla Sarti: I think one of the ones I've seen is where someone's oversold their capabilities, right? You've got a supplier, maybe they did a really good job on one project and they're asked to bid on another. And as a company, and again, trying to find that trusted supplier, it's very easy to fall into, well, let's just use these guys that were successful before. [00:17:13] You've really got to evaluate, are they going to be successful for this project? And of course they want business. Everyone wants business, but you've really got to look and say, okay, can I deliver on this project? Because if I can't. I'm actually going to ruin my reputation within the company. So just being honest and making sure again, from the company's standpoint, you're choosing the right supplier and that the suppliers. [00:17:42] Again, understanding the project that you're trying to implement and maybe they don't understand at first and they think they can deliver on the project. So, as a supplier, I would say, make sure you ask the questions. Be curious. Why are you doing this project? What exactly are you looking for? Oh, okay. [00:18:02] It's in this space. Okay. We don't have people in that space. Well, I can maybe bring people in to do that. You know, really understanding, that side to me, can really change the dynamic there. And then again, I'm not gonna, I'm going to keep talking about the transparency. If the supplier cannot be transparent when there is an issue, it's not going to be good.. I've always told people whether they work for me or a supplier, Bad news doesn't get better with time. You've got to bring these things forward. We've got to come up with solutions together. I don't care whose fault it is. [00:18:38] Mustansir Saifuddin: Yeah, [00:18:39] Carla Sarti: Like, ultimately, I want this project to be successful. So let's work together to get that done. [00:18:45] Mustansir Saifuddin: absolutely Absolutely. I think and and that's where I my question to you is how do you mitigate those issues? Everybody wants a smooth and successful implementation. It's just Everybody thinks that's how it should go, but we all know there are challenges. [00:18:59] Carla Sarti: Mm hmm. [00:19:00] Mustansir Saifuddin: you maybe share some ideas, thoughts on how do you mitigate those issues or something that you may have seen in the past? [00:19:08] Carla Sarti: So we, a lot of times, use just basic project management. Fundamentals, right? You've got your project plan. Are you on plan or not? Then you look at what can go wrong. Okay, you list out all the things that you think could go wrong and you start putting mitigating plans together on that, right? And having meetings around those things. [00:19:31] Okay, guys, how are we doing? Are we getting the data? That's going to be a big thing here. Did we get it? Did we not? What do we need to do? And again, having the right people on the project. So do you have somebody who can go in, break down those roadblocks if things aren't getting done, building the right relationships, again, you got to have the right people who can build relationships. [00:19:53] Project management, as you know, It's almost more about being a psychologist than anything else. I mean, you've got to bring people together that maybe don't normally work together. They have very different personalities. You've got people on the IT side that have different personalities than the project side. [00:20:11] So you've got to make sure that you understand those factors and use project management methodology. It's there for a reason. I mean, I've seen people, they're like, Oh, we don't need a project plan. Yeah. Like what? What are you talking? How do you do a successful project without a project plan? You don't even know what's coming next. [00:20:31] You don't even know where you are in the cycle. Are you on track? Are you not? So I think those things, honestly, like don't overlook the fundamentals. [00:20:41] Mustansir Saifuddin: No, I think that's a great advice. I one thing I, I, I like about your approach or your thinking is a project manager being a psychologist. You know, how many times you go through these, these iterations of projects after projects, you know, being a.supplier ourselves. I mean, I, I really appreciate your thought process on that because there's so many different stakeholders in any given time and project where you may have one stakeholder on board, but you may have someone else either business, I. [00:21:11] T. Whatever else you're working with. They may be either lost. They don't agree with your approach or there's something else that in this space. And you needs someone who can actually mitigate all those different pieces of the, [00:21:25] Carla Sarti: Mm [00:21:26] Mustansir Saifuddin: puzzle and bring it all, all of them together in a way they see the value. [00:21:30] It's all about value proposition and making sure that the end product is what the customer is asking for. Can we deliver? If we can deliver, what is the game plan? How do we go about making sure that we are all on the same page? Because at the end of the day, Once it is delivered correctly, It's a win win, you know. so [00:21:48] Carla Sarti: Hmm. [00:21:49] Mustansir Saifuddin: Do appreciate that insight into it and I know we talked about a lot of different things. I like to ask this one parting question. [00:21:58] What is that one key takeaway? You want to leave with our listeners today. [00:22:05] Carla Sarti: IT projects are very complex. So again, I would say the fundamentals are key. Understand what you're trying to accomplish. That is number one, understand the processes, get the right team involved, the right supplier, and set yourself up for success. So fundamentals. Use project management. Methodology for sure. [00:22:33] I mean, it's there for a reason and have the right, the right people on the project is key. I know I'm doing like five different key takeaways here in Mustansir, but really again, it's just so complex and the fundamentals, the right people and, and the right methodology, key, [00:22:51] Mustansir Saifuddin: No, thank you. Great advice and great takeaways. And I think once we have all these different pieces of the puzzle together, it's a recipe for success. So with that I'd like to conclude our session and I'd like to thank you for coming on on our show It was a pleasure having you. [00:23:08] Carla Sarti: likewise. Thank you for having me. [00:23:10] Mustansir Saifuddin: Thanks for listening to Tech Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Carla shared valuable insights that can be used immediately by your IT team her main takeaway, focus on the fundamentals that include understanding your objectives, involving the right team of staff and suppliers, and stick to solid project management methodologies. [00:23:33] We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners. com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this latest episode, Geoff Scott, of ASUG, joins Mustansir Saifuddin to discuss what is required for businesses to be successful with Gen AI as they prepare for the future. With more than 20 years of leadership and technology experience, including seven years of extensive SAP implementation and operations experience, Geoff understands the impact of Gen AI in digital transformation. Listen in as he also highlights how ASUG is supporting the SAP ecosystem on the Gen AI journey. Geoff Scott, is CEO and Chief Community Officer of ASUG, believes that the connections ASUG makes for our members have the potential to become career-defining relationships that inspire innovation and success for their organizations. His forward-thinking leadership prioritizes helping our members make the most of their investment in SAP technologies. To that end, Geoff works closely with customers, members, the SAP Executive Board, and the extensive partner ecosystem to amplify the voice of the SAP customer.   Past positions include CIO for TOMS Shoes, where he led the implementation of SAP: CIO at JBS; and senior leadership positions at Ford Motor Company. Before becoming CEO, Geoff was an ASUG member and served on the board. Geoff has served on several philanthropic boards and is the founding member of the Denver CIO Executive Council.  Connect with Us: LinkedIn Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter:  @gscott16 @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript   Welcome to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. I'm honored to have Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG, joins me to discuss what is required for businesses to be successful with Gen AI as they prepare for the future. He'll also share valuable insights on how ASUG is supporting the SAP ecosystem on the GEN AI journey. [00:00:02.560] - Mustansir Welcome to TechDriven business, Geoff. How are you?   [00:00:11.190] - Geoff I'm wonderful. How are you today?   [00:00:13.480] - Mustansir I'm doing great. Thank you. Thank you for joining our show.   [00:00:17.570] - Geoff Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Or I should say, you can make that decision after we're done today.   [00:00:23.130] - Mustansir All right. Sounds like a plan. Hey, it's always good to have you, Jeff, especially meeting in person every year, either in the volunteer meeting or at Sapphire or other events. It's always fun to have that conversation with you. Glad to have you on our show.   [00:00:38.390] - Geoff What a pleasure to be here. I want to thank you for your connection and commitment to ASUG, your commitment to the Michigan chapter, one of our most wonderful places to be in all of the United States. I have close ties to Michigan, so it's always wonderful to hear Go Green, for those who are Michiganders, my alma mater. I think that being part of ASUG and being part of this The SAP community is really a tremendous thing. I've been doing the CEO job at ASUG for 10 years. Every year, as you mentioned, we get all 300 volunteers together to plan the year and celebrate our successes and talk about our challenges. It's a tremendous things. So I encourage everyone to be part of ASUG. If you are an SAP professional and you want to be at the top of your game of SAP, there's no better place to be than being an active part of ASUG, which you are. I want to thank you for that.   [00:01:28.530] - Mustansir I second that. Thank you. Thank you. So today, we will be talking about how digital transformation in AI is changing the business landscape. How does that sound to you?   [00:01:39.350] - Geoff I think that sounds like a tremendous conversation.   [00:01:42.040] - Mustansir It absolutely is, and it's going to be fun. So let's start with the basics. Jeff, you have been around for a long time, not counting your-Original dinosaur. Hey, it's all good. But your extensive background with SAP. Can you share with our listeners a brief overview of your career journey?   [00:02:03.150] - Geoff Well, I would love to. As we just spoke about, 10 years as the CEO of Asug, and I don't love the CEO title. I like to think of myself as the Chief Community Champion. My job is to rally us as a community around this SAP software and make sure all of us are getting the most value from it. The organizations that are purchasing the software, we as all professionals in investing our careers into this amazing ecosystem, it's very important that we feel like we make forward progress. We feel that this is a place where we can learn, connect, and grow, which are three of our very important ASUG pillars. That's been a tremendous journey for me for the last 10 years. I didn't come into this intentionally. Prior to that, I was a CIO. I was at Tom's Shoes in Los Angeles. Prior to that, at a beef company, small beef company, only the third largest in the world, in Greenley, Colorado, where we were also an SAP shop. That was where I cut my teeth on being a full-time SAP advocate. Then prior to that, in your neck of the woods, in your backyard, in Deerborn, Michigan, doesn't take a lot to figure out what's in Deerborn these days.   [00:03:08.510] - Geoff So I was there for almost 10 years doing lots of different IT work. And then obviously prior to that, consulting in college and being a teenager and things like that.   [00:03:20.120] - Mustansir That's a wonderful background, Jeff. It's okay. I think the best part about this is being in your role, the role that you're playing at ASOG, your background or your history really brings that tremendous amount of knowledge and technology know-how, which really is what a lot of ASA customers or in general, SAP folks who are dealing with technology on a daily basis can utilize your know-how and your in-depth knowledge of what's going on in the industry versus someone with a background in business. You don't really have that depth in terms of what you bring to the table.   [00:04:00.920] - Geoff You're very kind. You're very kind. In my career, I started off when I was going to college, just a little bit west from where you are. Again, go green. Then that's the last I'm going to say that today, maybe. My degree's in accounting, and I chose that field because I really wanted to understand how business worked. I figured the best way to figure out how business would work is to understand how the money moves around. Accounting was actually a fallback for me. I started I started off in finance, and then this will date me tremendously. Then the stock market collapsed back in the late '80s, and I went, Oh, wait a minute. I don't know I want to be on Wall Street anymore. I grew up in the suburbs of New York City, so I had this delusion I would go back into New York and be on Wall Street. I said, I don't think that's going to work so well. I went to accounting, and I found I liked it better. A little bit more pragmatic. Finance can be fairly esoteric. I came into consulting in IT because I always thought about IT as a way in which businesses can be more efficient.   [00:05:01.780] - Geoff I was always intrigued by how we could use technology to drive business outcomes. That has served me throughout my career. I really think about business outcomes first and technology second.   [00:05:13.390] - Mustansir Absolutely. I think that's what really counts, how business drives technology. That takes me to my next discussion point. Ai. Ai took the business world by storm last year. We all know that. How are ASOG and ASAP supporting their clients with navigating AI and Gen AI in particular. Everybody is about Gen AI, so I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.   [00:05:38.820] - Geoff Yeah, I think that generative AI and all the things related to AI, nothing new to that, Mustache. We've been around in the SAP ecosystem. Ai has been around for a long time. What was new in November of 2022 when ChatGPT first came onto the market was this thing of generative AI. Well, that was different. But most SAP practitioners, the people you and I are talking to today, would say, Hey, we've been filling around AI for a long time. Understanding PDF documents, understanding pictures, converting pictures to text, scanning documents, scanning invoices, making sure we can convert all that. None of that is terribly new. I think generative AI made it mainstream. What was back office technology that was used to achieve business the outcomes all of a sudden became available to the masses. And it became available to the masses in a very simple way. I can sit down, I can write a sentence into a computer, and it will produce paragraphs of very eloquent text. We can have a whole conversation about how accurate it is, but I could finally get this star tracky type of thing, or I could type a sentence in and I would get this back.   [00:06:55.320] - Geoff And I could do cute things. Tell me how to bake a cake in Shakespeare in English, and it would do it. I think it became a piece of technology that everybody could connect to, and that everybody includes the board of directors, the CEO, the rest of your business peers who can now say, I get it. I understand how this works, and I want that for my business. We can make this work for all of us.   [00:07:25.460] - Mustansir I think it's a very interesting point you mentioned, Jeff. We always talk about C-suite, right? And you know that in this-I'm one of them. Yeah, exactly, right? So we talk about, I still get involved with a lot of implementations and boots on ground. And I know that a lot of these technology implementations, you have this gap between the C-suite and folks who are actually involved in the technology day to day, right? Do you think Gen AI is going to close that gap? What is your take on that perspective? Bringing these two worlds together.   [00:08:03.730] - Geoff I think generative AI is going to be an incredibly interesting diversion or departure for all of us in the sense that we've talked about for a long for a long time, the importance of some things in the SAP ecosystem that are near and dear to our heart. Master data, accuracy of data, archiving, things that warm our hearts that make the business run for cover. You want to watch paint dry? Have a conversation about archiving. The challenge with all of that is if we really want to get the most value from a generative AI solution, whether it be SAP's Joule or ChatGuard, GPT or everything in between, our enterprise data has to be lined up correctly. I think this is where we're going to see a tremendous amount of energy and effort to understand how this enterprise data will form these models and make them work. There was an article in the New York Times, I think two weeks ago, and this is topical because last week I was in Las Vegas for a few days at Google Next. And I always go to Google Next, and I also like to try to make it to AWS and Microsoft's events as well, because it refreshes me and it makes me think about how to tackle these problems from different perspectives.   [00:09:29.500] - Geoff And that, coupled with the New York Times article was very interesting to me in that it appears we're running out of trainable data for these models, that our models now are demanding so much data that we can't fill them. And And so there was an interesting topic in Las Vegas about synthetic data, which I'm still wrapping my head around and what that means. I'm trying to understand how we get to the levels of data. We do know one thing that these generative AI models require a lot of data in order to give very effective answers. And even when they have a lot of data, they can still hallucinate. I mean, there's no greater data source than the English language over the last 300 years. And the cool thinking about it is it hasn't really changed all that much. I can take all that stuff and I can pour it in. And yeah, there's different dialects, but the English language or pick a language, French, whatever, it hasn't moved all that much. So the data is fairly stable. Sure. Is that true when we think about our enterprise data? And the problem that I see coming is if we have lots of historical data, what does it really mean?   [00:10:37.900] - Geoff How accurate is it? And then the second big question is, how relevant is it? And if both of those are not at the top of their game, you run a huge risk that your model is being trained on data that isn't accurate, isn't relevant, and then you expect it to give you amazing results. The thing that makes me chuckle is the notion of saying to a model running on top of your SAP data, Hey, what's the best product I should sell? And it spits back a product that you made 15 years ago because it might have been at the time the most profitable based in parts that you don't even have access to anymore. And the model doesn't know that. I think there's another really important part of this whole equation, and that is something that I call gray data. And gray data is the data that's in our heads, in our minds, which is what we use to make decisions that the AI models have zero knowledge of. And the only way long term an AI model will be able to replicate what you do, what I do, what anyone listening today does, is it has exactly what's up in your head.   [00:11:42.850] - Geoff And it's not going to. We still know today in you're involved in SAP implementations all the time, that it takes someone interpreting that data, oftentimes, to understand what it's saying and what cues it's giving. Ai doesn't understand that because it's missing all the stuff that's in your gray space. And if that's the case, and how much of the data that you use to run your enterprise is gray data versus bits and bytes. If the answer is greater than 50 %, 60 %, 70 %, wow, we got a lot of missing data, and the model is not going to be that effective.   [00:12:17.980] - Mustansir For sure. I think it's an interesting point you mentioned about historical data and the quality of data. And that leads me into this next conversation about, I'm an analytics person in data focus. And it's all about good information will produce good results, right? So from that perspective, I'm curious, what are you seeing with ASUG members as it applies to their approach, especially to real-time data and analytics, and also the move to the cloud? Because a lot of things are happening in the cloud. So what is your take in this whole space?   [00:12:53.370] - Geoff Well, certainly, I believe that if you are going to want to participate, play in in a generative AI, AI space, and you say, and probably before you make that conclusion, you have to ask a question, which is, where do you and your organization want to be on the innovation curve? Do you want to be on the very front of it? Do you want to be in the middle of it? Where do you want to be? Now, if you want to be on the very, very back end of the innovation curve, continue doing what you're doing today. If you want to be to the middle of the innovation curve or the front end, and I think about it as a bell curve. If you want to be to the middle to the front end of that curve, and most people don't want to be at the front, you need a lot of courage and a lot of strength to be. That's the scary place. But there are organizations that are there. Let's say you want to be safely in the middle. I don't want to lead the pack. I don't want to trail the pack. I want to be right in the middle.   [00:13:47.870] - Geoff It necessitates three things, I firmly believe. Number one, you have to be in the cloud. Number two, you have to really think about your software investments as software as a service. You're moving the requirement for changes and updates to the software vendor in this world SAP. Number three, as little customization as possible. If you can If you can do those three things and you can do them well, you have the greatest likelihood that you will be able to take all this innovation, absorb it and go. Which to your question is, when you talk about analytics, when you talk about predictive analytics, that's what you're going to For many, many SAP customers, that is a tectonic shift in perspective. And certainly, the longer you have been an SAP customer, and the more customizations you have made for whatever reason. Your business process doesn't line up with SAP's. Sap didn't have a solution for you at the time. We talk about this thing of technical debt, and where I quibble with some of the leading thought people is We tend to say and infer the technical debt is bad. Well, I don't think any of us as SAP practitioners wake up in the morning and say, Today is the day I'm going to build a lot of technical debt.   [00:15:11.820] - Geoff There are some good reasons for it. There might be some bad reasons for it, too. I don't know how to do something, so I'm just going to code it. I get it, but I don't necessarily believe that the technical debt is something that we all strive for. Motherhood and apple pie, as few customizations as possible. The problem now is the stakes are way up because we've learned that you have to be in cloud, you have to be in SaaS, and you have to be almost no customization in order to adopt fast. And that means that we have to be super careful about customization. That creates another problem inside most organizations, and that is how do you handle change control and how do you handle organizational change management? So the IT folks say, Hey, this is good for me. No customization. I'm good to go. And the business says, Well, wait a minute here. I have to retrain thousands of people across 16 time zones in 32 different geographies, and that's hard. And it is. And it is. So how do we find that necessary balance? And I think if you've been on SAP a long time, that transition is not going to happen overnight.   [00:16:14.000] - Geoff It's going to be multiple years, maybe even a decade, dare I say. And if you haven't started your S/4 migration yet, you are fastly running out of time. And so there's no time like the present to start working on that, because absent that, you are going to be perpetually behind. And I don't want to be Cavalier here, Mustanzer, because what I just described is an epic undertaking. But if you get there, predictive analytics is super interesting, right? We have got to figure out a way to take our technology professionals and find ways for them to have more time. Because if we really want to do predictive analytics, it requires us to jump into data sets. It requires us to look at data, plant floor data, log data, all these other things where we haven't traditionally looked for things. In order to find those patterns and those indications and those clues that help us sell more, get more efficient, do other things. And that requires time. And in order to get that time, we have to be more efficient. So if we're going to spend all of our time working on customizations of SAP, we are not going to be doing predictive analytics.   [00:17:18.870] - Mustansir For sure. And I think that's one of the key points you mentioned about that, right? Stop spending time on doing things that are not adding any value, especially in this fast pace, changing constantly on a daily basis. And you put AI in the middle of all this, all of a sudden, your stakes are different, your challenges are different. And at the same time, the time to make those decisions is shrinking for you. So for organizations to be nimble and be able to act quickly, I mean, all the things you just mentioned, I think they go hand in hand, especially a lot of times folks think about analytics as a byproduct, right? It's after the fact. And then What we're thinking or what are you talking here at this point is put analytics in front because that will drive that whole behavior of change of exactly what is important to me. Predictive is one part of it. There's so many different aspects of information which you can put your right brains and your geeks. I mean, everyone has got geeks in the organization. I mean, you want to put those folks to good use. And the best way you can do it is having that Get ahead of the curve, right?   [00:18:31.520] - Mustansir Don't wait, basically.   [00:18:32.910] - Geoff That's what I'm hearing. A hundred %. And I'm excited about the potential of AI to help us migrate systems faster. I'd like to see us use AI to help understand quality in data, to help us understand how we lift and shift business processes out of legacy systems into new systems. I'd like to understand how we use AI to drive business test cases, quality assurance. I believe that we are at a massive inflection point where the upgrading of these systems, you asked a question earlier about digital transformation. We have to move to the next generation of SAP software. I believe that unlocks the gateway to everything we're talking about today. That cannot be a five-year project. We have got to figure out as technology professionals how to automate it, how to make it faster, how to do it and how to make sure we can get an unlock value faster. It's my biggest ask of SAP, and in conversations that I have with their CEO and their leadership team, please stop making new SKUs for new software licenses. I implore you to make your software easier to migrate and uplift and move to the next generation.   [00:19:53.220] - Geoff And can we use some of these AI ML tools to achieve that? It's essential.   [00:19:58.860] - Mustansir For sure. No, for sure. And I think talking about all this technology and SAP, let's come back to our conversation ASAG. Asag is a great start in 2024, right? I mean, personally, I know we had over 150 people at our Michigan Chapter meeting back in February. That is absolutely amazing. So what can ASEC members expect this year from their membership? Can you delve into that?   [00:20:26.820] - Geoff 100 %. First and foremost, I think you said the most important thing where we're seeing the most interest, the most excitement is in our 39 chapters. So if you are an SAP professional and you want to be at the top of your game and you want to learn, connect, and grow, you don't have to jump on an airplane. And of course, we're welcoming you to do that. You don't have to spend hotel room nights. Go to your local ASUG chapter and become involved. You will meet people like you who want to get ahead and understand how to solve problems using SAP. And you're You're in the middle of the Michigan SAP scene. It's amazing. So go spend time there, which is a huge pitch for what you do and why you volunteer is because you want to be part of what's happening on the ground, real-time in geography. And that is what the chapter organization is here to do. And I would really like to see that over the next three to five years grow to epic proportions. I have a challenge. I want to see your Michigan meeting not be just 150 people. I want it to be 350 people.   [00:21:33.460] - Geoff That, to me, is exciting, which is a very different change of perspective from us. But I think in a post-pandemic world, what a great opportunity to get out from behind your laptop. And whether you're back in the office or still working remotely, go spend time with your friends in an ASUG chapter event in Michigan or in California or in Florida. Pick a place and just go and have fun and meet your peers. It'll be so wonderful for you. If that's not good enough, then And enjoy some of the other events that we do. Get online and do some research and education there. We have ASUG annual conference and SAP Sapphire coming up in June. In the fall, we have SAP for utilities. We have ASUG best practices, which is a whole source of industry-based events. And then we cap off the year. This is my most exciting event. We cap off the year in West Palm Beach, Florida, November 12th through 14th with ASUG Tech Connect. It used to be called TechEd, but we've reconfigured TechEd with SAP. So TechEd is a virtual program. But in North America, it's ASUG Tech Connect. So if you want to wrap up 2023, sorry, 2024, getting my years all confused, and get ready for an amazing 2025, ASUG Tech Connect is the place to be.   [00:22:46.120] - Geoff And I think those are fine. What else can you do? First Five newsletter comes out every Monday morning. It's an amazing place to just get a recap of the top five articles that happened in the SAP ecosystem over the last week. Podcast, you and I are in a podcast Today. Everyone's doing podcast. Aseg does podcast. Be there. Let's get together at Campus Connect. Citadel University, University of Texas at Dallas, Fayetteville State University, and then my favorite at Michigan State University. There's my last plug for Go Green, are all very much in the Campus Connect program. What a great way to have this next generation of talent, get excited about the careers that we've been so fortunate to have in the SAP ecosystem.   [00:23:29.360] - Mustansir For I think there is a lot to learn. And the best thing about it, like you said, there's so many mediums. You pick what makes sense to you, what really florts your boat, especially after the pandemic. A lot of folks are open to coming out and meeting others and getting to know what's coming exciting. No, put it this way. Excitement is one thing. You get to meet people and either it's online, either it's in person or you're traveling somewhere else. Or like you mentioned, June. June, big event. A lot of new things are being shared and you understand and know exactly where SAP is going, where ASAG wants to take you in your journey. And as an organization, you want to learn from your peers, right? And That's the best opportunity. And one thing I like about your plug for the November event, you cannot go wrong with it. Exactly. You end your year on something that you really want to take into next year, and that and search your basis for exactly what you want to do. A lot of opportunities. I really love the whole platform that you explained so well.   [00:24:37.180] - Geoff Thank you. There is a lot going on inside the SAP ecosystem. It is a wonderful place for professionals like you, me, and everyone else, 130,000 of us in North America, to make our home, to learn, connect, grow, to thrive. And all you got to do is just raise your hand and go to a chapter meeting, meet with people outside of your your standard core team that you might be working on SAP for, and the whole world will be unlocked for you. And it'll make you feel like what you're doing has value, that the things you're learning can have a place in this broader ecosystem. We are going to need a lot more talent who stands there in the next 10 years than we have today. It frightens me about how much change is happening, and I believe we all find very rewarding careers inside of SAP.   [00:25:27.700] - Mustansir Now, I think the future is really bright And I know we can talk for hours, Jeff. I mean, your knowledge, your passion for technology and SAP. But I do have to finish our session, our talk for today. I'd like to leave with this one question for you. As far as topics and discussions you covered, what is the one key takeaway that you want our listeners to leave with?   [00:25:55.440] - Geoff I believe the key takeaway today is generative AI is real. The faster you get in and start contemplating what it can and can't do. We are trying inside of Asug lots of different technologies, and we're fiddling, and we have this experimental culture. Let's go try some stuff. It's good. And I think we We're doing a lot with video to text, recaps, things like that. I think there's a ton of upside to all of this. Go get yourself immense in AI.   [00:26:25.780] - Mustansir Yeah, for sure. I think that's a great advice. And It seems like a lot of folks who are still on the edges, it's time for them to move on and get on this bandwagon because this train has started rolling and there's no stopping. At least I don't see it in the near future.   [00:26:43.870] - Geoff Today is the worst day AI ever will be. It will get better from here, and it's going to be on an exponential scale. So don't wait another three, four weeks or months or years. Get in now.   [00:26:54.490] - Mustansir Great advice. Thank you. Now, this is an awesome conversation. Really enjoyed the talk, and I would love to get you back in the future. Whenever you need. Feedback on how things have settled down once we traverse through the 2024.   [00:27:10.980] - Geoff We are here for you, and I appreciate greatly everything you do for the community, for the SAP community, for ASUG, and everything you do in Michigan. Thank you.   Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Geoff delved deep into the transformative power of Gen AI shared valuable insights on how organizations can transform business with Generative AI. His main takeaway? Generative AI is real. Go get yourself immersed in AI as today is the worst day AI will ever be. We'd love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our You Tube channel. Information is in the Show Notes

In this latest episode, Mustansir Saifuddin delves into the ever-evolving landscape of Gen AI with Todd Kackley, Vice President and CIO of Textron. Todd shares how his team implemented their inaugural generative AI solution and the crucial role leaders play in crafting scalable, well-governed, and future-proof data analytics and AI infrastructure. Todd shares invaluable insights into striking the balance between leveraging third-party capabilities and developing in-house models, shedding light on the dynamic interplay between proprietary solutions and open source technologies. Whether you're a seasoned leader or a budding enthusiast, understanding the nuances of Gen AI and its implications is key to driving innovation and staying ahead in today's digital landscape. Todd A. Kackley is vice president and chief information officer for Textron Inc. In this role, he leads the business unit chief information officers and the Textron Information Services (TIS) organization. He oversees Textron's Information Management Council and manages Textron's information technology supplier and outsourcing relationships. Prior to his current role, Kackley was executive vice president and chief information officer for Bell where he developed and executed IT and digital strategy, aligning business systems, infrastructure, cybersecurity and development capabilities to the needs of the business. Connect with Us: LinkedIn Todd Kackley Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:00.890] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome to TechDriven business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Today, an old friend, Todd Kackley, Vice President and CEO of Textron, joins me to delve into the ever evolving landscape of Gen AI. Todd shares insights into implementing their inaugural generative AI solution and the pivotal role leaders play in crafting a scalable, well-governed, and future-proof data analytics and AI infrastructure.   [00:00:40.270] - Mustansir Saifuddin So thank you for joining the session today. Today, we will be talking about any organization's readiness to embrace Gen AI. And I would like to get your perspective on this topic. So with that, I would like to get into our session.   [00:00:57.060] - Todd Kackley Let's do it.   [00:00:59.280] - Mustansir Saifuddin Awesome. Great. So let me start with, as you lead your organization in these times of quicker adoption, we see this across the board, across technologies. When we talk about AI-driven solutions, how are you and your team striking a balance between leveraging third-party capabilities versus developing in-house models?   [00:01:24.640] - Todd Kackley Well, Mustansir I think that's a very good question. And this is also something very relevant for us at Textron. We recently implemented our first production generative AI solution, and that solution leverages a third-party proprietary generative AI model. And part of that decision making was certainly there's a lot involved in developing artificial intelligence models as a technology company as well at Textron. We've dealt with AI, and it's been part of our product offering and some of the things that we do around geospatial analysis and other things. And we built models in the past. So the decision to make versus buy, it wasn't necessarily one that we had to approach when it comes to generative AI, because I think this is an area where it's certainly a buy, leverage third-party models because of the capability and the massive amounts of compute and investments required to go off and build a model, the capability that we're We're seeing coming from third-party proprietary models that are secure. And certainly that's something that's very important to us, making sure that we leverage a third-party model that is secure and allows us to be able to work within the confines of our data tenant and be able to leverage the benefits of the OpenAI, but at the same time protecting our sensitive data.   [00:02:58.640] - Mustansir Saifuddin Now that makes sense. I mean, let's fast forward, right? Are you even looking at in-house models sometimes in the future, or is this something that you think a third party will give you the leverage that you're looking for as far as technology as well as security? One of the big question marks right now with Gen AI.   [00:03:16.820] - Todd Kackley In our defense businesses, it's something we're certainly possibly kicking around where there may be smaller scale opportunities for us to build lambda-based models or others using Compute technology that's not massive data center type of the computing horsepower that you need to be able to do something as large as an Open AI or an Azure AI type of experience. I contend that most of the use cases that we're seeing right now, I think there's a difference that people need to look at when they approach this question, and it's what What outcome are you trying to achieve? And if the outcome is, I want quick analysis or summarization or content generation and so forth, recreating that wheel and trying to build that model may not make sense where those third-party proprietary models already exist to do that. In fact, I'm seeing even in the ecosystem of development of workbenches and use cases around these third-party models, there are several developments already in place that have the turnkey copilot for a contract's evaluation or proposal generation or service centers and doing things like help desk. Those are accelerating the ability to implement quickly and get value quickly. And even the model itself, I read something yesterday that It just blew my mind that the evolution of ChatGPT 3.5 to 4.0 to 5.0 is at a pace that it's reinventing itself about every six months.   [00:05:12.810] - Todd Kackley And that's 4xMaur's law. If you think about that, the pace of Maur's. As a technologist, that just blows my mind.   [00:05:21.990] - Mustansir Saifuddin For sure. I think that leads me into my next question. When we talk about proprietary solutions versus open source, How does that affect your strategy?   [00:05:34.270] - Todd Kackley Well, I certainly appreciate how open source really drives innovation, and it really OpenAI is a good example. Openai is a good example. The release of ChatGPT a little more than a year ago as an open source technology has really fundamentally changed the perception of artificial intelligence and pretty much put the technology technology in the hands of the everyday consumer. You don't need to have a PhD in neural network to go off and understand how to interact with artificial intelligence. In fact, I think that has really accelerated. It's the fastest adopted technology hitting the 100 million user mark in less than two months. But at the same time, as a technologist, I think we've seen over time that there are certainly risks with some of the open source technologies, whether they become proprietary at some point or they get consumed by some player and they now become a fee-based application, and you've already committed to the technology. We've seen that across some of the major players that consume other open source technologies, and they turn around and license it. That's certainly a risk. It's certainly something that you can't undermine or underestimate the amount of patching and keeping up with the vulnerabilities of open source technology, because I think they're a little more susceptible to one of the vulnerabilities.   [00:07:11.670] - Todd Kackley But it's certainly something we have to weigh out when we make decisions around using proprietary technologies versus open source.   [00:07:21.460] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah. I think what I'm hearing from you, it seems like a lot of that is dependent on your business model and your individual needs as an organization, right?   [00:07:31.620] - Todd Kackley Absolutely. It's not just, let's go find the lowest cost solution always. You have to take into consideration many aspects not just is it the best solution? Is it a secure solution? Is it one that's going to endure, that's going to have a life cycle that is going to sustain? Because you don't make a technology investment. You hope not to make a technology investment and expect It's like that they only have a couple of years life cycle. You want it to endure a little bit. Sometimes what we've seen in the ecosystem, even in the larger players, in the consolidation of certain applications of the stacks and so forth, and the reinventing of those stacks, it's really forced us to stand back and look at all of these investments to make sure that there's going to be viability in the solution provider to continue to support, do investments, and continue to evolve that product set, whether it's a small individual capability or a larger enterprise-wide program.   [00:08:42.080] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, for sure. I think longevity and durability It seems like it needs to be built in the solutions that you're looking for, right?   [00:08:50.300] - Todd Kackley Absolutely.   [00:08:51.310] - Mustansir Saifuddin So thinking about from an experience perspective, you got years of experience, both in business and technology. What are some of the good use cases of AI-driven solutions that you've seen deliver tangible business value? I mean, it's all about providing value to business and then at the same time building trust with the business. What's your take on that?   [00:09:13.760] - Todd Kackley Well, we go back a long ways Mustansir. I appreciate you not actually stating how long I've been doing this job, but it feels like much longer. But it's interesting. The whole generative, as I just said, the whole generative AI thing, if you think even a year and a half ago, this wasn't on the radar for most CIOs or most technologists in general. And now it's pretty much consumed most of our discussions. For sure. So we decided here at Textron to take a look at an applicable use case. And while there are lots of analysis on where these capabilities actually work well or maybe provide the best value, we focused on our service center area of opportunity. And when you think about a services business where you have large volumes of data, not just on how you support, sustain that customer's product and the history of sustaining that customer's product, but you also have the combination of data around all of your All of your technical publications, all of your engineering specifications, everything known. And many of our products are in a regulated business, like commercial jets and so forth, or helicopters. So you have a lot of data that you need to maintain, and having that in disparate sources or even trying to make it accessible to a maintenance technician or a service center, call center resource, sometimes is a challenge.   [00:11:06.350] - Todd Kackley So we sought to try to accelerate the access to content internally for our maintenance technicians in our service centers, and it certainly provided an opportunity for them to have a capability, allow them to quickly either troubleshoot or identify content and point them to the the latest publication, latest operating procedure, latest set of instructions, and give them some insights as to how they should consider approaching either troubleshooting or diagnostics types of activities. We're certainly seeing that that's going to drive a measurable impact in the time that these maintenance technicians normally spend in front of a computer. They would rather spend time turning wrenches and doing the work to repair the aircraft and get our customers back in the air. And that's where the value is, having our customers' aircraft not sitting on the ground in our service centers, but in the air. So we see that not just in our aircraft industry, our business. But we also see that opportunities across anywhere we're providing a customer support type of solution. You think about even in IT, The help desks, we have... Most large organizations have a level one, level two, level three type of help desk.   [00:12:38.140] - Todd Kackley And as questions go from level one to level two, and level two to level three, the cost of that answer continues to get higher. So bringing the information and the ability to solve that person's question closer to level one, or maybe not even needing level one at all, if you're bringing it to the user, it And yourself, most people that I know, when you have a general household issue, you go to YouTube. How do I solve this? How do I fix this? And before you call the service technician, everything, you try to figure out. And I think users are more inclined to do that if they have access to the right information at their fingertips, and it's useful and current and timely. So I think those are really applicable use cases.   [00:13:30.620] - Mustansir Saifuddin No, I think for sure, what I'm hearing from you is time to delivery, right? And the example you use of YouTube is so real. Every day we do this, we look up things and we are trying to find things. How can we apply the same approach in a business scenario, in an organization which has got all these different levels of teams and support systems in place? The time to delivery to a customer, either internal or external, makes a lot of sense. I And this whole use case, especially when you talk about what Gen AI can do, seems like it's just helping get to the answers much faster than we ever comprehend it in the past.   [00:14:13.560] - Todd Kackley I agree. I do think it's going to transform how knowledge workers and beyond that, even the example of the shop floor of workers that we're having, the maintenance technicians, they're very excited because if you think about it, we have a... Most organizations have a challenge around keeping talent and skills and the continued evolution of having to provide them with the training and the knowledge. And the generative AI opportunities that allow us to use content generation for training or just the accessibility to the information levels the field a little bit from somebody that maybe 20, 30 years of experience to somebody that has less. So they all are leveraging the same resource and getting that expert information to help them accelerate their jobs. So I'm excited about that. I think that's going to help, particularly help us bring in the next workforce in the future and prepare them for the skills.   [00:15:25.600] - Mustansir Saifuddin No, totally. I totally agree on that. So taking a little segue over here, on On a personal note, where do you go do your research? What are some of the readings that you're currently doing? Would you like to share?   [00:15:39.140] - Todd Kackley So particularly on the topic of generative AI, there's a lot to stay on top of. I certainly follow most of the leading business journals and tech journals, and stay on top of that. I've got a lot of flags in my search criteria to be able to pop up new things that are coming up, and certainly look for those articles. And I follow several podcasts and tech leaders, spend a lot of time talking to systems integrators as well. And then I have a very large network that I belong to a number of professional organizations with technical leaders, CIOs, and we have a lot of discussions on this topic as well. It's an evolving topic, and I find that not just generative AI, there are several disciplines when leading an information technology organization that one needs to stay on top of. And then I try to find time also to read self-development books, things certainly leadership and books on organizational change and leading large organizations and working across generations. So there are tons of resources. I think the most valued resource is in your peer network, having an opportunity to sit with peers in the same type of role that you have and have those discussions, whether it's a chief information officer, Chief Information Security Officer, CTO, even an analyst in a business function or a technical function, having that ability to work with their peer group and understand what's going on day to day helps them develop their self-awareness and their knowledge of their skills.   [00:17:48.750] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah. It seems like your time is filled with all these different areas where you're pulling in the information and making sure that you're applying those your day to day operations as well as your learning that you're going through.   [00:18:05.910] - Todd Kackley I can't profess all of it sticks. I mean, there's probably more content going in that actually I can retain. But it's one of these things I find that having conversations about it and checking your understanding, this gener AI, going back to that quickly, my having to understand how all of this works and feeling comfortable with the solutions that we're looking to bring forward and how those operate safely, securely, and understanding how we explain that to the users and leaders as well. That's a big piece of that, being able to understand the capabilities and technology enough to assure key stakeholders and leaders that we're making the right decisions as Absolutely.   [00:19:01.290] - Mustansir Saifuddin Absolutely. So let's talk about from a Gen AI perspective, right? It is so new. It's a developing area for both business and technology. How do you see leaders such as yourself establishing a data, analytics, and AI infrastructure that is both scalable, well-governed, and at the same time, future-proof? It's a lot of things in one, but I-Yeah.   [00:19:29.970] - Todd Kackley That's a really good question. One of the things that we're still having a discussion on is there's been several years in the data and analytics, and I know you and I go back several years in the data analytics space originally. And organizations have spent a lot of time and money and effort putting together large data lakes or a focus on structured data for the purpose of data and analytics, for the purpose of dashboards, for the purpose of possibly maybe even more impactful data sciences and driving more value out of predictive and prescriptive type of data analysis and so forth. And that's all part of this evolution, I think. And we're still getting our arms around this. There's And maybe I'll just say this, and whether people think I'm right or wrong, we'll let them be the judge of that. But I think there's a Venn diagram here where data sciences and data analytics overlaps with the generative AI, and there's something in the middle of that Venn diagram. But the difference is when you're really focused on the predictive and the prescriptive repeatable model of a data science model where I need this machine learning algorithm to drive a very predictable output, understanding whether or not my machine on the shop floor is performing predictably, and I can identify when it's varying off of its function versus the generative AI type of experience where I need very comprehensive analysis with structured and unstructured data versus the data science, which may be more structured and curated data.   [00:21:40.160] - Todd Kackley I've often described it to people. I see data sciences as I'm looking for the needle in the haystack, and I see generative AI is what's in the haystack? And oh, by the way, there's a needle. So there are two different ways to look at it. I think when it comes to making decisions around the whole data side of this, data governance and data ownership is going to be a key piece of that, and it always has been, because ultimately, neither side works well with bad data. So that's certainly going to be something that's going to continue to drive the discussion. But I think a bigger piece of this is going to change the The way we think about architecting our data, whether or not it needs to be as structured as we've had in the past. We were just having this conversation the other day with our senior leaders in the past to build something like a chatbot or to build something like a very large search engine, you had to spend time creating the database, creating the indexes, creating all the special keys, doing all the tables and everything you to do, and then do all the programming around it.   [00:23:02.920] - Todd Kackley With generative AI, it doesn't matter really what structure your data is in. It's really about the prompt and how you ask the question and interface with the model to get the answer. So I do think we have to make a clearer distinction on what tool sets are used for what purposes, because you can't always use one or the other to solve the same thing. But that's going to be the challenge for technologists as they look at, do I need a data mart? And one of the risks here also When you're dealing with data, this is ultimately replicating all this data over multiple places and paying for it in multiple places and so forth. So you have to think about that. What's the architecture? Does it sit natively in the application and AI works around it. So we'll see. It's still too early to tell, but I think those are things that we have to directionally think about.   [00:24:09.750] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, definitely. I think it's an evolution, and we are just getting into it, finding ourselves right in the middle of it. Great discussion so far. But based on all that we have covered so far, what is that one key takeaway that you want to leave with our listeners today?   [00:24:30.030] - Todd Kackley Well, if we're talking about, since the theme has been largely generative AI, I think the key takeaway is that There may be a few, but I think when you're having the discussion around generative AI, it's important to understand that many organizations have been doing AI for a while. Data sciences is part of that evolution, building an algorithm and building a model and so forth. So I've seen peers in my industry and others, even not in my industry, their immediate reaction was, we've got to shut this genervate eye down or we need to go slowly. And the reality is, I think it's an evolution of what we've been normally doing with It's things like machine learning and algorithms and so forth. And it's something that regardless of whether or not, and I'm finding here, regardless of whether or not you have a position on to go fast and forward or to be more risk averse and hold back, the users are going to find a way to use this capability. And that's probably the big message here. If you're a technologist listening to this and you think you've got ChatGPT blocked or you're shutting down and saying, We're going to go slow.   [00:26:05.320] - Todd Kackley Trust me, your users are finding a way to use this technology to help them with their jobs. And you're going to have to figure out how to make it part of your business processes going forward in a secure manner that meets the requirements of the business and the need. And and embrace it because it's not going to go away.   [00:26:34.360] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Todd shared valuable insights on how organizations can transform business with generative AI. His main takeaway, Gen AI is here to stay. If you are a technologist, know that users are finding a way to use this technology to help them with their jobs. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

Meagan Knoll and Tom McGinnis, long-time collaborators and educators rejoin me to dive into what it takes for employers and universities to succeed with the SAP University Alliances program. Although employers may find it daunting, Meagan and Tom share valuable tips on how employers can engage with universities and students alike to develop a qualified talent pipeline. Meagan Knoll has been a member of Grand Valley State University Faculty for the past 16 years. In addition to her longstanding dedication to academia, Meagan has achieved a new milestone as the Vice Chair of the SAP North America Academic Community Board and as the Co-Chair of the Partnership Committee. Meagan's commitment to student success extends beyond the classroom. She takes great pride in her extracurricular role as the advisor of the university's SAP student group, a community that serves as a crucial bridge connecting students to professionals within the SAP ecosystem. Outside of GVSU, Meagan remains deeply involved with the ASUG Michigan Chapter, where she currently holds a position on the Senior Leadership Team (SLT).   Thomas McGinnis has industry experience as a Software Developer, Business Analyst, System Administrator ERP Consultant and Project Manager. Tom also has 20 years of experience in academia.  He has a Master of Science and a Ph.D. in the field of Business Information Systems; he is an SAP-certified Associate Consultant and TERP10 academy instructor.  Tom has developed and taught courses in Enterprise Resource Planning (using SAP), Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing.  He is active in his local ASUG Chapter; frequently presenting new and developing aspects of Business Intelligence at chapter meetings.   Tom's research work has appeared in peer reviewed journals, in book chapters and numerous conference proceedings.  Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Meagan Knoll Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  X: @Mmsaifuddin Innovative Solution Partners YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:00.890] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome to TechDriven business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Meagan Knoll and Tom McGinnis, long-time collaborators and educators, rejoin me to share how SAP University Alliances is impacting the IT industry talent pipeline. Listen in as we uncover the value of UA programs, how employers leaders can connect with universities and the key takeaways for fostering successful partnerships in the ever-evolving tech landscape. All right, So let's start with the very basics.   [00:00:46.430] - Mustansir Saifuddin When we talk about University Alliance, what is the real value of the UA program in building a talent pipeline overall from an IT industry perspective?   [00:01:00.900] - Meagan Knoll Well, let me get started with telling you some of the unique opportunities that the University Alliances offers, and I think that will really segue into some of the value that comes from it. So the University Alliances has a lot of different initiatives behind the scenes. They offer training and workshops to faculty so that we're always on the cusp of new technology and emerging technology. They allow us to have hands-on access to SAP systems so that our students can explore and learn really the basics and the extended knowledge of being within the SAP system. They offer a lot of curriculum resources. How can we impart this knowledge onto the students in a very hands-on way? And a curriculum that is pretty standardized across the University alliances, so we can pool our talents to troubleshoot and provide these really in-depth curriculum opportunities. Then one of the best, I think, when it comes to connecting SAP employees or SAP users, is it helps faculty and students collaborate with those experts. For new emerging technologies or maybe a specific line of business, they really help make that connection so that we're talking to the right people and having the students learn the right content.   [00:02:29.740] - Meagan Knoll Then they offer certifications and badges, which is really great for the students to not only leave with a degree from a university, but with a SAP certification There's many different ones that can be taken, but a value at the student level is that that certification has tangible learning objectives that they can take from their degree at the university and then apply them to those certificates and badges.   [00:03:07.990] - Mustansir Saifuddin That sounds incredibly awesome. I hear a few things when you talk about this at length. One is that not only the students are getting benefit, but even the teaching staff has got that breadth of knowledge by going through this program.   [00:03:28.760] - Mustansir Saifuddin Tom, from where you said, what do you see the value?   [00:03:32.500] - Mustansir Saifuddin What is that comes to you when you talk about UA program?   [00:03:36.870] - Tom McGinnis It's the continuation of exactly that. With the students and the faculty getting together, it provides a great deal of value for the employer that's going to be hiring those students. You have students who are arriving on site on day one that have a process understanding. They understand, if you will, the of SAP. They know what master data is. They know what the org structure of the organization could be. They understand the transactions. That fundamental knowledge of all those pieces really adds a great deal of value. Usually In the UA, a majority of the schools are worried about the make-buy-sell process. The value is not that the new hire has the company's specific business processes in mind, but But they know how to translate what they got out of the UA program into the organization and translate that into reporting, data sourcing, data-driven decisions. It really lets them hit the ground running, and the businesses can get a great deal out of that. At the same time, the students get a great deal out of that as well because they understand the value of what this means to business. Normally, speak to students about what's important, and they accept that.   [00:05:04.310] - Tom McGinnis When they see the University Alliance and how it partners with business, they now get a real value for that, and they're no longer passive in their education. We see students really jumping on board and augmenting skills more and more. So it improves both the business side as well as the student side. It's really fun to watch.   [00:05:25.790] - Mustansir Saifuddin For sure. I think I can totally relate to it. I mean, you would Your choice of words, especially when you talk about translating, translation, it is so much important. When you talk about a business, there are certain parameters they run and they use certain terminologies, technologies, and then everything is coming together to make up a business environment. And a student who is exposed to it very early on, they now are able to simulate in the new system because it's just natural to them now. That takes me to my next question, which is, look from an employer's perspective. Where can employers find a university they can connect with who has got the UA program?   [00:06:15.890] - Meagan Knoll The University Alliances, of the schools that participate in the program who offer some SAP courses, they always have one point person that's called the Faculty Coordinator. This point person is a great go-to as a person to learn about what offerings they have, if they have any student groups, if they have any needs or things that they want to connect over. There's also some great advisory board opportunities. A lot of local universities who offer the SAP program have advisory boards where different companies can sit on those advisory boards and help direct the curriculum choices. There's a really good touch point, which is Career Services. Contacting a local university's Career Services to see if they have an SAP program, if they have a University Alliances program, and getting your foot in the door with Career Services can then open not only the doors to the courses that were offered and the student body that makes up those courses, but also ways to really get engaged when it comes to maybe taking the students on for internships or taking the students on for an entry-level career.   [00:07:42.330] - Mustansir Saifuddin Wow. There are so many different aspects and avenues for employers to interact with a university that has got the program going, right? Now, looking from a different angle, what do you expect from prospective employers? What is that you guys want or the students are looking for?   [00:08:05.550] - Tom McGinnis There's a couple of things. Part of it is being active or participating with the faculty and the students. It also brings together the folks to talk about what the requirements are and expectations. I know Megan and I have worked with a lot of students in bringing companies into the student group to just talk hiring practices, talk about what's the average day in the office. That opens up their eyes. It also gets the employers in to help assess the program, if you will, because Not all programs are made equal. Some schools will have larger programs than others. Sometimes a school will have dedicated SAP coursework, meaning a full 15-week course dealing with business processes. Activities, dealing with configuration, dealing with warehouse management or building a data warehouse. And along with that, there might be snippets in other courses. So the accounting course may have a two-week discussion around SAP and what accounting looks like. A supply chain course might touch upon procurement just for a few weeks in the semester. There are different ways of teaching the classes, and employers can come in and take a look at that and see what they're looking for. Students see the employers coming in and get an understanding of what the employers are looking for, and everyone starts to dial in on what they like.   [00:09:43.650] - Tom McGinnis In some of the programs I've taught in, a majority of the students taking the courses, SAP courses, are not MIS students. They're not technology people. They're business process people because they see that the employers value that business process understanding. It's really fun to watch that eke out. Then faculty, of course, get involved because they want their courses to be relevant to employers. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy where everyone's feeding off each other's energy to ramp up the programs. It's really exciting to see that happen.   [00:10:23.260] - Mustansir Saifuddin Now, that's interesting. I think one point that I really got out of this is as an employer ourselves, at Innovative Solution Partners, basically what I'm hearing is you want us to be there, interact with the program and students, and get to know what is being taught. And this is one way of Getting the value out of the program because each program has got its own merit in terms of what has been taught in the program. And each school has a different curriculum. So this way an employer has an opportunity to get to know what they will be dealing with or what they will be getting in terms of the talent that they're looking for.   [00:11:09.540] - Meagan Knoll To speak to that point, let me give you some examples of some opportunities that have taken place at a lot of University Alliances schools. There's something called the NextGen Labs. Nextgen Labs are a space within the university where they can do hands-on projects for or a community partner. If your business has a small project that maybe you don't have the bandwidth to take on and it involves SAP in some way, you could turn it over to a course at a university, and the students could work on solving that problem for you or making that report that you need. That's one great way to preview the talent because those students that are on that next-gen project who are going to be meeting with you and talking about it and presenting it gives you a great insight into what type of employee those students might become. Another one that is pretty popular is code jams. A great way to connect with the students and see the students in action would be to participate in a code jam. A lot of SAP organizations or user groups groups, they have code jams put on by SAP. Students can attend those as much as the employees at the different businesses can attend.   [00:12:39.710] - Meagan Knoll And having that mix between students and professionals is a great way to see that blossoming talent and really connect with them before you hire them on.   [00:12:53.380] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's very interesting. So I know I'm familiar with code jam for sure. This next Gen program that you mentioned, it seems very interesting also. It seems like there are multiple ways a prospective employer can connect and interact and get a first-hand look at the talent that they're dealing with or they will we're going to be approaching in the future. So this is really good news.   [00:13:18.880] - Mustansir Saifuddin Now, let's take a different approach.   [00:13:24.130] - Mustansir Saifuddin I know you are being an educator, you're dealing with students day in, day out. How How are you preparing these young people to be productive from the get-go?   [00:13:35.620] - Meagan Knoll I think it takes more than just an individual faculty member. It's really, most of these SAP University Alliances programs are housed in a larger college, like the College of Business. It takes that whole roundabout knowledge of the tactical things, the systems thinking, the hands-on, education, all the different insights that come from career services and come from extracurriculars, even leadership type roles that students might have on campus. It really takes a large ecosphere at the university level to really prepare the students to go forth. And the UA gives a really great mix that universities can already add on to their great programs, but it just gives that little bit of extra edge.   [00:14:29.920] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, that makes sense, because especially when you think about these programs, I know it feels like sometimes when you think about these programs, you are looking at one part of it, but it's an overall scheme of things It makes sense to have it as the way it's set up, like you mentioned.   [00:14:49.740] - Mustansir Saifuddin Tom, you have any other points that you want to share about this, especially when you're preparing young folks?   [00:14:57.940] - Tom McGinnis Part of it is there's There's a couple of aspects to it. It's more from the employer side of things is when you're looking at programs, as I said before, they're not all the same. Oftentimes, I see companies struggle with how to participate, how to put their foot in in those cases. Megan has mentioned career services and all those opportunities, but part of it is assessing the schools that you partner with. Most organizations already have a set list of schools that they recruit from. It could be just as simple as going out and looking to see if one of their current schools is on that list. Sap, www. Sap. Com, they have a list of UA schools. If you have a list of 10, 15 local schools that you recruit from, it's worth checking to see whether those schools are there on that list. Then you just take a look at their program. How many students do they have? What's the mix of majors? How involved are the faculty? What courses are involved in that? Lastly, as Megan said, the certifications. You're looking at that holistically and bringing that all together, and that's where you get some of those unique views.   [00:16:19.160] - Tom McGinnis The faculty oftentimes go along for the ride because they see the interest in those programs. It's a great way of getting that synergy involved. I think that's the thing I want to stress. It's the combination of faculty organizations and the students. That's what really brings this home as a value prop for everyone involved.   [00:16:44.870] - Mustansir Saifuddin For sure. I think this subject is such a vast subject, and we can keep on going, but we do have a time limitation. I'll try to wrap this up. Just looking at all the discussions we had so far and what we covered, what is the one key takeaway that you want our listeners to go with?   [00:17:10.720] - Meagan Knoll In preparing and talking and getting this topic on the top of our minds, the one takeaway that really stood out to us is that old adage of, You reap what you sow. So the more involved that you are in that synergy of students and faculty and organizations the more that your connection and your internship possibilities, your young career possibilities will flourish.   [00:17:39.870] - Tom McGinnis There's opportunities out there for companies to harvest these diamonds in the rough, we call it. Fantastic performers that are sitting there in school not quite knowing what they want to do yet, who are going to really flourish in the right environment. It's just getting those folks together and seeing the value on on all their sides. And oftentimes, I see organizations not taking advantage of this because they have some self-imposed barrier to entry in this recruiting scheme. And there's nothing there. It's a simple call to Career Services to find out who on campus could I talk to and going from there. Or it's leveraging your current grads and whatever alumni associations you have in your company, using them to go out and recruit on campus. So there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that's there for people to take advantage of. Yeah, and I think I would like to sum it up with this is almost like a matchmaking   [00:18:45.870] - Mustansir Saifuddin You have the right set of talent on both sides, right?   [00:18:51.530] - Mustansir Saifuddin In our business, looking for individuals or teams that they want to bring into their fold. And the university is looking at placing these young individuals into a system where they can flourish and they can get a sense of what they are getting into. And it seems like the UA program allows them to do both of it in a way that interaction starts so much earlier than any other program where you are doing the book study versus not having that real-life exposure. I really appreciate you guys coming together and sharing your thoughts on this.   [00:19:38.430] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Meagan and Tom shared valuable insights on how IT firms can leverage the University Alliance program. Their main takeaway, the more involved that you are in that synergy of students, faculty, and organizations, the more impact the program will have. There is a lot of low hanging fruit that's there for people to take advantage of. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss our podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this next series of episodes, Megan Knoll and Tom McGinnis, long-time collaborators and educators join me to talk about how companies can leverage the SAP University Alliances to build their talent pipeline. In this first episode, we'll start with an overview of how the program is helping shape a skilled workforce and benefiting students, educational institutions, industry partners, and SAP.  Meagan Knoll has been a member of Grand Valley State University Faculty for the past 16 years. In addition to her longstanding dedication to academia, Meagan has achieved a new milestone as the Vice Chair of the SAP North America Academic Community Board and as the Co-Chair of the Partnership Committee. Meagan's commitment to student success extends beyond the classroom. She takes great pride in her extracurricular role as the advisor of the university's SAP student group, a community that serves as a crucial bridge connecting students to professionals within the SAP ecosystem. Outside of GVSU, Meagan remains deeply involved with the ASUG Michigan Chapter, where she currently holds a position on the Senior Leadership Team (SLT).   Thomas McGinnis has industry experience as a Software Developer, Business Analyst, System Administrator ERP Consultant and Project Manager. Tom also has 20 years of experience in academia.  He has a Master of Science and a Ph.D. in the field of Business Information Systems; he is an SAP-certified Associate Consultant and TERP10 academy instructor.  Tom has developed and taught courses in Enterprise Resource Planning (using SAP), Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing.  He is active in his local ASUG Chapter; frequently presenting new and developing aspects of Business Intelligence at chapter meetings.   Tom's research work has appeared in peer reviewed journals, in book chapters and numerous conference proceedings.  Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Meagan Knoll Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  X: @Mmsaifuddin @ISolPartners,  YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:00.000] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome.   [00:00:03.310] - Mustansir Saifuddin To Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Megan Knoll and Tom McGinnis, long-time collaborators and educators, joined me to share how the University Alliance Program is helping shape our skilled workforce and benefiting students, educational institutions, industry partners, and SAP. It's all about building a valuable talent pipeline.   [00:00:28.810] - Mustansir Saifuddin So how are you guys?   [00:00:38.400] - Meagan Knoll Well.   [00:00:39.200] - Tom McGinnis Thank you. Very well, thanks.   [00:00:41.830] - Mustansir Saifuddin So I know the topic from today's session is building your talent pipeline. And I know it's a wild subject, but I try to keep it to a few points that make sense in terms of how our listeners interact with our podcast. So if you guys are ready, we can get into our questions.   [00:01:05.990] - Meagan Knoll Sounds great.   [00:01:06.500] - Tom McGinnis Let's get started. Let's go.   [00:01:08.420] - Mustansir Saifuddin All right. So I know talent pipeline, big word, a lot of different things that goes along with it, but let's focus on a couple of things. Can you describe the University Alliance as it applies to SAP and the SAP customers and partners ecosystem? Absolutely.   [00:01:31.680] - Meagan Knoll The University Alliance is a program that was initiated by SAP, and the whole idea was to foster collaboration between educational institutions like the universities and trade schools, SAP itself, and then SAP customers and partners. What we like to think of for the University of Alliances is that it is a conduit for knowledge transfer that will help prepare students to become skilled professionals in the SAP area. It's a global initiative that has over 3,500 educational institutions, and that spans over 113 countries.   [00:02:18.810] - Tom McGinnis From a customer perspective, it gives an avenue. It allows companies to work with their local schools, because often times universities are struggling with what content to provide that's meaningful to the local community when it comes to job skills and with systems work. Companies can help identify what those requirements are and the skills that they value and help set those realistic goals for the graduates. And from a school's perspective, it's the target market that they're working with. So the whole idea of having this conduit back and forth allows both sides to get what they need out of the relationship. Collaterally then, everyone gets other benefits outside of the University Alliance, a variety of different ways that we'll probably end up talking about in a few minutes.   [00:03:12.440] - Meagan Knoll One of the other points when it comes to the SAP University Alliances is that there's a lot of collaboration and making sure that students and partners can both participate in things like conferences, meetings, workshops, boot camps, certifications. It really helps to make sure that our students are skilled to the point they need to be to jump right into that talent pipeline.   [00:03:40.340] - Mustansir Saifuddin Now that's a great explanation about the University Alliance. Thank you. Let me ask you this, how long has been this University Alliance around in terms of your interaction, both of your experiences, goals?   [00:03:57.820] - Meagan Knoll I have been interacting with the University Alliance for about 17 years now.   [00:04:03.680] - Tom McGinnis And for me, close to 15 years.   [00:04:07.050] - Mustansir Saifuddin Wow, it's quite a long time. Okay. So that leads me into my next question. Especially, we're talking about talent. University Alliances, coming from a customer's perspective, what can SAP customers and partners expect from this program? Can you elaborate on that?   [00:04:25.830] - Tom McGinnis Yeah, everyone gets a little bit different benefits out of it. The major stakeholders, as you said, the business community, the academic community, and most importantly, from our perspective, the students. From a business perspective, their impact on the school, I don't think organizations appreciate how much impact they can have on their local schools because they're looking for guidance, they're looking for help when it comes to what to offer students. The partnerships that are forged with companies and the local universities provide a variety of benefits out of that. Companies also, from an internal standpoint, get visibility at school so that their own organizations can see opportunities for upskilling employees, working with researchers at universities, and that partnership really builds. From the school's perspective, it's almost like self-marketing. They're working with these organizations, and it's a front-facing thing, where now these companies have a face on campus, and that means a face in recruiting. That's a face for research, a face for value generation that helps the university move along. And of course, with students, it's the networking. Students struggle. They struggle hard with meeting companies and getting their foot in the door with these social networks, professional social networks.   [00:06:00.830] - Tom McGinnis The UA program is a shot in the arm for them for that. It helps them meet people that they want to interact with and start slowly gaining that understanding of what an organization does. Again, it leads to other peripheral things. There's a lot of internships that come out of the UA, and that allows companies to test drive students in a manner of speaking, but also the students get to test drive a company and see what organization they'd like to work with. Ua schools are a great place for organizations to get interns because they're ready to hit the ground running when they're done with their coursework. So there's a great variety of things that benefit all three parts of that group.   [00:06:49.850] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah. It's going to be very interesting term you mentioned that it seems like a mutually beneficial for all parties involved in terms of... Especially, I think one thing that I really liked about your observation is everybody gets a test drive, right? You get to know the employer versus the employers get to know the students and the university being in the middle trying to engage these different parties into a common platform, right? So, Meagan, from your perspective, how have you seen this work? What's your perspective on this?   [00:07:28.900] - Meagan Knoll From an education standpoint, I have seen the great collaboration that has come between industry partners, SAP Proper, and then also the universities in the University Alliances. There is a wealth of information that's provided by these companies when it comes to adapting new technologies, giving students hands-on opportunities to work with these new technologies, and it also helps to encourage and support faculty-led research. Not only are we looking for benefits to the students, but also benefits in making the research aspect of working and having that environment where we have that pipeline of students versus our students going to our employers, it all comes together as a nice symbiosis.   [00:08:26.720] - Mustansir Saifuddin Makes sense. No, definitely. Let's talk about from a different angle. Lessons learned when you're working with employers, how can they be successful?   [00:08:38.590] - Tom McGinnis Well, that's a good one.   [00:08:40.300] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, for sure.   [00:08:42.340] - Tom McGinnis Well, it comes back a little bit to what we were saying just a bit ago about that front-facing aspect. One of the things that we've seen with our students, and part of it is the demographics of the student today, but if they don't know an organization, they tend not to go out of their way to recruit at that organization. They like whatever they know and they stick with it. Well, for companies that don't have an end consumer product, they're at a disadvantage. Those people who make intermediates, they make the product that goes into other products, our students don't know them, and the company is not on the radar during recruiting. With a program like UA, they're seeing how everything is made behind the scenes. A lot of UA schools also—and I do plant tours and things like that as part of the curriculum to get folks onto the shop floor, let's say, and see how SAP is really used there. Breaking down that barrier, if you will, or informing the students of who's out there, that's a big change in the opportunities for a company to recruit. And that's probably one of the biggest things I've seen come out of UA programs is the visibility of the company in front of the students has greatly increased compared to traditional courses.   [00:10:05.800] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think I really love that aspect of it. It seems like there is a conduit into how a student is starting from an education point of view, but then getting to real life earlier than they expect to. I mean, this engagement through the UA program allows them to experience way upfront, which makes it easier when they actually get into the real work-life, right? So it seems like a very powerful tool that allows them to be ahead of the competition. I mean, there's always companies looking for talent, but talent that comes with education upfront about themselves, about the organization where they're maybe potentially working in the future.   [00:10:58.270] - Meagan Knoll Absolutely. We have noticed that there not only is that reduced onboarding time because they have those skills and they're ready to hit the ground running, but there's also the opportunity to develop the talent. It's not uncommon for students who are part of the university alliances to intern at a company, then possibly work part-time at a company, and then become full-time hire as soon as they graduate. You can start to develop that talent in a specific way that meets your needs of your organization.   [00:11:33.790] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, for sure. And that is the key point, right? How do we get that engagement going early on? So now taking a little deviation from our UA part of it, but on a personal level, you both have been an educator for quite some time. Taking it back to the University Alliance, what is the aha moment that you would experience over the past few years? And you can go, Tom, you can start and then Meagan, you can follow up with what are your experience is. I'd love to share that with our listeners.   [00:12:15.910] - Tom McGinnis Well, it's funny the way you said that, because for me right now, it's going through the list of aha, moments. There's not just one. There are a couple of them. There was one moment for a Midwest company. This is a company that was in Minneapolis. They had to change the way that they hired new hires and students because they brought on a student who was doing SAP work, coursework, as an intern his sophomore year in school. They liked him so much, they brought him in for another internship the following summer. When he graduated, of course, he applied for a position there and they gave him a position, but he had worked there so long already they couldn't hire him as a new hire. He was actually in a different salary bracket. When you have a student that's that valuable before they've even finished their coursework, that's a big aha moment on what a UA program does for the student's skills. The other big aha moment is when I take a look at the students in my classroom, and I'm MIS faculty, Management Information Systems, you would think the course I teach predominantly has MIS students in it.   [00:13:35.970] - Tom McGinnis But my biggest SAP classes, my MIS students are in the minority in the class. It's usually other disciplines, supply chain management, marketing, accounting. It shows, I think, the value that other disciplines place on SAP skills and what those organizations are then doing to the recruiting at our college. Yeah, there's a lot of aha, moments.   [00:14:01.580] - Meagan Knoll I think the biggest aha moment for me was a very rewarding experience. A couple of years ago at Sapphire, I was able to sit in on a session in which one of our former students was presenting as the subject matter expert. That was only three years after she had graduated from our program. Knowing that the roles were reversed and I was able to learn from her, just like she had learned from me in the classroom five years earlier, was a great aha moment and a great feeling that our program does make a difference and that we could really bolster up that talent pipeline and really have students who are ready to hit the ground running to make valuable impacts for any organization that they're hired at.   [00:14:49.470] - Mustansir Saifuddin Great example. Thank you for sharing that. I think one thing I would like to add to this is being an SAP professional for over 20 years and working with different industries and different customers, one thing is very clear to me, and that is the talent that comes out of the UA program. I mean, the example that you used, Meagan, about someone this early in the career getting on a stage, something like a Sapphire conference, a huge opportunity and a huge gathering of customers and partners and folks who are learning more about SAP. And this is a moment for a student that just came out of this program and getting into the workforce, be able to share what they've learned on this stage. I think that is great. And especially, Tom, your examples speaks for itself, right? I mean, you're looking at as an organization, customers looking for talent. But when the talent is that well developed early on and they are able to get into the organization, start running from the get go. I mean, that's what a lot of these companies are looking for. They want to have employees who are ready, who understand the culture, who can adapt to the applications, to the technologies that they're using.   [00:16:22.160] - Mustansir Saifuddin So it's a happy ending from both angles, right? So great examples. Thank you. Well, I know we talked about a bunch of things in our session, so that takes me to my last question. And this is one takeaway that I always like our listeners to have with them after every session. Based on all that we have covered so far, what is the one key takeaway that you would want our listeners to leave with?   [00:16:56.560] - Meagan Knoll I would say that the one key takeaway that I want listeners to leave with is an expanded knowledge that this program does exist. It may not be at your fingertips at this time, but just the knowledge of knowing that the University of Alliance is out there and is promoting and producing this talent, is something to maybe tuck into your back pocket and revisit at another time and really reach out to a UA school in your area.   [00:17:26.980] - Tom McGinnis To echo that, I think it's about engagement. A company needs to reach out in this day and age to find the resources it needs. The UA is a great place to reach out to, but you also want to reach out to your local schools. Even if they're not in the UA program yet, your interest in UA coursework may push them in that direction. And it's that interaction that I really want to see organizations do, is get out there with their local schools and start that conversation. The worst thing that could happen is that you don't find the resources that you want. The best thing that can happen is you find these diamonds in the rough that you can then use and use them to recruit even more diamonds in the rough. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.   [00:18:21.530] - Mustansir Saifuddin No, great examples, and I think that's the key, right? I mean, you have the opportunity and you have the means to get to this great program that has been around. And how do we get the word out? So folks who are looking, folks who may be looking in the future, folks who never even heard about it, this is an opportunity for them to avail this, at least explore the options and see what is out there in terms of what UA can do for them. And we'll look forward to having you both on our next session, where we'll dig more into the details of the University ofAlliance program. So thank you.   [00:19:02.180] - Tom McGinnis Thank you. Thanks for having us.   [00:19:09.410] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech-driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Meagan and Tom shared valuable insights on how partners can come together in building a talent pipeline. Their main takeaway? Know that the University Alliance is out there and reach out to your UA school in your area. It's all about engagement and finding these diamonds in the rough that can help build a talent pipeline. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.Com. Never miss our podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this 2nd part of a 2-part series of Tech-Driven Business, Nick Verhoeven, Solution Manager for Planning & Analytics at SAP, rejoins Mustansir Saifuddin to dive into how SAP Analytics Cloud's seamless integration between planning, reporting and predictive capabilities is modernizing FP&A strategies. SAP Analytics Cloud continues to reshape business analytics and strategy. His key takeaway? With continuous technology developments, make sure you have a vision and then see how technology can help you achieve it.  As solution manager at SAP, Nick's role is to align the different functions within the company. Customer engagements, analyst relations as well as supporting the internal controlling functions are the main drivers of the role that spark enthusiasm in Nick and steer the solution in the right direction. Nick's discipline stemming from professional sports is his main strength, helping him drive enterprise engagements however sluggish processes might be. Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Nick Verhoeven,  Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners , Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin Innovative Solution Partners YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript: [00:00:00.260] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome to Tech-driven business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Nick Verhoeven, Solution Manager for Planning and Analytics at SAP, rejoins me to dive into how SAP Analytics Cloud's seamless integration between planning, reporting, and predictive capabilities is modernizing FP&A strategies. SAP Analytics Cloud continues to reshape business analytics and strategy.   [00:00:37.390] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome back, Nick, to Tech-driven business.   [00:00:39.830] - Nick Verhoeven Thank you, Mustansir. I'm happy to be here.   [00:00:43.670] - Mustansir Saifuddin Well, thank you, Nick. It's been an amazing session we had last time. Really enjoyed the discussion. And for our conversation today, I'd like to give a little background on what we talked about last time. We were looking on the surface of what planning is and what planning brings to SAC, especially in the analytics space. You are bringing both the planning capabilities and analytics together in the SAC platform. So what I would like to do today is I would like to start our conversation with taking it a step further. A lot of times, customers look at things where they are looking at, What benefit does it bring to me? What do I get out of this tool? So if I want to go and bring on planning capabilities of SAC, and how does it compare to other planning tools in the market? How does that sound to you?   [00:01:44.810] - Nick Verhoeven I think that's great. I always look forward to a bit of a deep dive in SAC and cloud, so let's do it.   [00:01:51.060] - Mustansir Saifuddin Awesome. Let's start with the most obvious thing. Whenever you look at any planning tool, you look at features. So what are some of the key features of SEL that elevates it compared to other planning tools in the market? What's your take on that?   [00:02:08.510] - Nick Verhoeven Well, that's a good one, Mustansir, but if I look at it, so this is my perspective, what I think is unique to the experience cloud is the flexibility in an enterprise setting. So what do I mean? What I mean by that is that with its integration to SAP systems and non-SAP systems, using commonly accepted APIs for metadata as transactional data to create and maintain data models for planning, that they can be easily extended with flexible dimensions and measures and accounts for a user interface. There you see this enterprise as well as business functionality coming together in that sweet spot. But then if you go beyond data, going beyond the model itself, you have user interactions through data inputs, analysis, workflow. Here similarly, we offer flexibility through drag and drop and wizards to build entire flows for the business user. But here we can also expand into scripting on those same objects and using a single artifact, lowering overall total cost of ownership, but allowing for limitless flexibility. Now having all these capabilities puts SAC Cloud in a true sweet spot in offering enterprise as well as flexibility, allowing for the FP&A persona and IT persona to work side by side on these different capabilities.   [00:03:31.360] - Nick Verhoeven And I think that's really unique to us.   [00:03:35.080] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, I think definitely I echo that same sentiment. One thing that really stuck out for me in this conversation is you mentioned flexibility a few times. So from your perspective, what you're seeing in this tool, what I'm hearing is from a business user's perspective, the flexibility is at a different level. Is that true? What is your take? What are you hearing from the customers when you talk about flexibility and that business ownership on this tool?   [00:04:07.790] - Nick Verhoeven Well, it's a sliding scale. In essence, a lot of business users are not used to working with enterprise tooling. They're used to working with Excel, and flexibility is 100% there. Then if they move to enterprise tooling, they need to be guided to a certain extent. I have a nice example from a toothpaste company from the US. What they've done is they've started with extremely guided applications, really having the user guided step-by-step, using heavily scripted applications, which are more expensive in the maintenance of such applications. But as the users gotten into it and started to accept the application with less flexibility than Excel, they've actually opened up bit by bit the functionalities that SAC brings to them. In a self-service perspective that they can do their own thing. With that, they started using those flexible functionalities for themselves, as still using scripting every now and then when they want to extend, but having the ability to create their own stuff, create their own models. Then they're really starting to appreciate the benefits of having a centralized database that consolidates all of the planning inputs side by side with a tool that is flexible enough for them to work on, albeit never as flexible as I thought.   [00:05:28.310] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, sure. And that's the key differentiator, right? And thank you for delving into the details of this. So what I'm hearing is at least you have two different paths. If you start off with a flexible application where a business user takes ownership versus an example where you started off with a guided approach and then let the business ease into the tool. So seems like multiple options available from how business can benefit from this tool. Great. Thank you. So now, and this question always comes up, and I've been working with planning and analytics in the SAP space for quite some time. What would be your recommendation for existing BPC customers? What is a realistic path forward for them?   [00:06:16.780] - Nick Verhoeven To your point, we get this question a lot because, of course, we have a huge user base using our BPC solution. Now, the first thing that I always want to say is we have tied our BPC support to that of BW for HANA, which is a long lasting one. There is no case of forced migration of any kind because this theoretically goes all the way up to 2040. However, it is the case that if you want to innovate, BPC is a platform that is being maintained and not expanded. This is where SAP Analytics Cloud comes in as our flagship cloud platform, neatly integrating with BPC so you can move on a case-by-case basis and build experience in the new platform. But no need, we're not forcing you in that sense. But realistically, customers have made major investments and moving without any aim of innovation does not make sense. My advice to BPC customers is to figure out where do you want to be from an FP&A perspective? What do you need? Considering the standstill of B2C from a functionality perspective and strong innovation in SAC and create an approach that aligns with your budget and resource constraints but still allows you to innovate at the because FP&A cannot sense it.   [00:07:34.430] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think that's the key point you mentioned, right? And the FP&A is this whole paradigm is shifting in this space. And if you're looking at a tool that is not moving with those changes and how the business is changing over across the board. So what is the best way to move forward? Is it a combination? What I'm hearing is it can be a combination of you still having your PPC and your landscape, but you're introducing SAC slowly, so where you can take in the benefits of all the new innovations that are coming in in SAC, correct?   [00:08:11.400] - Nick Verhoeven Yes. That is the more typical, to be fair. There is multiple examples that we have from companies. Some immediately go for a big process redesign because they want to consolidate their tooling, meaning they will only have a single platform and they move it immediately. But that requires a lot of resources and budget. If you do not have that available, but you do want to innovate, it makes more sense to do this case-by-case basis because it's a lot of change and you need to be ready to do the change management if it all happens at once. It's not black or white, but I would... I think that the more you go case by case is more logical if you have a big BPC investment.   [00:08:50.440] - Mustansir Saifuddin Makes sense. That takes me to a different topic and this same realm of conversations that we're having. Let's think from a business user's perspective, how can a business user be more effective using having SAC planning at their disposal versus other traditional planning applications? Can you provide some examples from your experience?   [00:09:14.290] - Nick Verhoeven Definitely. Because where I see traditional solutions having their place and mainly being very important to add up the numbers, they were also quite inflexible, up to the point that they were mere models of consolidation where data was added up. With SAP planning or SAP cloud planning, as our marketing department tells me to call it, one can do instance simulations using the versioning concept as well as running flexible, driver-based, and predictive-based calculations. That's a lot of buzzwords. What does it mean? Let's take the example of our reference customer Roche. They are a big pharmaceutical company in France. In their R&D expense planning, which is, of course, key as a pharmaceutical company, they had to produce about 20,000 data points each and every time that they run this situation. They, using our predictive functionality, have automated 16,000 out there. This is where they've used the embedded predictive capabilities in SAP's cloud for planning to automate to a certain extent, their planning process. Not all of it, because not all is automatable. But they've used the points that are predictable, used predictive for that. With that, they got the focus on those 4,000 points that are currently not that predictable, and they've increased their accuracy.   [00:10:36.560] - Nick Verhoeven This is really innovating the department, doing more with less and focus on where it matters for the people.   [00:10:46.180] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think that that is something that a lot of times it's not very obvious, especially you mentioned predictive capabilities and especially a lot of customers. But when you think about the traditional planning applications and tools available, a lot of times they don't even have those capabilities available. So from a business user's perspective, having this available at the disposal, it just gives them a lot more flexibility as well as control on what they are trying to get out of the tool. So it definitely, I think, puts them in a different level compared to how the traditional planning applications work in the past. Now, you used the example of Roche. How often do you see predictive being part of the planning solutions in terms of customers using SAC? Is this pretty prevalent or is it just trying to catch on now? What is your take on that?   [00:11:51.220] - Nick Verhoeven I wouldn't dare say that it's only starting to catch on because from the very beginning there were customers experimenting with this. But I think since we've released and this was 2021, 2022, the ability to directly write back into planning versions from predictions, this has really taken off. I actually myself have done an internal project with our central forecast team, where for central forecast, this is at a higher group level, we do the entire P&L using SmartPredict. I've trained a number of controllers to apply SmartPredict to the predictive functionality in SAP's cloud on their planning models. And not all accounts were automatable, but the ones that were are now being utilized. And we see those controllers applying it themselves because the focus of our predictive is that it's very much business-user-based. However, we are heavily investing in this. You say, What is the difference of a modern tool? I think that we are going to, and this is in our statement of direction, we are going to infuse artificial intelligence into each and every workflow of SAP and it's cloud for planning. This will go from version management to data management to scripting. All of that will get artificial intelligence and this will even more widen the user base that's able to work with SAP and it's cloud for planning.   [00:13:15.890] - Nick Verhoeven And first release is being mentioned on TechEd, which is currently ongoing. Their Just Ask has been presented as the natural language ability that we will get in SAP and it's cloud also on planning models.   [00:13:29.760] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, I think that is really good news. I mean, a lot of customers that have been thinking about that and now, as you already took the initiative of sharing that information with us, this is awesome because what I see, especially in this area, when you allow the business users to be more in control and this capabilities with AI becoming more forefront in a lot of these scenarios, and you have that tool that is already having those capabilities where it's allowing the business to take more control of their planning process, I think that's the wave of the future, basically. So talking from that angle, let's take a step back. The analytical applications, they've been around for some time. Can you use or share with us a use case where analytical application is required for a planning project?   [00:14:32.510] - Nick Verhoeven Yeah, sure I can. An analytical application is now embedded within the story, right? So it's a single artifact. But looking at the scripting functionalities of the unified story, so the former analytical application, we can devise a use case, and this, of course, comes from practice, but I'm not allowed to call the customer name, but let us just imagine I am a regional manager at a supermarket and I'm on the road. This regional manager then needs to analyze financial performance as well as subjective scores on cleanliness of the stalls and such. On entries or I enter this local supermarket, I desire to input set scores on my iPad and I would like to also compare these to the financial performance. After these inputs have been done, I want to sit down with the local manager and I want to figure out how can we tweak local forecast numbers based on the latest actuals and market expectations. In this situation where I need this flexibility on my mobile device, it is clear that I want a mobile experience and an easy way to input the numbers, say, in entry form with sliders. Having this is not standard.   [00:15:49.910] - Nick Verhoeven Of course, we have the ability to add Sliders, but how do we make sure that it writes back in the correct position of our plan and model? This can be easily achieved using descriptive functionality. This is an alternate way to leverage standard functionality, but then from Script. In this way, we will feed the Sliders into the model. We will make sure that we have a guided experience for a supermarket manager that is not necessarily someone that can build applications themselves. We actually see many specific requirements being fulfilled in this rate to really guide users through the process. Think about pop-ups, entering the screen, sliding screens as you go through them. Extra relevant for infrequent use, where a user can make do with minimal SAC training to what is needed using the scripts, you can really simplify their whole experience. I think that is key functionality where the scripting can help to either hide what could be viewed as a complex experience or to extend functionality that is just needed in that specific case, like the regional supermarket manager here.   [00:16:58.920] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think that's a great example, especially I like the fact that you're taking that extra step to make it easier for any user who maybe he or she may not be as comfortable with the application. How can you make their job function easier to handle depending on the requirement, right? And I see analytical applications becoming a key factor in those scenarios where you have the ability as a user to do things on the fly, but as long as you have the minimal training given to you, that makes a lot of sense. I think we talked about a lot of different things today. We are coming to the end of our session. Based on what we have covered so far, what is that one key takeaway that you would like to share with our listeners today?   [00:17:49.610] - Nick Verhoeven Well, I'd say there is really a new world of possibilities in the world of planning today. We've discussed a few with scripting and flexibility, but there is much more to explore now with AI also being infused into the platform like we mentioned. With that, it only becomes useful if we get tired to a specific strategy. Where does FP&A see themselves in the next 1-5 years in the world of AI, autonomous finance, and big data? Then we would want to see that you use that strategic vision and turn it into reality using rapidly evolving platform with the latest technology in the cloud, because that's the only place where this innovation can be offered. I would, of course, say look at SAP cloud, but my colleagues will tell you that you also have to look at the SAP Datasphere to have the surrounding data fabric. So really look at all the innovations ongoing, but always look at them into the respect of where is your FP&A strategy heading? You have a vision, you have something that you want to deliver on, and how can technology help you with that? And then as soon as you map that out, I'm quite sure the experts are more than willing to guide you on that.   [00:18:59.290] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, I think that's a great takeaway, especially you mentioned DataSphere, right? I mean, you think about technology, you think about cloud, all of it needs to be put together in a nice data mesh in terms of how you bring it all in one platform. And, of course, cloud is the way to go. So great insight on that one. I do appreciate your time. Thank you very much for sharing your insights. It's been a pleasure having you on our show. And definitely like to share this information with our listeners and make sure that they get the benefit of what you had to share today with us. So again, thank you.   [00:19:40.480] - Nick Verhoeven You're most welcome, Mustansir. I'm looking forward to see the recording.   [00:19:47.260] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech-driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Nick Verhoveen highlighted the dynamic evolution of SAP Analytics Cloud, emphasizing its integrative power within business planning and forecasting. His key takeaway: With continuous technology developments, make sure you have a vision and then see how technology can help you achieve it. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners. Com. Never miss our podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this next series of Tech-Driven Business, Nick Verhoeven, Solution Manager for Planning & Analytics at SAP, joins Mustansir Saifuddin to discuss the power of SAP Analytics Cloud for Planning and how it integrates within the SAP landscape. Listen in as Nick dives into how planning is such a powerful addition to SAP Analytics Cloud. His main takeaway? "To do relevant planning, you want to make sure you understand your current state of the business, the latest trends, and have your analytics looking at the future using AI and predictions."  The main purpose in Nick's role is to align the different functions within the company. Analyzing and reconciling these inputs to provide and position the best possible FP&A solution to facilitate optimal decisions through data. Customer engagements, analyst relations as well as supporting the internal controlling functions are the main drivers of the role that spark enthusiasm in Nick and steer the solution in the right direction. Nick's discipline stemming from professional sports is his main strength, helping him drive enterprise engagements however sluggish processes might be. Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Nick Verhoeven,  Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners, X: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:02.910] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this first episode of a multipart series, Nick Verhoeven, Solution Manager for Planning and Analytics at SAP, joins me to share how planning is such a powerful addition to SAP Analytics Cloud. It's all about how it integrates with your SAP landscape and beyond.   [00:00:28.300] - Mustansir Saifuddin So joining me today is Nick Verhoeven, who serves as a Solution Manager for Planning and Analytics at SAP. Welcome to Tech-Driven Business, Nick. How are you?   [00:00:40.090] - Nick Verhoeven Thank you, Mustansir. I'm quite well. It's been a good Monday so far, so happy to be here.   [00:00:45.620] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thank you. I'm glad to have you on our show. And this topic is very near and dear to me. I've been in planning and analytics for so many years, and really happy to have you as our guests and share your experiences, especially for our topic today. It's a three-part series. We are looking at kicking off this session, and we want to talk about what makes SAC planning such a powerful addition to SAP Analytics Cloud? How does that sound?   [00:01:16.710] - Nick Verhoeven Well, I think that sounds great. I'm looking forward to it.   [00:01:20.500] - Mustansir Saifuddin Awesome. Let's get into our topic then. I want to start with the basics. What sets apart SAP Analytics Cloud compared to other cloud-based tools in the market? There are so many tools. So I like to hear your perspective. What makes it so special?   [00:01:38.010] - Nick Verhoeven So of course, I'm slightly biased, right? I love the product. I'm the solution manager for the product. But I do think there is something that is rather factual that really sets us apart. You ask about the market, so how do you define a market in general? And then what I'll be using is the Gartner MQs. The Gartner Magic Cloud runs Gartner is an analyst company and they make ratings of different software markets, if you will. What I think is rather defining, if you look at the way that SAP Analytics Cloud is positioned, is that we are represented in the business intelligence market, as defined by Gartner, but we are also, as the one and only vendor, also represented with the same product in the financial planning MQ. And that, I think, really sets us apart. And beyond that, if you look beyond just the solution SAP Analytics Cloud for Planning, I think the integration within an SAP landscape sets us apart. So it's the integration to our transactional systems, but also the integration to our business technology platform systems, which allows a wealth of data integrations and connections.   [00:02:54.070] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think that is the key piece over here, right? I mean, you just hit it on the head. So it seems like when you look around, especially when you're dealing with a cloud-based solution, a lot of times you're stuck with either one or the other solution. So what I'm hearing from you is it's really about bringing two technologies together in one platform, right? Is that basically what makes you think that this is a special tool that allows customers, especially when you're looking for a unified approach of doing things? So it seems like SAC is serving up both those areas from a customer standpoint, right?   [00:03:35.790] - Nick Verhoeven I'd say so, and think about it. When you are going to do planning, you don't start from scratch. You want insight on where you are, where you're going. And this is where analytics and planning to me and also to SAP, of course, are a natural extension of each other and not something that should have been viewed in a silo.   [00:03:54.810] - Mustansir Saifuddin Absolutely. Now that makes a lot of sense. And so talking about from that angle, let's get into the details. When you look at from an SAP perspective, you're a little biased because you're working in that tool and you know the insights and what's really going on. When we move forward, SAP continues to enhance its analytics offerings. What do you wish customers knew about SAP that they may have overlooked? A lot of times a tool is out there, but there are certain insights that you may have that can help a customer get more out of their investment, basically.   [00:04:34.170] - Nick Verhoeven I would say... We were discussing analytics and planning, but if I really focus on analytics, I think the main new addition, and people may have not overlooked it but haven't fully appreciated the capabilities that it brings, is what we call the unified story. This, in essence, means that we take the original object, that is the story where you could drag and drop self-service BI capabilities in there, and we combine that with the capabilities of the former artifact, which is the application designer. Here you could create very specific applications through scripting. Now, by combining these two, we allow in a single object to be present simple, low TCO way of building your analytics or planning input sheets for that matter. But the ability at any point in time extend that with scripting, if you so will. This is already quite interesting and relevant, but it's not the no point of return. At the point you've added scripting, you can close that again and give the object back to the user that might not be adapted to scripting, but the ability to maintain the object in itself, still remaining and retaining the lower TCO, but having the full flexibility to adjust the behavior of your analytical or planning object with specific scripting, I think that is unique to our platform in the way that we do it and has benefits for analytics as well as planning.   [00:06:09.730] - Mustansir Saifuddin That is very interesting. So let me ask you a follow-up question on this. So that means that when you talk about application designer, you're talking about the ability from a programming standpoint, you can customize certain things and build an application around it. But when you bring in a user, a business user, who can leverage this object or development that is done by from the technical perspective and then bring in their data or their simple stories and have a single, unified approach of looking at information, right? I'm hearing it correctly?   [00:06:49.790] - Nick Verhoeven I think you hear it completely correctly. Then we also productize that in a way with the recent addition of composites. Composites are reusable objects that will be released in our latest wave, and you'll see it in SAC three. But here what we have is basically script objects or regular objects that can be reused across many stories developed by a highly esteemed professional, but then can be reused across all of those stories. And then if you make an adjustment in such a composite, it will be adjusted in all of the stories, so really scaling out this combined capability across a very large user set.   [00:07:29.490] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, definitely. I think. And that brings value to the customer really many-folds, and that's what I'm hearing from you. So it's the benefit of using something that is being built and that is embedded, and then you're just extending it to a business user. So that's really awesome. Thank you for sharing that. So now let's get into our main conversation, why a customer, why any organization should consider planning capabilities of SAC? That's really the crux of why we have these two technologies put together in a single platform. So can you elaborate on that?   [00:08:10.120] - Nick Verhoeven Yeah, definitely. So I'd say the recent world of turbulent change, and I say recent, but this is of all times, that things are changing around us and we have to deal with it. And I think the natural addition to planning is to start looking forward of where might we be going. If you don't know where you're going, you'll never end up there, right? Yeah. And this is where we're planning adds so much value if you combine that in a single platform. And I would never be one to judge. Every company has their own resourcing constraints and such. But I see all kinds of small planning projects popping up in our analytics user base where they have either a long-term strategic planning that they want to start with or workforce planning as they want to get the right talent at the right time. So small initiatives, and that will then be leading up to a larger enterprise planning deployment at a customer. But I think it is a natural extension to analytics and also where analytics can add so much more value because you have analytics and then put that into something actionable being a plan, which could be resource allocation.   [00:09:18.390] - Mustansir Saifuddin Absolutely. I think what I like in this example, you mentioned two things, right? One is a lot of times when you think of planning, you look at the bigger enterprise planning approach. But here you have the ability or the capability of doing something small and you need planning no matter what you're doing. It doesn't matter if you're working with your labor data or your HR planning versus your financial or your sales data. You have components of planning which can be pretty easily integrated into this platform.I think that's one of the things that a lot of customers  always think about planning as a separate component versus having it together in an easy-to-use fashion where they can leverage the analytics at the same time, add a component of planning depending on what they are working on. So it's a natural extension. So that brings me to a more of a personal question. You've been SAP for quite some time as a Solution Manager for planning analytics. What drives you to make this tool as a tool of choice for customers? What is your take on it?   [00:10:31.710] - Nick Verhoeven If we boil it down to what is the reason for using this tool? It's all about decision making. I'm very passionate about the topic of decision making because it's so abundant in all of our lives because we make decisions all of the time. Where I have the tool myself personally, where I use it to have multiple scenarios of mortgage down payments, I have it for multiple scenarios of investments. I'm using drivers to also influence those investments and what would happen if, and that is my personal life. But then when I go out there with the customers, we have scenarios in the oil industry, we have the medical industry. We have so many different angles that you get to for planning and you have to get into quite a bit of specifics. This is what I really like. This is what I really love. Then on my day-to-day job, what I try to make sure is that I look at the solution not only as a great platform, but also something pragmatic that can help people in their day-to-day operation of making better decisions. And this is the analytics and planning that comes together, which I hold so dear.   [00:11:45.150] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, that makes sense. I think you hit it in the head on this one, especially when you think about how simple can it be versus how complex you want to make it, depending on your use case scenario, right? So it really helps to have this capability built-in where you already have information coming from your organizations, different platforms, and you're looking at more like an analytic solution using SAC, but then you push in this planning capability in that tool, and all of a sudden you got this all-rounded view of the organization, basically. That's pretty powerful. Now, so thinking ahead, we always talk about roadmaps and what is really coming next. And this is, I call it... I call it a two-part question. When you think about roadmap, what is there, from a business perspective, short term and long term, what is coming next that a customer should watch out for when you think about the roadmap for SAC?   [00:12:44.190] - Nick Verhoeven Taking that twofold question, starting with the short term, I'd say there's many developments, right? But I'll make a focus point where short term and long term also meet each other. And if I look at the short term, I'd say API, API, API. What I mean with that is within the application itself, so the scripting that we were just talking about, we offer APIs there so that you can, through scripting, enhance versions, set up customized planning areas. That is a multitude of functionalities there that you can use through APIs. So basically opening up the system to be manipulated in any way that the customer could want. I'd say that's one of the major short-term developments that we have offered and are also enhancing. This is something that also comes together with our B2P offering. So the import and export API can be leveraged by our integration suite, which can then also make sure that the data from the data marketplace in SAP DataSphere rolls in as drivers into SAP Analytics Cloud for Planning, does its calculations. And then if you want to go to the execution side of things, the integration suite can take those APIs again, take that information and push it out to execution system so that you actually execute on your plan.   [00:14:03.470] - Nick Verhoeven So that would be short term. Those APIs also offer a lot of perspective for the long term. So one of the statements that our major development leaders, so Matthias Kramer, has made is that artificial intelligence will come to each and every workflow of SAP Analytics Cloud. Now, the only way to make that work or have something that is effective through AI is to make sure that your application is offering all of the APIs for it to work. Just to give you an example, if you want to have something like asking your application to be built using scripts with certain functionalities, then you can ask the AI bot to write that. But that's only possible if the APIs are there, if it has the ability to create a version API, if it has the ability to trigger data actions. This is where it really meets each other. Just to give you an exciting perspective here, we internally have already developed bots that can generate entire applications, can also create queries, like we know from the pending just ask functionality, but the former search to insight functionality that's still there. But then going beyond that, also leveraging large language models to write a query and also ask AI to summarize.   [00:15:29.910] - Nick Verhoeven What do we see in that query? What are the most profitable stores within my assortment? It's these two stores. Note, this one store is actually on the rise compared to the last time you asked. Those insights the AI bot can offer. I've seen internal demonstrations where we can already do it. We also have an external statement of direction on AI, where we also have some of those beta demos already visible because we're really committed to deliver on that. [00:15:59.100] - Mustansir Saifuddin That is so exciting. I mean, especially thinking being on the projects myself, I know that from a customer standpoint, this is really exciting stuff, especially when they're looking at how to maximize their investments, especially on a platform like SAC, and you mentioned a couple of other technologies where you bring in data from DataSphere and all these other surrounding BTP, et cetera, how they all make it so much useful and allow any organization, any business who is using these platforms to extend their value proposition to the end users. So definitely something exciting and really looking forward to having these short-term and long-term goals coming together and giving this tool a boost that it really can make decision making, especially when you talk about these analytical tools, the decision making is where you're looking at time to value, and how quickly can you make those things? I know we talked about a lot of different things. So coming to our closure, one thing that I always like to ask my guests is based on what we talked about so far, what is the one key takeaway that you want our listeners to leave today?   [00:17:22.400] - Nick Verhoeven I'd say it's where we started. We spoke about what makes the platform special. In my mind, it's the presence in not only the analytics market, but also in the planning market, and with that also now with AI and predictive coming together. I think the most important thing is to not decouple these two elements, because to do relevant planning, you want to make sure you understand your current state of the business, the latest trends, and also having analytics looking at the future using AI and predictions, those are natural inputs to your actual plans, and those plans that need to turn into execution. It's so logical if you look at the plan to check X circle from Deming. There are so many things that always relate to these two are interrelated. And I think within a platform, they should also be interrelated. That's my main takeaway.   [00:18:24.480] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, I think that is really powerful. Thank you for sharing that. And that's really what sets the whole application apart from so many other tools out there. And with that, I'd like to wrap our session. I do want to thank you for coming on to our show. I'm looking forward to our next conversation, which is all about planning and what makes SAC planning such a powerful tool. I'm looking forward to having that deep dive where... Especially when you look at all these things outside in the market, even from SAP, you have BPC, you have other competitor planning applications out there. We'll talk about more into a deeper perspective of what SAC planning can do and how will that be a game-changer for folks who are looking at planning as one of their additional analytics capabilities to be built into their platform. So looking forward to that. Thank you.   [00:19:23.910] - Nick Verhoeven Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to that as well. Thank you Mustansir.   [00:19:26.590] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Nick shared valuable insights on the power of SAC planning. His main takeway? To do relevant planning, you want to make sure you understand your current state of the business, the latest trends, and have your analytics looking at the future using AI and predictions. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this next episode, Mustansir Saifuddin speaks with David C. Williams, Assistant Vice President-Automation at AT&T. David dives into how hyper-automation, specially RPA, and AI come together to effectively and efficiently make a business impact. It's not about choosing one over the other.   During David's career with AT&T, he has created deep-link HTML marketing initiatives that garner 90 million monthly impressions, led Competitive Intelligence which helped shape AT&T's Mobile First strategy, has been responsible for supporting several Fortune500 companies encompassing $120M in revenue, and authored two patents for Reprogrammable RFID and bridging satellite and LTE technology. In his current role, David is responsible for hyper-automation & emerging technology to transform Customer/Employee Experience and Cost Structure for his organization. He leads the largest Robotics Process Automation program worldwide. His innovations are driving change across the company as his team has developed 600+ Bots automating 70M contacts, realizing $400M in operating income at over 3,000% ROI. Additionally, he also invented & sponsored a decision engine driving $200M credit reduction annually. David is the 2021 Legacy Award recipient at Black Engineer of the Year STEM Global Conference, 2x Dream in Black winner, AT&T Champion of Diversity Award winner, a proud mentor of multiple Employee Groups, & Diversity Ambassador. David's humble beginnings in the poorest corner of Dallas, TX, continual giving back through Solar Robot Workshops to the community, and rise through a corporate giant is encapsulated in his book entitled, Business Model.  Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: David C. Williams Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.   Show Notes: [00:00:03.320] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome.   [00:00:04.180] - Mustansir Saifuddin To Tech-driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this episode, I welcome back David C. Williams. Listen in as David shares his thoughts on how organizations can use AI and RPA to move business forward. David dives into the role each plays and how they complement each other to solve business problems.   [00:00:27.320] - Mustansir Saifuddin Hello, David. How are you?   [00:00:37.300] - David C. Williams Must say I'm doing well.   [00:00:42.460] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thank you, David. I'd like to welcome you back to my podcast, Tech-Driven Business. Today, I would like to talk about how RPA and AI is helping organizations. How does that sound to you?   [00:00:59.900] - David C. Williams Wonderful. It's an exciting topic, brother.   [00:01:07.610] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, I know this is very near and dear to you. In our previous sessions, you had talked about at length, about RPA. I thought this will be a good segue into this conversation.   [00:01:21.770] - David C. Williams Wonderful.   [00:01:23.000] - Mustansir Saifuddin How is AI and RPA helping organizations increase efficiency in their operations and throughout their business in general?   [00:01:34.740] - David C. Williams Well, when I think about it, RPA is, I would say all of hyper automation, but especially RPA, is one of the, if not the least, expensive way to solve a business problem with software. Artificial intelligence is the computing power we've dreamed of. When you take that type of computing power and intelligence and give it a efficient reach like RPA, you can go do a lot of cool things very quickly and it doesn't cost your arm and the leg.   [00:02:17.250] - Mustansir Saifuddin I like the way you connected the two. So it seems like they are both connected at the hip in terms of how they are complementing each other.   [00:02:29.080] - David C. Williams Yeah. Ai is a brain, right? And just like in a human body, a brain is great, but it can't move anything physically, right? And so you need all these extremities to go about the brain's business every day. That's how I think about AI and RPA coming together. You have the most intelligent computational brain that you could imagine or dream of with mobility of RPA that's so flexible, so ubiquitous, so applicable in so many ways that when you put the two together, it's exponential.   [00:03:09.370] - Mustansir Saifuddin That is great. Let's talk about something in terms of leveraging the efficiency part, right? We talk about efficiencies in business, in our general lives, how we can do things faster, better.   [00:03:25.920] - Mustansir Saifuddin When we talk about leveraging the efficiency of RPA and the capabilities of AI, what makes it beneficial to a business? Can you give some examples? Talk about that.   [00:03:43.690] - David C. Williams Yeah, sure. If you think about the combination of the two things that you could do with this. Let's say you have a workforce that uses some knowledge management system. Well, every day that workforce thumbs through a virtual encyclopedia, right? They thumb through a virtual dictionary to go get information or they query it.   [00:04:19.960] - David C. Williams With the advent of generative AI combined with RPA, what you could do is you could use AI to do the querying and summarization of all of that knowledge management. You can use RPA to quickly place that in so many different places to make it more accessible. Yep, we got it. We got the great brain that's going to take all of this stuff and compile it into something that's usable and easy to extract from. But how do I get it over to my field technicians, to my customer service group? How do I leverage that across several systems? Rpa and other components of hyperautomation are very prone, very likely to be the best options to go do that without having to reinvent the wheel.   [00:05:18.730] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's a great example you use. That leads me into my next question about you've been doing hyper automation for quite some time, and you had some great success and gains that you saw with that implementation at AT&T. How do you see that journey evolved with the addition of AI now?   [00:05:42.030] - David C. Williams Oh, man. Well, I would tell you, when it comes to things like RPA, my team does sit on the very forefront of where all that stuff is going, the way we use it, the conversations we even had with Microsoft on what they're building and enhancing and all that stuff. When I think about where it's going, though, and with AI, AI is going to take our most challenging parts of the development cycle, the most challenging parts of every business or many businesses, and it'll simplify. When I think of that, I think about a world where RPA is even more democratized, where literally any knowledge worker can use RPA. Instead of putting up PowerPoints, we can share prototypes.   [00:06:45.660] - David C. Williams That is going to open up an entire universe of innovation and automation.   [00:06:53.900] - Mustansir Saifuddin It seems almost like you are fast tracking a lot of things.   [00:06:59.900] - David C. Williams Trying to, man. The funny thing about automation is the more you do it, the more folks want it, which is a good thing, but it is still a challenge. As we continue to grow the program, as we continue to help more of our colleagues, coworkers, customers, as more parts of the business depend on the things we create, we look for ways to continue to accelerate. There are a ton of quotes that we believe in and mantra we have on our team. One is that success is momentum over time. As we continue to... We found some success, we built some momentum. It's taking us a little bit of time as we continue to go down this path, we're going to keep driving more momentum. That is the expectation. Honestly, we're positioned for it. The more things that we build, the more we get to leverage. At one point, we were using bricks to build buildings, then we're using buildings to blocks to build cities, cities to build, etc. We're just still lead on that journey, accelerating and looking for ways to continue to accelerate. And that AI version of what I just spoke about is just one area.   [00:08:16.220] - David C. Williams There's a ton of other things that we're looking at to automate so that we can accelerate everything that we're doing in that space.   [00:08:24.640] - Mustansir Saifuddin That is awesome. When you think about opportunities, what opportunities do you see in this area where AI and RP are working together, the idea of creating this intelligent automation? Where do you see that going?   [00:08:42.160] - David C. Williams Well, I think that at a certain point it's going to happen. For those that discover it or leverage it, priced, they will solve more complex business problems at a cheaper price, at a faster pace, and that will impact their competition and so forth and so forth. I think it's just a matter of time. These things, these operations, these big companies, whether you're talking telecom or healthcare, doesn't matter. The efficiency that they can drive helps them to be able to capitalize on the things that they do in those specific industries. Rpa is the least expensive hyperautomation is the least expensive way of solving a business problem with software. I haven't found anything cheaper. You put cognitive capabilities on top of that. That means the more complex things you can get after with the cheapest means of doing it. If you're doing that better than your competitor, look at our competitor.   [00:09:57.630] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's always this conversation about what technology is moving away from or getting a thing of the past. So when you hear people talk about who say that RPA is a thing of the past and the future is AI, what is your response to that?   [00:10:19.710] - David C. Williams It's probably a laugh, a chuckle. It would be like saying, Oh, you know what? The Wright brothers have mastered human flight. We've discovered human flight. We all can fly now. There's no need for tires. No need for tires. Nobody needs tires anymore. It's impossible to even think like that. I would say the same about AI and RPA. There is no competition between the two. This is chocolate and peanut butter. They work better together. There is no competition between the two. There is no replacement of one or the other. Your brain will never replace your thumb. Never. I don't care how good of a brain you have. That thumb sure comes in handy. That's how I think about RPA is that it's not that this is the 3G and there's 4G. No, no, no, no, no. This is complementary. As long as you have one, you will want the other. That's what I think about AI and RPA. As long as you have one, you're going to want the other. If you have RPA, you want cognitive capabilities to make those automations smarter so you can automate more things. If you have AI, you want reach and you want quick reach because with AI you get quick answers.   [00:11:54.510] - David C. Williams So you want quick, ubiquitous, far, far reaching reach. Rpa gives you that hyper automation gives you that. Putting up Lego blocks together in the right ways, you get exactly that. For those that say that, I guess maybe it may be a little telling, but I don't see it.   [00:12:14.950] - Mustansir Saifuddin I love the example you use. That is really great. It just puts things in perspective. I think it's just like the one cannot live without the other. It's almost like a marriage made in heaven. That's awesome.   [00:12:28.810] - David C. Williams It really is. I mean, when you think about just how fast AI is able to go get the most complex, sophisticated answers and responses to produce code in seconds, whole paragraphs in seconds, whole reports. When you think about that to have that level of intelligence with the an arm 8,000 miles long, you can do a lot. You can do a whole lot. And so that's, I think, the beauty of AI and RPA coming together.   [00:13:10.790] - Mustansir Saifuddin That makes sense. Definitely. For sure. So I guess that takes me to my next point. Based on all that we covered today, what is that one key takeaway that you would want our listeners to leave the session today with?   [00:13:29.000] - David C. Williams You got to embrace AI quickly. You got to move safely with it. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Rpa is still the future. Rpa still has a huge impact. I would say to many American Airlines is great for getting you from New York to Los Angeles. But if you need tacos delivered on Tuesday at 2:00 PM American Airlines is probably not the place that you want to call. There's probably better options, more suitable options. One is not better than the other. They just have different roles. That's how RPA and AI relationship are. They have different roles that are extremely complementary of each other.   [00:14:23.860] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think that's a great way to put it. I like the example you use. I think it seems like a lot of times folks are thinking of one technology versus the other. The way you're explaining or you're rationalizing this whole thing is one is helping the other to be more productive, more efficient, and be more robust together as a business, as a technology that is working together to make things better.   [00:14:58.570] - David C. Williams Must have said, I would tell you, brother, that one of the biggest mistakes people make in technology is they want to put all the eggs in one basket. Oh, we're going to have this one thing that's going to do all these things. You know what that's called? They did that a long time ago. It's called the Titanic. It doesn't work well that way. Even if you look at Netflix, Amazon, everything you're looking on a page, it's not just one application. There's so many applications working at once. You just see it in one user interface. And so the same way that those microservices work and they feel like one, but they're all separate is what hyper automation, what RPA is. It feels like one thing, but it's still separate. You put all these things together and you can create something magical versus trying to do this just one big, herculean, Titanic thing. And so I find that putting one and one together, if you get them close enough together, one in one is 11. You get further, faster, you get something exponential. You can skip all the other stuff. That's how I think about AI and RPA coming together.   [00:16:17.120] - David C. Williams You get further, faster putting them together.   [00:16:20.620] - Mustansir Saifuddin For sure. Now it's been a great session, David. And thank you for sharing your thoughts and your insights into this discussion point. I mean, definitely, there is a lot of progress that needs to be made in this field where both AI and RPA coming together, helping businesses and making our lives better. So I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining our session today.   [00:16:49.500] - David C. Williams Thank you. Have a great day.   [00:16:58.250] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech-driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. David gave a great overview on the power of AI and rpa. His main takeaway: embrace AI quickly, move safely with it. Rpa is still the future and will have a great and huge impact. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about innovative solution partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss our podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.      

In this next series of Tech-Driven Business, Michael Kim, Data & Analytics Leader, joins Mustansir Saifuddin to discuss how to approach data and analytics in a complex landscape. They'll dive into how to simplify your implementation approach and what it takes to have a successful implementation.  Michael has 20 years of product management and consulting experience at Accenture, IBM, KPIT, DXC Technology. Michael is responsible for implementing over 15 Data and Analytics Solutions across multiple industries. He's a Product Strategist and Expert of the information delivery platforms: SAP, IBM, Snowflake, Salesforce, Workday.  Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Michael Kim Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:00.000] - Mustansir Welcome to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this first episode of a multi-part series, I welcome Michael Kim, a data and analytics expert. Listen in as Michael shares his thoughts on how to address complex IT landscapes for a successful implementation. Hello, everyone. Joining me today is Michael Kim, a good friend and a seasoned leader in the field of data and analytics with a focus on SAP technology. Welcome, Michael.   [00:00:42.530] - Michael Hey, Mustansir. Very nice to be here. It's a pleasure. It's always great to have a conversation and dialog with my good friend. What better topic than talking about data analytics, especially given time right now where things are going. It's an exciting time for the market and the industry, and I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.   [00:01:02.760] - Mustansir All right. Now, great to have you, Michael. I think this is one of the hot topic as you go along across the board. Any organization, everybody is talking about challenges of implementing data and analytics in their environment, especially when you have a complex landscape. With that, I'd like to get into our discussion points. Are you ready?   [00:01:26.920] - Michael Yes, absolutely. Let's get it going.   [00:01:29.020] - Mustansir All right. Let's start with a high level. I wanted to get your take on how do you approach data analytics in a complex landscape? What are the things that you're seeing based on your experience? Can you explain, can you share some thoughts on that?   [00:01:44.100] - Michael Absolutely. This is the big elephant in the room for all organization, is what is complex? And especially data analytics alone, topic itself is complex. So how do we tackle it? And it's been a conversation. It's been a question. It's been a challenge for all organizations globally for however long ,I've been doing this for a very long time. And it doesn't change. I think the way I see it and what I experienced for the past 20 years, serving multiple clients and multiple vendors, both from SAP and outside of SAP, and IT and business, I think it comes down to two things is what is a complex landscape and how do we approach it? And really nails down to, two, is process approach or is it a data-driven approach? And there's no right or wrong answer for that matter. It's really what sets the foundation of solving the complexity to provide business clarity on process and what role does data and analytics products and toolset comes into that picture as well. So I've seen an organization who prefer to have a data analytics landscape where they want to have it more centralized, meaning they don't want to have it decentralized from multiple regions.   [00:03:07.130] - Michael They want to consolidate it from multiple regions to one centralized data platform, which will produce data products to the business and to the customers and to the vendors. And then I've seen organizations where they prefer decentralization of the data environment. And of course, I'm not going to say there's no right or wrong approach on this. I think it all comes down to the customer's desire and where they fit in the industry. And at the end of the day, it's understanding the environment of the landscape. And that's how you tackle it is a centralized approach of the data environment and  how do you solve that complex landscape? And then what is that data product and process comes into place as to a data centralized data environment where you want to provide clarity and data insights in that decentralized, but how does that serve the purpose to the customers and the users in the business to provide data products around that area.   [00:04:05.550] - Mustansir Got it. No, that makes sense. I think that's a good lead into my next question. When you talk about implementation approach, what criteria do you employ? And basically, what is the application to simplify the implementation approach is a better question, I guess.   [00:04:23.830] - Michael I always go with this approach is I think it's taking a step back from applications or business, but how we come into this world from when we're infants to when we become an adult and as we age into more mature grownups. There's three stages. There's crawl, walk, and run approach. And of course, I think that's the most important thing for the organization to really realize where they are in the current state is are they in the infant stage? Or they are in the infant stage where they want to make that transition into walking and to running and then ultimately sprinting. And if I have to put that into an analytic perspective is, I think this is the most common term that's thrown out there is, where are you in the organization in your data products and analytics maturity? Is that really driven by descriptive analytics, or is it more predictive, or is it more prescriptive? And then it gets more complex with new embedded things like artificial intelligence and machine learning, which makes analytics going from prescriptive to a lot more advanced to do a lot more wonderful things on how to use the product.   [00:05:41.950] - Mustansir Yeah. I think you hit it right on. That's one of the things that a lot of organizations do have to analyze where they are in this journey. And that can be challenging, depending on the maturity of the data analytics approach that the organization is using. And to your point, when you talk about these three phases of descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive, it is a balance of what you currently have and where you want to end up. That's the key, what I'm hearing from you.   [00:06:23.260] - Michael Absolutely, Mustansir. I mean, you and I work with a lot of colleagues going back to many of us, we serve a lot of customers in the past. And I think it's the same story, even for you. You've been into a lot of big high profile, large cap companies, large different, I guess, corporations, different business global wide and SIs. And when you walk in, first thing I believe you always look for is even for yourself is where are we? What am I walking into? And then where are we as a project, program, also as a client? And minute you, I think, harness that realization, we're in the program, then you also define what you need to do and how you can add value to simplify that implementation approach. It's the same thing for every consultant, every data analytics professional is really understanding your surroundings, your current state, not only for yourself, for the program and the client, and also where does the Si role come into picture? Where does the application or software vendor come into picture? It's really understanding your current state and where you want to get to, which is the future state.   [00:07:28.730] - Mustansir Yeah, for sure. I think that using that as a driver into our next conversation is based on your experience working with system integrators, as you mentioned, customers, SAP itself, what constitutes a successful data analytics project?   [00:07:47.520] - Michael That's really interesting question. I guess it's coming from IT then. I guess it all depends on who you're serving as a data analytics professional or as industry wide consultant or expert. But it really comes down to, in my opinion, is who are we here to serve? Is it IT or is it business or is it organization? What makes the company click? And in my personal philosophy is it's always prioritized business first, mainly because going back to the whole fundamental three pillars is people, process, and technology is when you start a business, even for a small startup, it's selling a small hamburger for mom and pop stores to turning that into a multibillion dollar global hamburger chain. It's all about selling the product and serving the public. Who's going to help you get there? It's the people. It's the people you hire and people who share the same vision. And then after that, after those people are defined to collaborate in that vision, what is the set of process that we need to put in place not only for the company, but also within the division, within the people and the culture? And then once you set that good process and strategy, then that's when the technology comes in and make sure that we execute.   [00:09:15.520] - Michael I think with that said, what I'm looking for as a cost is successful is the business objective is met. And if that business constitutes a C-level executives, or it constitutes a middle management, or also even for the customers and vendor is can they make data analytics about providing insights and providing data and providing intelligence so they can make informed decisions? And to me, that's the prioritization that constitutes successful is that are business able to make better decision for the company than they were able to do it in the past than as to today and also for the future? And also there's no right or wrong answer. It also depends on where you are in the program. And at the end of the day, it's always going back to the core fundamental is making the business and organization successful.   [00:10:09.520] - Mustansir Yeah, I think I like the way you summed it all up. And it seems like first you need to know your end-customer, especially when you're dealing with analytics. And at the end of the day, the business needs to benefit. And if the business is benefiting, then that will allow an organization to grow, which is the whole idea behind Analytics is to help businesses, organizations as a whole, to make sure that they are on the right path, they are making progress. And your approach makes a lot of sense, especially when you talk about success factors, like what are the things that makes an organization click? Thank you for clarifying that. I think this is really important. Then when you're talking on this topic, let's look at it from a different angle. Why is it important to have all these projects? We look at different projects and why is it so important to have a good senior analytics architect who can see things from a holistic perspective on these projects? Why is it that so critical?   [00:11:15.180] - Michael Well, I can share my personal experience working with you when you join the program, one of our clients is they want you join the program. Mustansir here comes in and say, Hey, Michael, Mustansir, very nice to meet you. And we click. And then the first question you asked is, What am I walking into? And who are my customers, and you wanted to get the whole picture all together. And my questions is like, Okay, there's a lot of good questions you're asking. And one of the things you're saying is that everything is connected, Michael. As a senior architect, not only have to see it from technical perspective, but you have to see it from business perspective, and you have to see it from process perspective. That's what the senior analytic architect brings to the successful program is having that right combination of technology and business and also process in place to really see the holistic picture where the whole fundamental principles that you add here that you always preach to me and also we preach to our team is, Analytics and data are all connected within the organization. We just need to help the business and the technology, IT and the customers be able to see the holistic picture of how everything is connected.   [00:12:29.030] - Michael So it's not just the analytic architect who's specializing on tools like SAP or Oracle, or not just the business architect who comes from consulting company like McKinsey, just focusing on such much business process, but being able to connect both process, business, technology all into one, and then package that into one holistic picture and drive that whole success of the program. I think that's what sets the importance of senior architect. And what I'm trying to... I think the lack of a better word is the total package, who sees everything and who are able to connect everything and then able to drive to that success. That was an impressive experience. We always adhere to and we always preach it to our colleagues. So far, it worked out well, right?   [00:13:14.650] - Mustansir Yeah, for sure. That's the key, that holistic view like you explained it. Especially when you're trying to do a robust data environment, how do you define your goals? What is short term versus long term? And like a strategy approach versus more operational approach. So seems like having that person, that view of the whole landscape really allows you to get into the details. And the only way you can do it is having that experience in the past, right? Having been there, experienced it, seen it, and now you're applying all those learnings into this project, right? So I think that's what I'm hearing from you.   [00:14:02.620] - Michael Absolutely. I'm going to quote you on this. There was a moment in the program when we're working together, you said, Hey, I'm here for two things. I'm here to either add value, I'm here to fix the problem, I'm here to do both. I think if that mindset comes in, and that's mindset and the principle that senior architect holds, I think that program is due for good success. I'm sorry to steal your quote on this, but that was the very impressive that the principles that I still go by is I'm always learning from my colleagues like yourself. I think that's the core founding principles as a senior analytic architect is to not only add value but also fix problems, but at the same time do both, not only for short term but long term as well.   [00:14:45.640] - Mustansir For sure. Thank you for the kind words. I think that takes us towards the end of our conversation. I'd like to always ask this question from our guests. Based on what we covered so far, what is the one key take away that you would want to leave with the listeners today?   [00:15:02.200] - Michael Analytics, data, this technology, there's no right or wrong answer. It's changing every day. And one thing that has, I think we're in 2023, year 2023, but the year 2002 pandemic has taught us, if anything, is that we still don't know. Even with the week, we're never well prepared. It's always evolving. And there was one way to counter that is always preparing ourselves to, technology wise, people wise, and process wise. But in order to get there is understanding your organization, either organization as an executive or organization as a middle management, or organization as a customer and vendor we work with. It's understanding your current state and where you are. And then from there, using that self realization to really drive the strategy, the short term strategy and the long term roadmap to really have a good, clear picture of where you want to get from point A to B to X, Y, Z. I think that is the key take away for I want to share with the listeners today is that I think analytics and data technology, what we're doing in this industry is always going to be a journey. We just need to know that where we are in the journey and how we want to get there.   [00:16:18.240] - Michael I think that is the critical component of our success, not only to ourselves, but to our customers and vendors and our partners.   [00:16:25.860] - Mustansir I think you said it very well. My two takeaways from this is change is the only constant in this industry as well as self realization. Self realization is the key for an organization to move forward on where you want to end up as a data analytics landscape. And then, of course, the long term strategy that becomes part of the goals that you want to put together. This was a great conversation, Michael. Looking forward to having more sessions with you where we do some more in depth conversations on this topic. I'd like to get some real life examples from you. Thank you very much for joining the session with us today.   [00:17:07.090] - Michael Thank you Mustansir. It's been a good first session and thanks for having me. To our listeners, definitely it's exciting times for the field of data analytics. This is an incredible journey we're going to embark on. I'm looking forward to more conversation and more dialogs and experiences we're going to discuss going forward.   [00:17:28.700] - Mustansir Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Michael shared valuable insights on what it takes to handle complex landscapes. His main takeaway, there is no right answer when working with analytics, data, and technology. It is constantly evolving and it's a journey. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversations by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.  

In this episode of Tech-Driven Business, William ("Bill") Newman, Industry Executive Advisor (Chief), Automotive for the Customer Innovation Office at SAP North America, rejoins Mustansir Saifuddin to talk about the electronic vehicle (EV) market. Bill shares background on the EV market, how the market is developing, and what to expect in the future. From fuel cell technology to point charging to the changing user experience and sustainability, Bill covers a lot. More importantly he shares some valuable information for consumers and suppliers alike. Bill has over 35 years of executive leadership, strategy, consulting, practice management experience balanced with extensive public speaking and higher education experience. A former leadership team member for Volkswagen's IT division, he is the author of two books on enterprise performance and has worked with many OEMs and suppliers across the automotive industry.  Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Bill Newman, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @william_newman @Mmsaifuddin Instagram @billwine5 YouTube isolutionpartners or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:03.760] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome to Tech Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this episode, I welcome back Bill Newman of SAP. Listen in as Bill shares a background on the electric vehicles or the EV market. He dives into not only the past, but what we can expect to see down the road for suppliers across industries.   [00:00:30.200] - Mustansir Saifuddin Hello, Bill. How are you?   [00:00:32.060] - Bill Newman Good, Mustansir. Good to be back on your show.   [00:00:35.960] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thank you. Hey, welcome to Tech-Driven Business. We had some interesting conversations in the past and I'd like to continue our talk. But this time I picked a different topic than what we had discussed in the past. So looking forward to having that conversation with you.   [00:00:53.120] - Bill Newman Sounds great. Let's dive in.   [00:00:56.490] - Mustansir Saifuddin All right. So what we want to discuss as part of the show today is electric vehicles or EV and technology and how they go hand in hand. So with that, let's start with our conversation. I want to start off with, what are some of the cool things on the horizon when you talk about EV market? Can you just give us some background and your perspective on that?   [00:01:24.740] - Bill Newman Well, sure. I think listeners will be pretty familiar with the light passenger space. Battery electric vehicles, plug in hybrid electric vehicles, particularly those are going to be some of the things that we're seeing now and will continue to see. In other parts of the vehicle space, we're seeing hydrogen, other aspects of fuel cell technology, particularly for long-haul. But the general consumer, unless they're part of that transportation business, is probably, at least in the near term, not going to be impacted by that. With electrification comes this pesky business of having to charge a vehicle. I think listeners might be aware of the term range anxiety. The good news is that on a couple of fronts, battery density and the ability to charge a battery quickly using a DC direct-current fast-charging methods and even some infrastructure that allows parallel DC fast-charging will become more and more available. So it's not just we need locations for charging, but we also need those locations to be quick, efficient, and effective. People understand that you can't just put charging stations out in a parking lot and it works great in the summertime. But when there's weather and in the Sun Belt, the weather can be in the summertime, you have to also provide a friendly charging environment for that.   [00:03:14.240] – Bill Newman So you're going to have covers and maybe some solar collection on the top of the covers, maybe some heated environments for northern climates. These things are all being talked about. We went in deep with them with a recent center of automotive research event that we had that SAP sponsored in San Ramon at the end of 2022. I think also, too, the fact that the federal government is enabling an additional subsidy program for passenger EVs, and also putting some significant infrastructure dollars on the table as a part of the IRA will allow not just the Coast and a lot of the key Gulf Sunbelt strips, which do seem to have a high propensity for charging station density, but allow those to fill into places like in America's heartland where there's lots of open stretches in places where the traditional oil and gas companies have fought to keep electric charging out. So I do think that you'll begin to see over the next few years a little bit less range anxiety. Maybe even we get closer to the mythical 1,000 mile charge, which would really free up EVs as a cross continental and road trip platform that you could take with your friends, your family, maybe even towing, given the fact that we've got some really cool high torque electric vehicle trucks that are now making it into the marketplace and are getting very well received. Here to show everybody around the candy store what might be coming with EVs. So far, it all looks pretty good over the next few years.   [00:05:16.620] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think it's a very exciting time that we're living in, especially that some of the changes that are coming in this segment of the market is pretty phenomenal. How the battery life has been standing in a matter of very short period of time. I think this is really exciting stuff. Taking that growth in that EV space now, looking from the lens of a technology company, how can tech companies support this evolving EV market?   [00:05:54.100] - Bill Newman Well, staying on the topic of point charging, we see there an emergence of a new role in the auto ecosystem and that of energy provisioner. Being not just the companies that create third-party charging stations, but actually brands owning that as an option to say someone like you or I buying an electric vehicle, just like we would decide that we want some sporty wheels and trim packages on our vehicle. Maybe there's a package for pulling a boat, and we'll also be able to buy a trim package to hang a charging unit on the inside of our garage and be able to charge that way. Those are products that need to be built. Those are products that need to be serviced and managed. Guess what? There's a lot of companies, like all the big brands that want to have a piece of that and not only just white label those to be able to provide to their customers, but also be able to potentially do some fractal billing, a few basis pennies per kilowatt hour over time really adds up. And so there's a significant upside and revenue potential there and the Wall Street Journal covered that pretty extensively in an article in late 2022.   [00:07:18.940] - Bill Newman So those are all good things from a vehicle technology perspective, obviously higher density batteries, non-heavy metal batteries. So doing a lot of work with silicone, which can be developed synthetically and not have to be mined and harvested out of tough to reach and sometimes areas with really poor labor practices or maybe not politically friendly to Western markets. So there's a real upside there. And really just also, I think when you look at EVs, the nature, and I've spoken about this on this program and others, the nature of how EVs are shifting the experience from the front-seat driver experience to what I call the back-seat passenger experience, where you might be traveling in a semi-autonomous vehicle that is electrified and may not have a steering wheel, may actually feel more like a rolling, either workplace, or family space. And those provide new opportunities for companies who provide interiors, who provide lighting, who provide sound and instrumentation. We are working with suppliers today, automotive suppliers today, that are really thrilled with the opportunity to come up with some of these new creative designs or creative applications to support some of the new technologies that are going into different EV designs.   [00:08:56.580] - Bill Newman That piece is really extraordinary. If you look back in time, it's almost like when we left the Model A and the lifted carriage design that Henry Ford made so popular and really began to go into the longer sedan like driving experience where everybody could go for a Sunday drive in the countryside. And it was really liberating. I think in many ways we're at that next juncture point now in the design of vehicles that EV is letting us aspire to.   [00:09:36.600] - Mustansir Saifuddin I like your comparison. Really, it is coming to the point where we are going to see a big shift, at least from the vantage point we are at right now, seems like the possibilities are endless, especially when you talk about the interior of a car and the experience of a passenger, not just a driver. You're bringing in a whole new market segment, not only for organizations who are building those interiors, but technology companies who provide those accessories where it opens up a lot of opportunities for the consumers to have a different experience altogether in a vehicle.   [00:10:24.330] - Bill Newman I'll just add really quickly to that and do a shout out to the Experiences Per Mile Advisory Council, and the report that they issued in 2022, actually was the first report of its kind that suggested that the utility or the experience value, the value of an experience was different based on the purpose for that particular use of a vehicle. So if I was going on a vacation road trip, or if I was just driving to the office, or I was taking my kids to a soccer practice, there were lots of different use cases. And it's really pretty extraordinary to see then, are we moving to a place, particularly with new EV design, where we're actually designing or maybe just using a vehicle specifically fit for a given purpose or a set of specific purposes. And then for another basket of reasons why we would use a vehicle, we use something completely different all together. Really suggests a huge differentiation in potentially where vehicles could go and maybe moving out of that, how many hundreds of thousands of this particular vehicle did I produce to make money in a particular year to how personalized was I able to make this vehicle experience to my customers?   [00:11:55.840] - Bill Newman And how many times were they able to come into my portfolio of different vehicles to get the value that they wanted? So it's pretty fascinating stuff.   [00:12:07.660] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think you touched upon a very important point over here, the experience economy. Everything is about the experience now. This whole EV market can definitely change how folks look at a mode of transportation being so versatile and so open to having these possibilities which were unimaginable a few years back. Definitely a big shift in this direction. On a separate note, let me ask you this, what do you consider your biggest accomplishment? I know on a professional level, definitely you have a lot to share, but something that sticks out to you on a personal professional level that you'd like to share with our listeners?   [00:13:01.080] - Bill Newman Well, I think outside of my family, on a personal level professionally, I've always tried to be more of a teacher and a mentor. Interesting story. When I was a junior at UCLA, I was a substitute teacher for a school district that was on strike. All the world of respect to educators out there, but I was a hungry college student that needed to earn a few bucks, so I taught some math classes. One of my most fulfilling moments in my early adulthood was being able to work with some of the high school students that frankly hadn't gotten much of a shot from the institutional educators that were working at the high school that I was pinch hitting in and really being able to watch them grow. I've learned over the years that some of them have actually gone on to become educators themselves. I find that hugely fulfilling and feels like I have in a small way left a mark in somebody's life moving forward. Also just as a youth leader, too, as the same thing, whether it's at church or boy scouts or any of those things. Professionally, I've been part of some really cool vehicle design programs.   [00:14:23.900] - Bill Newman Listeners might know that I was an airplane guy before I was an automobile guy. So being able to take advantage of some design to first flight vehicle programs was really rewarding for me, as well as watching the Volkswagen Beatle sunset and roll off the assembly line down in Puebla, Mexico, after owning one as my first car when I had just gotten my license when I was 16. Those are just some fun things that come to mind. Appreciate you asking the question.   [00:15:03.360] - Mustansir Saifuddin Now, that's awesome. I can see that spark in your eyes when you talk about teaching and your passion for that and how it relates to your professional life also. But coming back to our topic, when you talk about EVs and this whole conversation about technology, what's your take on sustainability? How big a role is sustainability playing for the supply chain as you have seen in the past year or what do you see as the future in 2023?   [00:15:39.080] - Bill Newman Well, for sure, we're doing in our supply chain, we're moving more to a make-to-market, so more of a regionalization, which is good ecologically. Putting things on airplanes and putting them on boats and making them go thousands of miles. Yeah, I understand that there's a factor cost benefit to it to keep the price low, but it's not a good thing in terms of emissions either from vehicles or from ships, air vehicles, airplanes, air cargo jets in particular, and it's also very expensive. So I think that that aside, being able to figure out a way to manufacture EV technologies with less of a reliance on heavy materials that, again, need to be strip mined in many situations and have a tendency to devastate the environment of developing nations and not so developing nations who are doing that at their own expense. I think that there's something to be said about that. We're going to look at Scope 1, 2 and possibly Scope 3 requirements, along with significant tailpipe emission requirements and other rules that are going to come to the US in 2023. One can imagine that if I don't have my rules in alignment, I could, as an innocent EV owner, purchase a vehicle that was manufactured using inappropriate labor sources with materials that were mined in non-environmentally friendly ways and powered by non-environmentally friendly coal fired electrical plants.   [00:17:39.120] - Bill Newman So just because you drive an EV doesn't mean that you're being ecologically mindful. You have to really understand where it's all coming from and how you're using it. So sustainability plays a huge role there. We're going to see more regulatory impacts and reporting impacts as we go into 2023. And frankly, that works for people who want to drive gas powered vehicles as well. They're complex pieces of machinery and whether you have an affinity to drive gas powered electric or what have you, there's no guarantee that just because you climb behind a wheel, some gas powered vehicles are actually more sustainable than EVs. So it's not a black and white thing. Just to use the expression, you really have to go under the hood to understand what's going on there so that you're putting your money in a meaningful way in a place where you can act accordingly based on your beliefs for what sustainability means for you.   [00:18:48.360] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think you just hit it really right on the point when you talk about you really have to look under the hood to see what's going on. That's a good advice for our listeners to keep that in mind when you look at sustainability and how big of a role it plays overall. I think that brings us to the end of our conversation. Like I say always, what is the one take away from this particular topic that you're talking about that you want our listeners to keep in mind how we move through 2023?   [00:19:26.100] - Bill Newman Well, I think on the topic of EVs, just to wrap up the last piece that we were discussing, I think you have to decide what kind of an impact and how early you want to make, if you are going to be a green buyer and be conscientious and put your money where your mouth is. And for those people who really want to make an impact right now, immediately, and feel good about what they're doing over the next 5 to 10 years with the environment, buy a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. It's proven technology. Do plug it in. Don't drive it like a gas powered vehicle because then you're no better off than if you're filling up at the gas station. But that's very finely tuned technology. It's multi generations old. If you do feel that compelled to go in and buy a full battery electric vehicle, also understand that the technology is going to significantly improve, not quite like Moore's Law, but you're going to see some significant improvements in vehicle performance and comfort. Maybe not reliability because they're generally very high quality vehicles built today. But certainly in terms of battery capacity range, etc. You're going to see some real significant improvements in the next two to three years.   [00:20:51.240] - Bill Newman But again, plan to drive the car for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. That's how they're built. And that's a real change in the mindset, particularly of North American auto consumers who, as recent as 20 years ago, generally bought or leased a new car every 4 to 6 years. We're moving away from that. So be really happy and confident in the purchase, particularly that you're making when and if you do go in for a form of electric vehicle. And that way you'll be quite satisfied over the period of ownership.   [00:21:33.120] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's a good advice to keep in mind. Thank you so much, Bill. It has been a pleasure talking with you. And it was a great conversation, especially this topic has been lingering and a lot of folks have questions in terms of how we are seeing the market now, but also what is the future holds for them. So thank you again for sharing your insights into this topic.   [00:21:58.240] - Bill Newman Great to be with you again. Take care. Have a great day.   [00:22:02.340] - Mustansir Saifuddin You too. Thank you.   [00:22:07.920] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Bill covered so many aspects of the quickly evolving EV market. His main take away? Decide what environmental impact you want to make and when. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovation Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this next series of Tech-Driven Business, William ("Bill") Newman, Industry Executive Advisor at SAP North America, rejoins Mustansir Saifuddin to discuss how Workforce Planning has evolved through out the pandemic. This includes Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, changes in business operational styles, talent acquisition and retention, and how SAP is playing a role in this landscape. From not only supporting customers with their talent attraction and retention to providing access to education to expand the talent pool, SAP continues to be an important player in the tech industry. Bill has over 35 years of executive leadership, strategy, consulting, practice management experience balanced with extensive public speaking and higher education experience. A former leadership team member for Volkswagen's IT division, he is the author of two books on enterprise performance and has worked with many OEMs and suppliers across the automotive industry.  Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Bill Newman Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @william_newman @Mmsaifuddin Instagram @billwine5 YouTube @isolutionpartners or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:04.090] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome to Tech-driven Business. Brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this first episode of a multipart series, I welcome back Bill Newman of SAP listen in as Bill shares his thoughts on how workforce planning has evolved in the pandemic. There are so many moving pieces to the puzzle and Bill hits on what businesses of all sizes should be aware of.   [00:00:30.730] - Mustansir Saifuddin Hello, Bill. How are you?   [00:00:33.530] - Bill Newman Great. Mustansir. Good to be back with you again.   [00:00:36.970] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thank you. Thank you for joining us. It's been a while, so it's really good to have you back on our show.   [00:00:42.590] - Bill Newman Good to be back with you. Good topic to revisit now that it's been a little while, for sure.   [00:00:49.730] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think today we will focus on workforce planning and DEI. That's what we want to talk about and get some real examples from you and how things have progressed over since our last conversation. So if you're ready, we can get into our questions.   [00:01:10.230] - Bill Newman Let's dive in.   [00:01:12.390] - Mustansir Saifuddin Sounds good. So I know when you last joined me, we were in the midst of a pandemic, right? And looking back at 2022, what changes have you seen and where do you see us going?   [00:01:28.330] - Bill Newman Well, I think the biggest change is that we're all we're all back together again, right? We're all working. We're working differently. So obviously there's a lot of technology that has been provided to enable remote work that's become mainstream. And in fact, in many cases, it's de facto. Whereas prior to the pandemic, we would say, tell me why we can't get together face to face. The kind of the thinking now is, tell me why we can't do this virtually. Right? Everybody's kind of enjoyed not only do they have the technology to work remotely, many people have enjoyed the fact that they haven't had to spend two, three, 4 hours a day commuting or traveling. So if we need to, we will. If we don't, why should we? It's even gotten to a point where a lot of our customers have asked their employees, tell me what days you would be willing to come into the office. And no big surprise, very few people lift their hand on Monday and Friday because they would like to spend those days at least working from home to have a little bit more of a work life or life work balance.   [00:02:47.270] - Bill Newman But interestingly, everybody coming into the office on Wednesdays just creates the same traffic nightmare and parking anxiety that everybody had prior to the pandemic. So that's always an interesting facet. I think the way that we engage with people both in terms of how we bring them into the company and what our expectations are of them once they're in the company, I think has certainly changed. I think about some of the prioritizations and I guess what's a good word for it, some of the glamour that kind of went along with working for, say, for example, a high tech company in Silicon Valley. Well, guess what? You can probably work for that same company and work in Asheville, North Carolina, up in the mountains eating fish tacos at night. So there's really lots of different opportunities to work. So the glamour around working for some of these companies where you would come in, you get the ping pong table, you could bring your pet to work, you could get free lunches, free dinners, almost create an environment where you'd never want to leave, particularly if you were at the time of young millennial without a family.   [00:04:13.570] - Bill Newman That pretext has gone away and that pretense doesn't make any sense anymore. We'll get into a couple of other things around workforce hiring and some of the things that are emerging around diversity and equality and inclusion or dei, which I think is very interesting as we do our look ahead. But those are some of the main and plain changes that we've seen since you and I were together, I think over a year ago.   [00:04:44.490] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, for sure. I think Bill and thanks for getting into like the nittygritty of what's going on and what we are seeing in this 2022 versus during the Pandemic. I think one of the things that was really stood out, especially for younger workforce, they find this as a new normal. And that has definitely put a lot of pressure on organizations to look at this as a going forward approach also right. In terms of how they should be operating, not just now coming out of the Pandemic, but in the long run, how should they be structured and what should be the criteria for the employees to be attracted to an organization or to associate with them. Right. In that fashion, I think it's safe.   [00:05:35.780] - Bill Newman To say that geography has very little correlation to where we work and what we do anymore. And that is a huge game changer.   [00:05:44.190] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, for sure. That kind of takes me to looking ahead. So let's fast forward to 2023. What do you think organizations should be looking at and employees at the same time, right? What should be their focus as far as moving ahead in 2023?   [00:06:07.190] - Bill Newman Well, I think on the topic of workforce planning, for sure, and I'll look at this through a manufacturing lens. So, you know, you and I are both manufacturing experts, so let's kind of stay in our base camp for the moment. There's going to be a significant amount of hiring that's still going to continue just because we decide to keep interest rates high. That's not going to take away the need from having people with both skilled trades as well as higher education, engineering especially, to come in and really contribute. So those talents will remain and will become very competitive across different kinds of manufacturing as well as non-manufacturing segments. So, again, remember, we took geography out of the equation. So you and I are today recording. We're both in Michigan. Tomorrow we could be looking at bringing somebody on board to our projects that could be in California, Arizona, Massachusetts, Florida and Georgia. Doesn't matter. We're all going to be enabled to come together. So I think that this idea of, again, where you work and where you live is now disassociated. And what that does is it creates a lot of competitiveness across industries and across industry sectors.   [00:07:36.870] - Bill Newman So how we interview, I'm a big brand, you want to come and work for me? Maybe I'm not really interested in going through eight to ten interview cycles with you anymore. Maybe I can find a good job, a good next step in my career without having to make that kind of commitment that you expected to come work for a brand name company before the pandemic. So being able to get to figure out for employers, being able to figure out what's the talent we need, what does that skill mix look like, what's my preferred ratio of being in office or being remote? Does the position require being face to face? And if so, how much, how much virtualization can be needed, is needed to be successful? All of that you got to figure out ahead of time and then really compress the onboarding and hiring process. So that's for sure going to be a real challenge, particularly in this talent shortage and manufacturing, again, staying kind of our base camp. I think the other thing to look at and we'll lead into this topic around DEI, it's really in the mainstream now. So I'm going to refer to the recently published Original Equipment Supplier Association OESA study that was completed with Acadia just in December of 2022.   [00:09:09.790] - Bill Newman It really spoke strongly and without going too deep into the report, just kind of give a couple of points. That over 60% of companies now in the automotive supplier space. So again, kind of stay in niche into one of our home bases here have active dei programs and of those, 60 plus percent are showing improvements or acceleration in those programs. And I'm really not just talking about making sure that you have a diverse workforce from a cultural or race or a gender perspective. It's actually also extending to socioeconomic background kind of in terms of culturally where your country of origin might be from, and also making sure that those DEI elements not only apply to new talent acquisition, but also to high potential programs to work shift opportunities. So if you did want to take a different shift in your skilled trade, maybe having that balance across for second and maybe even third shifts is important as well as in the boardroom. So you're not just going to see it at the front end and the back end of the career management process. You're going to see it all across the different elements of an employee journey, throughout the organization.   [00:10:35.470] - Bill Newman And again, while manufacturing is going to be significantly short on effective and productive talent, you're going to see a real lean into that to keep those people happy, to keep them motivated and to keep them performing at very high levels with very high intrinsic value, for sure.   [00:10:56.900] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think you mentioned about DEI and what role is being playing and how quickly it is getting integrated into the new normal. Right. That's amazing. With that being said, let's take a little detail over here on a personal note. I know you always have a pulse on what is going on in the industry. How are you able to do that?   [00:11:23.370] - Bill Newman Well, I think it comes from a lot of years and knowing a lot of people and having done a lot of different things. I really do enjoy learning. I'm a naturally curious individual. I also enjoy meeting new people and hearing their perspective, particularly some of the lessons learned in the personal experiences coming out of the pandemic. I think we have a lot to offer each other and I think that just being able to be part of that conversation and maybe not contribute into the conversation as much as well as listening in and taking ideas away from the conversation, but certainly trying to frame a balance of that. And I think also, too, it's very interesting as the parent of Millennials now that the millennials are essentially running the workplace now. They're the largest generation in the workforce now by numbers. It's very interesting for me to see how the nature of business is changing now that essentially my kids generation are running business here, at least in North America. So I find that particularly interesting and in some cases highly entertaining.   [00:12:47.650] - Mustansir Saifuddin I can totally relate to that. It's just different dynamics, right? That's for sure.   [00:12:53.750] - Bill Newman Yeah, 100%. You know, things are things are very, very different and the different expectations that come with shaping those different generational life journeys is pretty interesting to watch.   [00:13:08.010] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah. And I think that in a good way, it's happening and it's happening fairly, I would say at a very fast pace the way it's happening. But now looking back, like, let's do it from an organization's point of view, right. What's your take on how SAP is helping retool the workforce to make it easier for people to jump into it? What have you observed?   [00:13:39.170] - Bill Newman Well, there are some things certainly that we can offer our customers that can make it a lot easier for them to manage their employee journey. So I think listeners are probably familiar with the fact that SAP has a special relationship with Qualtrics. Qualtrics does a lot of work around employee relationship and being able to kind of do those pulse surveys. And we did use those pulse surveys very significantly across a lot of industries during the pandemic. They were incredibly useful just to kind of keep a sense, particularly when we weren't together at all, to be able to keep a sense on where everybody was. The so called pulse check, I think also too that from a human experience management or human HR relationship type of perspective. We've always had tools to help with the onboarding and also the career management of employees. I just think that those are going to gain a higher level of importance, particularly as skilled trade and experienced talent particularly is harder to find and is harder to keep and as the demand grows. I think from a knowledge and community sharing, SAP has been very forward with online learning platforms such as Open SAP.   [00:15:13.970] - Bill Newman So lots of education, a lot of content, a lot of knowledge available to go in and learn basically available for at free of charge in many cases. So just one zone time. And I think based on some of the experiences Mustansir that you and I have had within the user groups, is a very vibrant community within the user base, that allows for not only personal networking, but also for experiential learning as well as story sharing and other really great learning vehicles like that. So we're trying to do our best particularly inside of key industries and localized geographies where people may not be working but where they are resident. And I think that that will continue and become even more important in the coming years.   [00:16:07.350] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, I think you mentioned about SAP's role. I think I likely when throwing you mentioned about user groups and America's SAP User Group (ASUG) I will call them out on this and they have done a great job in kind of mixing in with the the new normal. How things are happening in 2022 after the Pandemic and having that virtual/in-person events, trying to meet up with the demands after the Pandemic, how things are moving forward and what are people looking at as far as learning and meeting up with each other, as well as collaboration. So I think we have a mixed bag of all the platforms that are currently available to the business community are coming along and moving into the direction that makes it much easier for organizations to manage how they are managing their workforce and especially this trend. Will we'll see how 2023 brings to the forefront in terms of what we have seen in 2022 and what is going to be a long term effect on how workforce planning goes in general right now, from an organizational point of view? So that being said, I know this was one thing that I always ask my guest what is that one takeaway that you want to share with our listeners and they should leave with that in this session?   [00:17:58.970] - Bill Newman Well, kind of going back to trying to have a state of natural curiosity, I think listeners can always keep in mind or maybe take with them the fact that we can always learn something from one another. And you may have a highly pedigreed career over decades, but bringing a set of fresh eyes with a different perspective can be really kind of that spark moment that you need to either solve a critical business problem or really just find something intrinsic in your own personal growth journey. Doesn't matter what your age are or who you are, we all have that need, and I think being able to contribute and help shape each other and being open, I think that's really also another key. Being open to those messages when they come in will all make us much better people and make our businesses operate much more productively and efficiently, for sure.   [00:19:09.570] - Mustansir Saifuddin Great advice. Thank you so much. This has been a great session with you, Bill, as always. Thank you and I look forward to talking with you in our next podcast.   [00:19:21.810] - Bill Newman Sounds great. Look forward to it. Thanks for having me on.   [00:19:27.750] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Bill provided valuable insights on how workforce planning has changed over the last couple of years. His main takeaway? We can always learn from one another. Bringing a fresh set of ideas with a different perspective can be the spark movement you need to solve a business problem or for your own personal growth. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting Isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.  

In this episode, Matt Florian of Comerit rejoins Mustansir Saifuddin to discuss the importance of managing organizational change as enterprises take on cloud based analytics. It's not enough to choose an analytics tool. Successful companies take the time to look at how organizational change gets to be addressed; from awareness, decision making, implementation, and finally institutionalizing it. His key takeaway: Not addressing a change strategy will inherently increase your risk of not achieving your objectives for your cloud analytics initiative. Matt has more than 25 years of leadership in data and enterprise architecture in numerous industries. He has successfully delivered enterprise data transformation projects for government, telecommunication, retail, manufacturing, and financial services sectors. Matt began consulting focusing on data warehousing in telecommunication for national providers. Over the course of his career has consulted for Oracle, IBM, and Unisys across many industries. His leadership, experience, and clarity of technical topics earned him the trust of client executive leadership. Matt's talent to develop and lead teams is the key to his successful delivery of projects for clients. Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Matt Florian Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:03.390] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome to Tech-Driven Business, brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this third episode of a multipart series,  I welcome back Matt Florian of Comerit. Listen in as Matt and I discuss the importance of addressing organizational change. When you pursue a cloud analytics initiative, we'll drive into real-life scenarios to highlight the value of alignment of business and .IT   [00:00:35.440] - Mustansir Saifuddin Hello Matt, welcome to Tech During Business. How are you man?   [00:00:39.370] - Matt Florian I am doing very well. Mustansir, how are you sir?   [00:00:43.840] - Mustansir Saifuddin Wonderful. Thank you for joining us today.   [00:00:48.490] - Matt Florian I'm happy to be here, happy to join you once again. These have been fantastic talks and look forward to more.   [00:00:56.360] - Mustansir Saifuddin Awesome. So I'd like to continue our discussion. I know we started this conversation some time ago where we dived into transitioning to cloud data warehouse and also looked into hybrid environments and some of the benefits that customers are reaping going that route. So today I would like to focus on organizational change in cloud analytics and why are they so important in the whole cloud journey? How does that sound to you?   [00:01:29.020] - Matt Florian It sounds great. It's a conversation, a topic that is too often overlooked. So let's get to it.   [00:01:36.640] - Mustansir Saifuddin Absolutely. So I think let's start with the basics, right? I mean, can you help explain the role of organizational change when it comes to cloud analytics? Can you just simplify that?   [00:01:49.690] - Matt Florian You know, it's such an important piece on the cloud analytics and like I said, it's not discussed often enough. Being in IT for over 25 years, and you and I have both been around the block quite a bit and worked with different companies of all shapes and sizes. And their failures in analytics always come down to a very common thing, and that is they didn't incorporate the change, the organizational change that is part of it. And organizational change is very difficult in and of itself. Right. The study of literature says that the estimates of organizational change initiatives failed 60% to 70% of the time, and that's something that hasn't changed since the 70s. It's just a consistent theme. So lack of having good engagement, bringing in experts like you and I to go and do this and then relying on us to actually convey it, well, that's a big cost. Because if we don't have managers involved in organizational change and institutionalizing that is who they are, then going to the cloud is not going to solve your problem.   [00:03:05.590] - Mustansir Saifuddin Absolutely. I think that being said, I know that's one of the biggest, bigger challenges especially is outside the realm of the technical delivery of objects. Right. But when you think about organizational change, what are some of the critical or change management components that customers get to have in place? Would you be able to dive into that detail about some of the critical change components that are very important?   [00:03:39.560] - Matt Florian Sure. Organizational change, it's a body of knowledge that has been built up by business schools and organizational psychology has studied us and has given us a breadth of knowledge to build from and we have frameworks to work from. As a matter of fact, I think if you went and searched on Amazon today, you'd probably find 1000 books published in the last three or four years that talk about organizational change and how to succeed and everybody's opinion on it and what it comes down to. But I think that when you think about organizational change and you spoil it down and boil down what those 500 books, I have to say it really comes down to four really critical phases. That is awareness, making the decision to do something, implementing it and then institutionalizing it. And those are the four key phases of organizational change.   [00:04:45.490] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's good to know and those are important areas, right? Especially when it comes to something that is new and it's very broad. When you talk about cloud analytics, we are talking about a lot of different things in play. So when you mentioned those critical change components, right, is there an example that you can share with us about any one of those?   [00:05:16.910] - Matt Florian Yeah, so awareness really starts off with business and IT both come to an agreement, a recognition that there's a problem. And the problem is that you'll see when it comes to analytics are problems like we're not achieving our organic growth metrics, we're not lowering the cost, we're not gaining insights, we're reacting instead of being proactive and respond to the market. And those are all pieces of awareness. And awareness can also be that we're not making bright investments in technology. The business has been implementing different data visualization and analytics tools all across and nobody has a common platform. So as a result, spending a lot of money on a lot of different tools that are telling you different stories and those all can lead into that awareness. With awareness we have a problem, we're not achieving our goals, we're not controlling our costs, we need to do analytics better. And that really they can lead into decision, right? And those are all problems that everybody's seen, it's nothing new. And then the decision part then is, well we got to do something about this. And where I think a lot of companies stumble is that they jump to the decision and say, we're going to go cloud analytics.   [00:06:49.390] - Matt Florian Well, cloud analytics is not a decision, it's an architecture, it's a technology. But the decision really needs to be a collaboration between the business and IT on what that vision is. Because they went and started using other analytics tools for a reason, they went outside and did things differently for a reason. There's a need that wasn't being met. So jumping to analytics and cloud analytics isn't the answer, it's creating a shared vision is the answer. What do we want this new vision to look like? And that very well could be cloud analytics. But it's cloud analytics and other things and other things in the cloud. So that really drives into that decision. We're going to do something and we now have a shared vision of what that is. We shared the architecture and our solution and how we're all going to do this. And we're going to achieve this within some set budget, which then drives us an execution go to do it. And execution still requires a whole lot of communication, though, because during execution, we may have had a great plan of what our decision was, but the execution comes down and we have to start making changes and adjustments and react to different things along the way.   [00:08:07.470] - Matt Florian So we need to continue to communicate because we have a shared vision. We have to keep that vision alive. Everybody still has to be on board when we get done with this development that they're going to go, this is what I wanted, this is great, I want to be part of this. Then you get to that institutionalization. And this is where I think you and I both have seen these projects stumble hard, is the consultants get done, we leave, and the business is like, well, what do I do with this? How do I work this? And you know what? That's all right. I'm just going to go back to Excel. And they didn't institutionalize the change and all the work that you did and the business along that path, they need to develop their champions and they need to develop a pipeline of champions because the business owns that institutionalization side.   [00:09:02.810] - Mustansir Saifuddin Absolutely. I think, and that's really the key message that you mentioned over here. Especially, a lot of times we see when you go into these kind of conversations, one of the biggest challenges that organizations face is these silos, right? These business units doing their own thing based on their comfort level, based on a tool they were exposed to. And those silos need to be broken down in order to have a cohesive approach in terms of going to a cloud analytics approach, right. So that takes me to my next segue question. Can you share a success story on a particular cloud analytics project where you have gone through the cycle? And what are some of the implementation steps? The right steps, I'll call the right steps to address that organizational change in that case. Can you share?   [00:10:03.340] - Matt Florian Yeah, well, I'm glad you asked for a successful one. They are the hard ones to pull out of the hat sometimes because some projects are kind of a mixed bag of what success is. But we worked with a client just a few years ago on a self service project and doing a big move into cloud analytics space. And that project began not with a move to say we're going to do cloud analytics. That project began with the question from the IT department of what is our current visualization tools that are out there? What are people using? So we did a survey of the business and evaluated and analyzed what the different business practices and organizations are coming back with. We're using to look at the data because business assumed, IT assumed, we got this big cognitive implementation. People are just hitting this thing all the time, they're using it everywhere. And the reality was that according to the business, they were using their cloud, their Cognos to download large data sets and analyze them in other tools. So we found Tableau, we found Power BI, we found Looker, we found Alterix and we found a whole lot of Excel.   [00:11:31.460] - Matt Florian And as I said, the business had a need and the existing structure wasn't working. So that led to that awareness and having that discussion with the business leaders of what's going on. And IT led awareness like, well, we really do need to standardize in what we're doing. Everybody has a favorite, but it's costing a lot of money. So, working with the business,  we built again, that shared vision. That said, there's a lot of people that like Power BI in that particular case. And you're already a Microsoft shop, you have a large Microsoft presence in Azure. So let's move your warehouse over to Azure and let's build a new vision of what analytics looks like and start freeing up data as data sets. So we built this model, this vision that IT would get out of the business of creating reports. And they would serve data, they would have data products. And in return, business would go and learn how to create their reports and consume the data that they needed so that both sides are being met. And the business was very much behind it. So when we built, we continued to work with the business on what this build looks like, what data sets are going to look like, and having very early testing in it, they're starting to build excitement and getting encouragement with it.   [00:12:56.550] - Matt Florian And organizational change was a big part of this in my communication with the IT and the business owners. So we went on a roadshow, we would go and have host lunches with business stakeholders and people that are going to consume the data and say this is what the vision looks like, this is what the future is going to be, see how you can do all this stuff. And we let them go and hammer away on playing with dashboards and creating their own reports and creating excitement that says oh my God, I can go do this, I can make this happen. And when it finally came time to deploy and started deploying out different models, the business was on it and they picked up and they picked up their own community of practice, continued having champions of the data and continued to be champions of Power BI and build their own communities. And that institutionalized that change into their organization. So every now and then you'll have other trickles of Alteryx or Tableau come in from an outside consultant, but organizationally, they viewed themselves as a Power BI shop. And that's how they see themselves and that's how they react.   [00:14:07.690] - Matt Florian And to this day, they still view themselves that way. And so it's like a good example of change, organizational change that took hold to support the deployment of a cloud analytics solution.   [00:14:21.560] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's awesome. I think that the key takeaway for our listeners from this example seems like you completely flip the conversation. Make it more like ownership factor moves towards the business versus IT, and then business kind of took it on themselves to move forward with this approach, which is definitely the way to go forward.   [00:14:47.210] - Matt Florian With cloud analytics, IT is just an enabler of that data. The actual consumer and taking action that's business; business needs to be very much part of this.   [00:15:02.510] - Mustansir Saifuddin Absolutely. I think that kind of takes me to a conversation which is very critical, especially on some of these projects. Right. When you talk about cloud analytics, what are some of the cost implications when you don't have the right organizational change strategy in place? Because that's always on top of the mind of folks. What can go wrong, especially from a cost perspective. Can you share an example of this?   [00:15:34.960] - Matt Florian Sure. Did you ever hear about that bridge in Alaska that they built? They built a bridge in Alaska. It's called the Bridge to Nowhere because it just built and then funding stopped. It actually ends in the middle of nothing. It doesn't connect with anything. That's exactly what happens; what will happen and can happen with an analytics project if you don't have organizational change. You run a high risk of putting a lot of money and a lot of time, investment and energy into building what could be a very transformative tool to the business to achieve goals and their objectives. And it goes nowhere. And that investment is just lost. You'll have no ROI on it because nobody uses it. And nobody uses it because that whole user experience of the business consuming the data wasn't taken into account and how they're going to change. You're asking people to stop using Excel to analyze every little thing and instead be analytics minded. That's a major shift. And it's not a badge against Excel. Excel does great things. I use Excel to do some analytics all the time. But to drive the business and to make shared collaborative decisions, you need a tool that's more informative than Excel, and you need a shared vision by the business of what it's going to be important.   [00:17:10.240] - Matt Florian So if you're going to go and say, I want to take an analytics journey, the first question you have to ask is why and who's on the journey with you? And if you don't if you don't take business on that journey, then it's a bridge to nowhere.   [00:17:26.960] - Mustansir Saifuddin A great example, for sure. I think that's in time and time again, a lot of folks forget about that and they want to go to the decisionmaking or the actual execution part, which is definitely very important. But without having that upfront work, which seems like this example you very clearly articulated, you will not be able to reach the goal that you set out for yourself. So I think that takes me to my closing question on this topic. What is one takeaway, one key takeaway that you want our listeners to leave with today?   [00:18:11.060] - Matt Florian The key takeaway is that if organizational change is not part of your plan, it's not part of what's incorporated, then you might as well just put it straight over into the project risk register; that you run the risk of not achieving your project objectives. Because without it that's some semblance of this, you are going to run a high risk of not succeeding and having cost runovers by redoing things because the business was not fully on board. The business had an idea of what they wanted. But you and the business aren't in alignment on what the shared vision is and what it's going to actually take in order to make it happen. So if you don't want to run that risk, incorporate it, make it part of the project, and you will mitigate the risk. There's no risks, but you'll mitigate that.   [00:19:11.660] - Mustansir Saifuddin What a great advice. I think I love that. I think that's one thing that if folks pay attention to it very upfront in the journey, they will pay dividends down the road. So thank you for sharing that. So I think with that, I like to thank you, Matt, for joining us. Again, look forward to more conversations on this topic.   [00:19:34.010] - Matt Florian Thank you, I look forward to as well. As always, great talking to you Mustansir.   [00:19:43.460] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Matt shared the value of addressing organizational change as enterprises get ready to take on cloud analytics initiatives. His main takeaway if organizational change is not part of your plan, you run the risk of not achieving your project objectives. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting Isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this episode of Tech-Driven Business, Mustansir Saifuddin continues the conversation with Matt Florian of Comerit on how enterprises can leverage hybrid cloud data warehouse solutions. Matt shares the value of hybrid solutions, how to approach creating a hybrid solution, and lessons he's learned along the way. His key takeaway: focus on flexibility and resiliency in your data architecture so you can create data products that can answer multiple questions.  Matt has more than 25 years of leadership in data and enterprise architecture in numerous industries. He has successfully delivered enterprise data transformation projects for government, telecommunication, retail, manufacturing, and financial services sectors. Matt began consulting focusing on data warehousing in telecommunication for national providers. Over the course of his career has consulted for Oracle, IBM, and Unisys across many industries. His leadership, experience, and clarity of technical topics earned him the trust of client executive leadership. Matt's talent to develop and lead teams is the key to his successful delivery of projects for clients. Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Matt Florian Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:03.010] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. Brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this second episode of a multipart series, I welcome back Matt Florian of Comerit. Listen in as Matt and I discuss the value of hybrid cloud data warehouse solutions, including how to approach creating one, and lessons learned along the way. It's more than about just getting it in place.   [00:00:35.510] - Mustansir Saifuddin Hello, Matt. Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. How are you, man?   [00:00:39.130] - Matt Florian I'm doing very well Mustansir. How are you, sir?   [00:00:42.860] - Mustansir Saifuddin Another beautiful day. Hey, thank you for our first conversation when we started off this whole cloud data warehouse topic, and I'd like to continue our discussion on this topic. And I think one area that I feel a lot of conversations are happening is the hybrid environment. So I thought we should talk about that in today's session and wanted to get your take on that.   [00:01:15.190] - Matt Florian Oh, absolutely. It's a very common conversation that goes on with clients nowadays and trying to figure out what is it that they really want to go do and how much risk they want to carry on it. You'll hear hybrid pop up there every time. So I think one of the biggest problems they have is what the heck does hybrid need?   [00:01:34.090] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, I hear you, and I think this will be really helpful, especially with your experience. And when you look at across the board, doesn't matter what industry you're in, it seems like customers are not ready to make that jump. Right. They are looking at ways to either extend their environments into a way that they can sustain in the short term and then plan for the long term.   [00:02:01.710] - Matt Florian Right.   [00:02:01.930] - Mustansir Saifuddin So this conversation would be very beneficial.   [00:02:05.820] - Matt Florian I completely agree.   [00:02:08.890] - Mustansir Saifuddin All right, so let's start with this. Let's start with a very basic thing. I think I would like to have my listeners get an understanding of when we talk about hybrid. What do you really mean and why hybrid? I think those two questions I like to start with.   [00:02:24.580] - Matt Florian Sure. You think of hybrid. Hybrid's about taking two options that are very similar to each other. They have overlapping functionality and saying.   [00:02:40.720] - Matt Florian I want the safety and security of what I've been doing, but I want to start dabbling into another way to do it. And we see that a lot with SAP customers who have a lot of security inside of being inside of BW, and then maybe they want to dabble over into cloud computing with Snowflake. And how do you do that? There's different ways that looks at you. Same thing we said, like the security of SAC, but maybe I want to use Power Bi or Sigma or something like that and balance it out, but don't extend their risk and just jump and go do it. So SAP customers don't tend to be risk heavy. They like to avert it as much as possible.   [00:03:32.590] - Mustansir Saifuddin Absolutely. And that makes sense, right? Especially when you have big landscapes and you want to manage your environment, what's the best way to do it? Right? So I guess I heard two things right, and I'm talking about benefits. It seems like you want to avoid risk as much as possible. At the same time try out new technology. Are there any other benefits that you see from your viewpoint when you take a hybrid approach?   [00:04:01.310] - Matt Florian So the hybrid is a benefit to using hybrid is that you get to focus on a particular use case that is of value and benefit to you. And I often see customers go down that hybrid because they want to go and have more flexibility to blend SAP data with other third party data and do it just easier. And so they'll go down this hybrid approach because, well, let's face it, BW does a lot of analytics well and don't break what's really working well for you. On the other hand, wanting to know your organic growth against other metrics that come from Salesforce or other CRMs or from Google Analytics, that's a whole other dimension. And that's hybrid really can help bridge that and be able to answer some questions that SAP doesn't answer easily.   [00:05:04.990] - Mustansir Saifuddin Absolutely, I think so. You use the SAP reference over here, right? So I guess I'll come from that angle now. So I'm an SAP customer. Why would I want to think about a hybrid solution? And I believe you kind of dabbled into the answer, but give some examples that you can think of where an SAP customer would like to go the route of hybrid.   [00:05:31.390] - Matt Florian So a couple of immediate use cases where hybrid can come into play and really help out is let's go with archiving and being able to look at archived data along with live data. Archiving into a cloud database is one option for archiving either a system that you've migrated off and you did a brownfield implementation. So you have historical data sitting in one place and all your new data building up in another. S/4HANA sitting over here, and you want to bring that together. Well, hybrid is a good option for bringing and looking at historical data along with your current transactions. So that's one area that you may want to go and dabble in. Another good use case is that you really want to implement machine learning and AI, and you want to watch streams of data and you want to train data models for machine learning. Well, that's a hybrid approach gives just a wide open ecosystem of tools that you can use for machine learning and AI, and it would really be beneficial. Again, just easier, for sure.   [00:06:57.240] - Mustansir Saifuddin No, I like your examples. I think kind of puts things in perspective, right? I mean, especially like I said, if things are working, you don't want to break it. At the same time, how can I bring in new ideas, new technology, or new approaches to make my environment easier to maintain and maybe more future proof as far as where I want to go in the long run, right?   [00:07:20.060] - Matt Florian Right. Absolutely.   [00:07:23.360] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's great. So I think let's talk about when we are on that journey, especially folks who are maybe just starting or like to go this direction when we look at from a good practices point of view. Do you have any suggestions or ideas as far as timelines for keeping the hybrid environment?   [00:07:48.860] - Matt Florian For keeping or building? What does it take to do? Is that what you're thinking?   [00:07:55.610] - Mustansir Saifuddin So I'm thinking two ways, right. One, is a lot of times the question come up, right? If I want to go the hybrid route, what is the best way to do it? Do I have a strategy? Timline strategy like I'm going to sunset the system in a certain time frame versus going maybe a one shot approach. I'm going to shut down this existing environment and then move completely into cloud. But I feel like hybrid is becoming a lot more common practice these days. So what would be a good timeline as far as a use case that we can apply in this situation?   [00:08:40.290] - Matt Florian Sure. So we'll go back to that migrating to S/4HANA as an example. If you're going to migrate to S/4HANA and you are going to go with a brownfield or even greenfield strategy on migrating over to that from a homegrown point of sale system to different ERP coming in, whatever it is. That's a great time to go and make that decision of, I'm going to do this hybrid and start the work even before your migration for your S/4HANA and start bringing that information in and building a common, unified model. That would be the place to start. A lot of companies begin that work way too late, and they're trying to play catch up and they want to have unified data at day one, but they don't because they didn't put in that work early enough to say, how am I going to unify my data? And there are strategies to do it, but you need to think it from the very beginning so that you have a solid strategy to make it happen. The other approach is if you're, let's say, you're going to incrementally go and build out your hybrid. In that case, you start with a very high impact use case, something that a lot of people would go and jump on and want to use, and oftentimes it's going to be directly related to sales.   [00:10:16.690] - Matt Florian That's something that's driving top line growth and wanting to tie that to other third party. Start with a very foundational use case that you can build from and then build the processes out around that. That just builds. It just naturally grows from there.   [00:10:38.810] - Mustansir Saifuddin For sure. You kind of touched upon two topics over here, and I like to jump a little bit deeper into this one idea that you just shared. Like, when I'm going the hybrid route, what should be the focus from an implementation perspective, when you go in the hybrid approach, what are some of the things that you should keep in mind?   [00:11:08.210] - Matt Florian Well, you should keep in mind first what's your point of reference is going to be in that hybrid. By point of reference, the hybrid system needs to have something to anchor itself to. For instance, if you're going in and you're going to build out again, I'm going to go back to the SAP. If you're building S/4HANA out, your point of reference is that S/4HANA model and then blending processes into that S/4HANA model. So S/4HANA becomes that anchor, and then you're building out a hybrid model that is SAP plus Salesforce, SAP plus HubSpot plus Google Analytics plus Legacy. But that's your foundation. If you can keep yourself focused on a foundation topic, then you'll be successful. If you go in without that focus, then the lack of clarity creates easily, will create chaos in your hybrid, and then you'll have a high risk of your perception of failure because it didn't answer the set of questions.   [00:12:29.510] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, I think that's an interesting insight, what you just shared. Because I think it seems like in order for you to keep your hybrid environment, I'm looking at how to be successful in this approach.   [00:12:47.140] - Mustansir Saifuddin It seems like if you anchor yourself with a certain system as a starting point, it allows you or it gives you the flexibility to build it out versus going it all out and try to do too many things at the same time will set you up for failure. That's how I'm reading into that.   [00:13:05.650] - Matt Florian It will. If you build out based upon your process areas of the business, and you build out the models from that and connect them, then you have a hybrid environment that is able to answer a whole breadth of questions because they're tied. There's a logical story being told by the data. If you don't have that focus, then the data can't tell a story. And you want that data to tell a story. And all of it has story, and some of that story is from archives, from prior implementations. But it has a story to tell. And in order to do that, you have to give it context and focus. And that's why you need to start this way. You need to keep that something to ground it.   [00:13:58.860] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think, for sure. And I think one of the things, one of the takeaways that I see from this conversation is the fact that a lot of customers may have, depending on the industry, you may have a different set of challenges where you want to use this approach. There are certain things that are working in your current environment. You want to keep that as is. But there are other things that you want to bring in multiple data sets. And you take this approach of going to Snowflake using this multiple data set approach. But having an anchor system in the middle try to leverage that as a starting point. Right?   [00:14:37.210] - Matt Florian Yeah. Because really your anchor is if you think about it another way, your anchor is your process. What is your process today? And that is your anchor. The process is supported by a system of some sort, whatever it may be, but the process is the anchor. And using that as the point lets you go and have your insights and understanding about what it is that you're attempting to achieve.   [00:15:08.140] - Mustansir Saifuddin That kind of takes me to this question which I always ask as one key takeaway. Right. And today's conversation is in a way fairly broad, but I like to keep it controlled and in a way that makes sense for someone who is looking this route. So what would be the one thing that you would share with them as far as if they are thinking of hybrid or they're already on a journey to hybrid? What are some of the key takeaways that you want them to leave the session?   [00:15:41.140] - Matt Florian If you're thinking about go to hybrid and working that way, it's not going to be just focused on what that process is, but architecturally from a data perspective is that think of that hybrid in the approach of creating data products that can answer many questions. Don't try to just answer one. Build an architecture that lets you use that hybrid data as Lego blocks to build and answer other questions. Because if you try to just focus on answering a question, then you're losing other valuable insights that you can gather by blending more data. That's what your hybrid is going to do. You're going to blend data together and you have to architect with intent so that you can answer more questions and have flexibility.   [00:16:39.860] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, I like your way of thinking, especially when you are looking at the future state. A lot of times folks want to take a narrow approach of getting things done, but that may not be the right answer, right.   [00:16:54.790] - Matt Florian It's not just about getting it done. It's about architecting for the future and for your resiliency. And there are many models, many approaches, methodologies that let you architect for resiliency. And when you go down this path, that should be a guiding principle of what that hybrid is built off of, is modeled and architected for that resiliency so that you can answer many questions and be more agile in your answering your questions to the business and respond to changing economic and market conditions.   [00:17:35.660] - Mustansir Saifuddin Great, thank you. This is really helpful.   [00:17:43.910] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Matt shared some valuable information on hybrid cloud data warehouse solutions. His main takeaway: focus on a data architecture perspective so your data can tell a story and answer multiple questions. It's not about just getting it done. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.  

In this next episode of Tech-Driven Business, Matt Florian of Comerit, joins Mustansir Saifuddin to talk about the urgency and motivation for companies to move to a cloud-based data warehouse. This is the beginning of a series of episodes that will dive into how newer tools, like Snowflake, are changing the landscape for companies to blend in different types of data, including their existing SAP systems.  Matt's takeaway: don't wait to start. There will always be something new coming on the horizon so start with a small project and buildup. Matt has more than 25 years of leadership in data and enterprise architecture in numerous industries. He has successfully delivered enterprise data transformation projects for government, telecommunication, retail, manufacturing, and financial services sectors. Matt began consulting focusing on data warehousing in telecommunication for national providers. Over the course of his career has consulted for Oracle, IBM, and Unisys across many industries. His leadership, experience, and clarity of technical topics earned him the trust of client executive leadership. Matt's talent to develop and lead teams is the key to his successful delivery of projects for clients. Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Matt Florian, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners, Twitter: @PragmaticEA, @Mmsaifuddin, YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript: [00:00:03.690] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. Brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this first episode of a multipart series, I welcome Matt Florian of Comerit. Listen in as Matt shares his thoughts on why companies are moving to a cloud data warehouse with such a sense of urgency. With data volumes growing, it's important for companies to take advantage of the power of new technology tools that Matt talks about, including snowflake.   [00:00:35.510] - Mustansir Saifuddin Hello, Matt. How are you?   [00:00:37.600] - Matt Florian I'm doing fine Mustansir how are you?   [00:00:40.090] - Mustansir Saifuddin Doing well. Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. It's a pleasure to have you on my show.   [00:00:46.160] - Matt Florian I'm very grateful to be a member of it and be part of this with you, man.   [00:00:51.710] - Mustansir Saifuddin Awesome. So today we will kick off basically the idea is to kick off a series of podcasts which will revolve around cloud based data warehouses. And we would like to dive into this topic of why companies are transitioning to cloud based data warehouses. Right. And at the same time, what are some of the benefits that they are getting with this move? How does that sound to you?   [00:01:18.420] - Matt Florian That sounds great. Let's get talking.   [00:01:21.110] - Mustansir Saifuddin Awesome. Okay. I know this topic is very near and dear to you, and I'm very glad that we have you on our show, and this will be a great conversation. So let's start with our why, right? So why it is so important right now, moving to a cloud based data warehouse? And the urgency. I think there's two components of this. Right. Why is it important for companies and the same time? What is the urgency behind it?   [00:01:47.800] - Matt Florian Sure. Well, I think that a lot of companies have taken a fair amount of time in the last several years of getting their processes in place and fixing processes with implementations of like SAP and other large ERP. At the same time, you have other parts of the business that are trying to get process in place with a Salesforce or other CRM and other tools out there like that. And each of these platforms, they've been operating fairly independently. And you can do a lot outside of SAP, but getting the full value, I think businesses are looking to get leverage, full value of those implementations, that investment by blending that data with other data, with other stuff. And that's why there's a big urgency and a big move, because it's just being able to do that and do it easily.   [00:02:48.940] - Mustansir Saifuddin That makes sense. Yeah. I think one key word that I got out of this conversation is you mentioned SAP being a central focal point for a lot of companies, but at the same time, they do have these other systems where they want to bring in this information together and blend it together.   [00:03:08.220] - Matt Florian And even we see this a lot with SAP implementation right. That SAP is able to manage a good part of the process, but it doesn't always manage all of the process. There's still other third party applications outside of the SAP ecosystem that are part of the business process and part of the outcomes of the business. And so if you're measuring your outcomes, you have to look at all that data together for sure.   [00:03:37.760] - Mustansir Saifuddin That brings up another point. What are some of the benefits of moving to the cloud? We talk about cloud in a lot of different contexts. Like when you talk about data warehouse and going to a data warehouse based cloud, what are some of the benefits that you see?   [00:03:52.090] - Matt Florian Well, a lot of the new modern data warehouse and cloud applications up there for data management focus, the purchasing and how you procure that is a whole different paradigm today than it was even five years ago. Five years ago, we talked about moving to the cloud and putting stuff into Azure data warehouse or Amazon Redshift. And when you did that, that was good. But you're buying capacity way up front. And some of the more modern warehouses I try not to use the warehouse term overboard here, but the modern data platforms out there really moved over to a utility model where you're charged just for what you're actually using. And combining that with serverless technology, where you're spinning up compute as needed on demand and scaling it, all things that we can't do in even some of the traditional AWS infrastructure and definitely could not do on-premise. So we have such flexibility to solve big problems with data with these cloud applications done smart.   [00:05:15.260] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, I think the key word I hear from a lot of customers, and you mentioned it a couple of times here, is scalability. Right. And then the ability to control that which is not available or which was not available earlier in the traditional data platforms, if you want to use that terminology. Right. So it's a big win, especially when the data volumes are growing at a very rapid pace. And you do want to have that flexibility. And I think you do get both of them with this new move or the benefits that customers are seeing in real time now.   [00:05:56.860] - Matt Florian And if you think about we pick on SAC for a minute. We think about the infrastructure that we have to design and build out for SAP. For a lot of those implementations, you have to preplan everything that you're going to do. And once you go outside of that planned infrastructure, then it requires replanning. And so businesses will often limit themselves to what data they're going to do in there, not because of the limitations of data, but limitations of the infrastructure. So if I can change that dynamic and say, let's do this over in, say, a Snowflake data platform and do this inside a snowflake or inside a Snowflake, I can scale that infrastructure, the compute resources up and out dynamically. And that's something that you really cannot do inside of an SAP here and even in Azure data warehouse couldn't do that kind of scaling. So anybody that's able to make that easy like Snowflake did, that is a proof point right there to why we should move into the cloud.   [00:07:16.390] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, definitely. That makes sense. I think that being said, let's talk about some of the choices available. I think that is one of the key questions a lot of customers are looking for now after COVID has been over. There seems to be a lot of things are happening in the cloud, especially with the amount of choices customers have. I mean, would you like to share some experiences about what are some of the data platform choices that are available and how to the stack up from your perspective?   [00:07:52.460] - Matt Florian Well, we've had opportunities to do cloud computing, cloud build, data warehouse in the cloud for several years now. And AWS and even Azure were very early into the gate of what you could do and they followed a model that was that procurement model inside of the cloud that says, hey, buy this much free capacity and you want to purchase that capacity. And that worked well. And I tell you, when we first did some Azure data warehouses, those warehouses screamed, we moved stuff off of Legacy to onprem into Azure and it was performing tremendously, but it also didn't scale. And how we moved data in was more complicated and it kept a lot of the Legacy mentality about infrastructure in place that you had to pre plan for. And so we didn't really see all the benefits that we should have seen out of it. The same can be said with AWS and Redshift, same kind of mentality, same idea. And it wasn't really until they said that Snowflake model came out that disrupted the marketplace. And I think you hear so much about Snowflake as being one of the predominant tools and platforms talked about today.   [00:09:30.510] - Matt Florian That's because it's utility, right? If I can service 50 queries with one set of compute, then I'm only charged for that one set of compute for the seconds in which I use it and then it turns off. And if I need to go and open up another room, it's like having you a big conference center. If I can service everybody in one room, great, I'm paid for one room. But if I need to spill out into three rooms, I can just spill out the three rooms, turn the lights on and run it until I don't need those other two rooms again, and then come back down into the one without any interactions, without any really taking action. And that's such a big difference in the compute and how we think about data. But it also required at the same time that we end up needing to change how we think about how we're putting data in and building that data. It's a complete mind shift entirely.   [00:10:34.240] - Mustansir Saifuddin That makes sense. I think that's the key piece, right? How you are able to get the flexibility and then control what you want and what you don't want at any given time, which is a lot of customers are asking for, especially when they don't know what the end state is going to look like. Right. I mean, this is what I need now, but it may change in a few months depending on what kind of information they want to bring into the platform and use it. Right. So that makes a lot of sense. Well, let's move away from this topic. Let's talk about on a personal note. You've been doing this technology for quite some time. What are some of the biggest accomplishment that you see you have accomplished over your personal or your professional career biggest.   [00:11:26.820] - Matt Florian Accomplishments besides maintaining a career as long as I have, that itself can be an accomplishment. But there you go. It's funny, early on in my career, I was on a project when I worked as a consultant for IBM and we built an Oncology database for Emory University. And this database, the contract issues can be run into, but the client really wanted a Cadillac for a database and platform that they had, but they had the money for a Yugo instead. And we built just a very streamlined platform and data engineering to build out this Oncology database and take all this clinical data that in the end off of a low cost ETL tool that at the end of the year end up winning awards for the actual design and implementation because it wouldn't identify all these clusters. All these clusters where cancer was occurring and fed and resulted in policy changes and all this great stuff that happened with it. It was done off of a low cost solution to a big problem. And when you can achieve something like that, simplicity to solve something big, man Elvis doesn't get much better than that.   [00:13:11.140] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's a great story. I think at the end of the day, I think it's just a lot of folks talk about data and building these huge data warehouse solutions, right? What is that? It's solving, right? And if you are solving a business case where the organization can see the value right off the bat, and I think that's what really stands out and that's what I got out of this story. So really awesome. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I think this is really good. So that kind of gets me into my next question. It's a nice segue, which is the real meat of this conversation, right. How can organizations make the right choice? I mean, there's a lot of choices, like you mentioned earlier, how can organizations make the right choice of picking the cloud data warehouse that works for them? What would you tell them?   [00:14:04.990] - Matt Florian So what I would tell them is to stop and take a look at what their end goal is for analytics and what it is that they're what type of measures and outcomes they're really trying to get at and build from there. Don't try to jump to the finish line without building a good quality data pipeline. We can rebuild things so much faster than what we used to. Now that being resistant to changing this because you're afraid of the cost and effort that it will take to rebuild your pipelines, that you have the tools that exist today. We can rapidly build and improve on pipelines. So it's taking a look at all the tools that you have and getting down to again, the simplest set of solutions to solve your biggest problems is achievable and it can be done.   [00:15:12.490] - Mustansir Saifuddin It seems like, to me, it seems like almost like know your end state and then kind of work backwards. And as long as you can see your end state as an organization, I think it's much easier to make the right choice in terms of these clusters of choices out there for customers.   [00:15:29.470] - Matt Florian Yep. And we help customers with that all the time.   [00:15:33.260] - Mustansir Saifuddin Definitely. I think that's the key word, right. Especially when there are choices, there are always confusion. And the confusion takes over the choices sometimes and it feels like you're going in a direction but you're not sure if the direction is correct or not unless you have that insights like you mentioned. Start with the end state and then look back and see what you need to achieve and how you can achieve that. Right, so that's a great advice.   [00:16:01.910] - Matt Florian It's confusion and just being stuck in old ways of thinking.   [00:16:27.210] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's the mindset. Right. And we talk about change management, especially when it comes to going to the cloud based data platforms. There is a huge change management involved in this whole process.   [00:16:27.210] - Matt Florian Yeah, we could have a whole episode just on the change management of going to the cloud   [00:16:28.840] - Mustansir Saifuddin and that's the goal. So I think what you want to do with this episode right now is to kind of set the stage of what's coming next. Especially we talk about the choices, we talked about what should be the right way to go, move forward, especially when you are trying to start on this journey or maybe you're in the middle of the journey and you're not seeing the results. Right. All of those different topics that we will cover them as we move along in this series. What is one of the key takeaways that you want to leave with the listeners today?   [00:17:03.710] - Matt Florian The key takeaway for those that are looking at cloud analytics and go into the cloud is to not wait to take that journey. Start it, you can start it with a small project and then build up, but start the journey and start getting there and going through that transformation. It's not a painful transformation, but it is a transformation and start making it happen. Don't wait, don't wait for the next thing to come out. There's always something else coming out, but there's some outstanding tools to go and make that move today, and there's no reason to wait anymore.   [00:17:49.160] - Mustansir Saifuddin What a great advice. Thank you for sharing that. I think that's what I'm hearing, and I keep seeing that time is of essence, right? Especially when folks are looking at moving that leap of fate into this new platform. It seems like the approach has changed in the past. You're planning it out for so long and then you get on the journey. Now it seems like the journey is almost here for you. You just need to get on it and move on forward.   [00:18:21.860] - Matt Florian Absolutely.   [00:18:24.190] - Mustansir Saifuddin Well, it's a great conversation with you, Matt, and I'm really glad that we were able to cover this topic today.   [00:18:36.640] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to tech-driven business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Matt gave a great overview on the power of a cloud based data warehouse and why organizations should consider the move. His main takeaway? Don't wait. Start with a small project and build up. There will always be something new to come down the pipeline. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting us at isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this next episode of Tech-Driven Business, Mustansir Saifuddin continues the conversation with Hau Ngo of  Summerlin Analytics to discuss what enterprises should consider when choosing a tool like SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). They cover everything from system landscape, data sources, visuals, security, and cost considerations. His key takeaway: look at how an analytics tool fits into your business, timeline, and total cost of ownership. Hau is an SAP Analytics Architect and an early adopter of SAP Analytics Cloud. In 2017, he helped a technology company in California consolidate global sales reporting across 7 different ERP systems. This effort culminated in one executive dashboard that displayed real-time information, eliminating weeks of manual coordination and data wrangling. Subsequently, Hau has presented his work at conferences such as SAPPHIRE 2019 in Orlando Florida, and has gone onward to help additional customers streamline their reporting processes and visualize the key company metrics. His experience with SAP Analytics Cloud extends to customers with various systems such as SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, BW/4HANA, and S/4HANA.  Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Hau Ngo, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:05.170] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. Brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this episode, I welcome back Hau Ngo of Summerlin Analytics. Listen in as he shares key points to consider when choosing an analytics tool like SAP Analytics Cloud or SAC.   [00:00:27.750] - Mustansir Saifuddin Hello, how are you, man?   [00:00:29.530] - Hau Ngo I'm doing well, Mustansir how are you doing?   [00:00:32.610] - Mustansir Saifuddin Doing well. Welcome to Tech-Driven Business again.   [00:00:36.030] - Hau Ngo I'm good to be here. Thanks for having me.   [00:00:38.470] - Mustansir Saifuddin Awesome. Hey, so I know we've been kind of talking about different topics so far, and today I would like to kind of zoom in into this very important point where a lot of customers, when we talk about considering SAC as their cloud analytics tool of choice. What are some of the considerations they should take into account? That's how I'm thinking we can dig a little bit deeper, at least from a cloud analytics point of view.   [00:01:11.490] - Hau Ngo Yeah. So it really depends on what their system landscape looks like, if they have the legacy ECC or S/4, or maybe they have a BW or HANA Data Warehouse. So all those decisions sort of come into play. And I don't think a lot of customers are aware that SAC Analytics Cloud as a tool has different functionality depending on what you have on the back- end. So we can talk about that in this episode.   [00:01:43.230] - Mustansir Saifuddin Absolutely. And I think that kind of is a good segue to what I was alluding to earlier. When we talk system landscapes, it means a lot of different things depending on who you're asking. In this example, I'll use the system landscape, especially from a data source point of view. Especially when we're talking about creating models in SAC and those visuals, how does that come into play when you're dealing with, let's say, for example, an ECC source system or an S/4 for that matter, or compared to a non-SAP source, what are some of the things that you should take into account when creating your SAC models?   [00:02:30.070] - Hau Ngo Oh, sure. So one thing SAP does really well is they market their tool in terms of features and benefits and everything you can do from a Dashboarding perspective. I think the inherent problem, though, is SAP has such a large product matrix that it's hard to say, does this feature work here versus another one? So if you're using the legacy ECC as a source, there's really nothing you can do in terms of getting around it. You have to have some sort of data warehouse because SAP Analytics Cloud works best with a proper data warehouse. But if you happen to have an S/4 system, you can connect your dashboarding tool directly to S/4. And I was going to say on my first project in late 2017-2018, the integration between the front-end Analytics Cloud and all the back-end system weren't fully fleshed out or developed at that time. But if you were to fast forward to today, you're almost looking at feature parity for all the different systems. Before, it used to be that we have to import the data into the tenant, into the cloud tenant first, to have everything in terms of all the functionality, all the utility of the tool.   [00:03:46.820] - Hau Ngo But now a lot of that feature set is rolled out to BW, to the HANA data warehouse, of course, data warehouse, cloud, and now even S/4. So there are differences now, but they're getting much less and smaller between the different systems.   [00:04:04.770] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's good to know, because especially you see, a lot of customers have a mixed bag of systems and depending on whatever source system they are using, it seems like the tool itself is capable of consuming that data, right. In a way that is, from a user standpoint, it doesn't really matter what is the source, it's just the visuals. And the tool itself can mask that from them, right?   [00:04:34.680] - Hau Ngo Yes, absolutely. And then I think in certain cases, I think my current client now we're exploring even a use case, a dual use case where some reports come from their BW system that we're initiating, and then a different set of reports come from S/4. But the UI, the interface is still SAC, so to the user is transparent, but depending on the use case, it could come from a data warehouse or their transactional system.   [00:05:03.690] - Mustansir Saifuddin Right. And I think that kind of brings up this point. Right? The lines are getting blurry when it comes to the data itself. Right. It is real time information versus data stored in a warehouse and being consumed based on whatever frequency is getting updated, right?   [00:05:22.310] - Hau Ngo Yep, absolutely.   [00:05:24.810] - Mustansir Saifuddin So, talking about tips, right? Can you share some ideas or tips that when it comes to using different visuals in SAC, are there any best practices or any ideas that you like to share?   [00:05:43.410] - Hau Ngo Oh, sure. So the cloud itself, the tool itself, Analytics Cloud, has a number of different chart visualizations and they're categorized primarily by function. For example, you have a group of bar charts for comparisons. If you want to see trends, there are a set of line graphs, and then there's pie graphs and tree maps for distribution. So you have a good number of chart types to choose from, depending on what you wish to communicate with. That being said, the three that I've seen the most on my last ten projects has been bar, number one, numeric, the large numbers, the aggregation as number two, and tables as number three. And what I found early on, when I try to experiment with all the different chart types, it tends to confuse people if they're not statisticians. Right. You can't just throw a scatter plot and assume people know what that means. So what I find is most people tend to stick to those three bar numeric and table as the three most common chart types. If you stick with that and start from there, you should be in good shape.   [00:06:57.150] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's a good tip. I mean, keep it simple. It seems like the more simple you keep, the better usability you get out of that, right?   [00:07:05.940] - Hau Ngo Absolutely. And a lot of these folks, they do generate their existing dashboard from Excel. And if you were to look and use the existing dashboard from the managerial report deck, they almost typically use those three chart types.   [00:07:23.270] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think one of the things that I'm looking at from a prerequisite point of view, talking about, what are some of the prerequisites required for a client. When they're using SAC as a self service tool? Because it's almost like a parallel, right. Things that are done currently in Excel, especially when you're doing some kind of manager or reporting that you want to customize in Excel and you want to take those skills into SAC. So what are some of the things that they should have in place from a prerequisite standpoint if they want to use this as a self service tool?   [00:08:04.000] - Hau Ngo Oh, sure. So I think that may be a two part answer. From a personnel or staffing perspective, I would suggest that our audience consider finding someone, whether they be internal or external, who is excited about dashboards and what this tool can do for the company. And I'm not talking about the technical features of the tool, but the way the tool itself can benefit someone's day to day chores or workload. And now imagine if you were a business analyst and you can tell your team that they don't have to open their laptop and log into SAP to see the numbers. And that would be cool, because if they got an email each morning with a full color PDF with all information they needed, that simplifies and cuts out that friction. Right. And for the field staff, if they could open up a phone or a small tablet and get the customer sales history before going to a sales meeting, that would be easier than what they're using now. And from a technical perspective, companies with an S/4 landscape should consider SAC as a reporting tool of choice. I'm working on a proof of concept where I'm embedding the SAC dashboards into the S/4 environment for a customer, and maybe we can talk about that on a future episode.   [00:09:28.670] - Hau Ngo But if you have a BW or Hana data warehouse and you're deciding between SAC or another cloud based tool, then I would strongly suggest you consider SAC. And that's because you get tighter integration with live data connections and you don't really have to worry about the security.   [00:09:48.550] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, for sure. And I think that kind of is a good segue into my next question, which is all about leveraging what you already have in place, right. So when you are dealing with an S/4 or data warehouse cloud source system, what are some of the quick wins when you want to leverage the security models the roles definition that you have in your source system, do you have some examples that you can share with us?   [00:10:17.800] - Hau Ngo Oh, sure. So I would say the quickest wins you can do when you're going in and highlighting the features of a new tool is to eliminate the unnecessary things that you would have to do, which is building data model, model data validation, and setting up security. If you could connect your dashboard to existing data warehouse or S/4 system, you're halfway there. And the beauty of SAC in terms of integration is there is no security. You inherit the security profiles of your source system, whether it's BW Hana or S/4. And the front end tool with single sign on respects all of the privileges you set up versus another tool where you have to kind of maintain or even duplicate that setting. With SAC, you don't have to worry about it, single sign on takes care of all of that.   [00:11:13.790] - Mustansir Saifuddin I think that can go a long way, right? I mean, I'm thinking from the ease of use as well as the ease of deployment. It seems like if I can leverage my source systems for my security and my roles that are already in place, it can make much easier for folks to kind of leverage that information. That mapping that is already in place.   [00:11:40.450] - Hau Ngo Yeah, I would say it's an easier sell. And also long term, there's only one point of failure. There's no dual maintenance that someone has to maintain in different systems. So I think it's an easier path as well. In terms of the actual tool itself, you can have some limitation in terms of whether user is a content viewer where they can consume the information or if they're a power user. Right. But in terms of the actual line by line, row by row authorization, let that be taken care of centrally in either your data warehouse or your S/4 system.   [00:12:18.830] - Mustansir Saifuddin Okay, that makes sense. Now, what are the opportunities? It seems like that's a good feature to have. Right. And that comes out of the box from SAC if you want to do any additional security in SAC because I know there are some planning functionalities as well as just pure reporting and dashboarding capabilities. Are there features available in SAC that allow you to further customize your securities or the role?   [00:12:49.410] - Hau Ngo Yeah, sure. So for some customers, they have data sets that they upload, whether they're doing manual compiling of information or planning or something like that. You can still set up security inside analytics cloud from a team perspective. So you can define team roles where certain team members can see the financial information but other team members cannot. So there are some security functionality, but it's more around who can see what sensitive information that's maybe not in your systems, but in these confidential flat files.   [00:13:29.990] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's good to know because I think your point earlier, right, when you talked about source systems, and especially when you're dealing with multiple source systems, it seems like it may be a better idea to have SAC drive some of the security of the role definitions. Right, because you have a mixed bag of information coming in to your models.   [00:13:48.530] - Hau Ngo Yes, absolutely.   [00:13:50.930] - Mustansir Saifuddin Good to know that. It's interesting when you look at this overall, we talk about everybody's looking at cloud analytics as the way to go and it's just so much simpler and the technology has advanced so much across the board. Right. It seems like the most logical choice for customers to move forward in the direction. Would you say so?   [00:14:17.290] - Hau Ngo I would say so. I think what you're going to see moving forward is maybe not SAP specific, but more cloud based technology. Just because from a deployment perspective, the vendor only has to maintain one instance or one master copy of the tool. It's just so much easier to use than what I think we've had a struggle with in the past, where even though a lot of customers are doing similar things, we have to have our own installation on custom repository. Here I've noticed at least on the early days, SAP was rolling out features every two weeks and it was really hard to keep up. But now the products seem to have matured a lot more. So I think at this point we're going to focus more on usability versus features.   [00:15:07.910] - Mustansir Saifuddin For sure. I know we covered a lot of different things in the session. Would you like to share any one key takeaway that our listeners can take it with them?   [00:15:19.750] - Hau Ngo Oh, sure. So we talk about SAC quite often and some of the different considerations for implementing this tool. But overall there are other tools and if you consider implementation and tool selection in a broader perspective, I've been lucky to be in a few early conversations during the tool selection phase and most customers seem to struggle with either SAC or another cloud based tool such as Power BI or Tableau and deciding which one to use. And most of the time the conversation seems to be centered around features versus cost between these tools. And what I've seen in terms of outcome from a couple of these meetings with different companies is that the SAP centric customer tends to stay under the SAP umbrella due to the tighter integration and security benefits that we spoke about. And other customers with non SAP systems in the mix choose the other tools because they have similar features at a lower cost. But that cost saving is usually offset by higher development times. So that's just the cost of doing business when you're integrating different systems. But that's just something to think about.   [00:16:42.830] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, and that's a good tip, right. And a good takeaway, especially when you have all these choices available to you. One thing that folks tend to leave behind is the fact that sometimes costs can be a factor in most cases, it is a factor. But what is the cost? Are you looking at the cost at this point in time, or are you looking at a future cost perspective? Especially when you're doing integration? Right. And this is all about maintaining your systems in the long run, right. So you have to keep that in mind.   [00:17:18.090] - Hau Ngo Yes, absolutely. I think a lot of customers, they're very intelligent, but sometimes they get too focused on a certain thing and they get tunnel vision. But like you said, if you were to step back and look at the total cost of ownership of not only the tool, but maintenance, and will this be accepted? And which tool can actually be embraced by the business community? So those factors are taken into account. I would leave, I guess, the audience with one thing. People now are more impatient than they were in the past, because at the speed of things and their expectations have changed. Right. So app development, dashboard development, it's much faster. And if your tool can meet that demand from your customer base, then you're golden. The fact that you can whip up a dashboard in an hour or two is great, but if you're taking three months to get a lower cost tool up and running, that might be a deal breaker for your community, for sure.   [00:18:20.070] - Mustansir Saifuddin And that's a great takeaway. I mean, it's something to keep in mind, especially when you're doing any cloud based analytics, right? What is the time to delivery that matters? Thank you so much, how. This has been a great session. Thanks for some of the insights into what things we should consider, especially when you're going with SAP analytics cloud as a tool of choice. So really appreciate your time and we'll look forward to meeting with you in the future.   [00:18:47.940] - Hau Ngo Yes, absolutely. Have a good one, Mustansir.   [00:18:50.930] - Mustansir Saifuddin You too.   [00:18:55.770] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business, brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Hau has shared some key pointers for you to think about when choosing SAC. His main takeaway? Look at the bigger picture when choosing a tool. Be careful when being driven by cost. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting Isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this next episode of Tech-Driven Business, Mustansir Saifuddin continues the conversation with Hau Ngo of Summerlin Analytics to discuss how to approach data modeling and visualization when using SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). Hau first joined us for a 6-part series in 2021 to talk about SAC and what it means to enterprises as they move to the cloud. Hau and Mustansir share real-life tips on how to approach this depending on your team and company. Listen in for quick takeaways that you can put in to place today. As the tech industry moves to simpler tools, data modeling plays an even more important role. Hau is an SAP Analytics Architect and an early adopter of SAP Analytics Cloud. In 2017, he helped a technology company in California consolidate global sales reporting across 7 different ERP systems. This effort culminated in one executive dashboard that displayed real-time information, eliminating weeks of manual coordination and data wrangling. Subsequently, Hau has presented his work at conferences such as SAPPHIRE 2019 in Orlando Florida, and has gone onward to help additional customers streamline their reporting processes and visualize the key company metrics. His experience with SAP Analytics Cloud extends to customers with various systems such as SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, BW/4HANA, and S/4HANA.  Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Hau Ngo Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript [00:00:06.010] - Mustansir Saifuddin Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. Brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this episode, I welcome back Hau Ngo of Summerlin Analytics listen in as he talks about the importance of balancing data modeling with visualization to get the most out of your investment in SAP analytics Cloud or SAC. [00:00:34.110] - Mustansir Saifuddin Hello Hau, how are you? [00:00:37.110] - Hau Ngo I'm doing well, Mustansir, how are you? [00:00:39.570] - Mustansir Saifuddin Hey, doing great, man. Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. Again, today we will talk about the balancing act they call it, especially when you talk about SAC. And you have so many different variables in terms of the data modeling part, the data visualization, and what is the right balance. That's what I want to talk about today. [00:01:06.070] - Hau Ngo Oh, sure, yeah. I think it gets a little bit tricky, I think now with this newer tool because you can do so much with it. Before we used to just do everything in either ABAP or BW and you just have like a table dump either in Excel or an LB grid. But now with SAC, you can still do a little bit of data modeling. You can define calculations so the lines are blurred, like where do you do which things? Right? And I think in terms of what I would suggest for a good data model in this new paradigm, I would try to have all your work done on the back end, meaning you would have all your calculations done in either S/4 or BW or Data Warehouse Cloud, and treat SAC as a read-only layer. So SAC as a reporting layer, just read what you've written and leave that. Now of course there's some give and take, some things are easier in SAC, but I think for the most part, make sure everything is done on the source system and you should be off to a good start. [00:02:13.930] - Mustansir Saifuddin Interesting. So what seems like a good data model in your example that you just shared? It's almost like do more of the heavy lifting on the back end, which can be either S/4 or Data Warehouse Cloud or any other system for that matter, as long as you can connect to SAC and then use SAC as almost like your reporting layer. But create your stories, but avoid more detailed calculations and modeling in SAC.   [00:02:47.170] - Hau Ngo Yeah, exactly. Because if you start reading into the technical documentation, SAC explains the technology in this way. Each widget, each table that you see in your dashboard is a separate report or query call to the back end. So if you're doing a lot of heavy lifting on the front end, inside Analytics Cloud, it has to do that X times per widget. So we have nine or twelve there's nine or twelve separate calls. It's going to fetch a lot of data and then you're going to do a lot of calculations in your browser and that may slow it down.   [00:03:27.770] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, that's for sure. I mean, the number of widgets does impact your so, I mean, when we talk about widgets, especially, I've seen some dashboards or stories that can go from a single pager to multiple pages. Is there a good definition of exactly how many visuals you can have or you should have just to make your dashboards more robust? [00:03:56.110] - Hau Ngo Oh, sure, yeah. If you're looking for like a really responsive, quick rendering type dashboard, something that the user can open and see the data right away. The approach I've been taking is if you can break up your stories into multiple pages, I think SAP still recommends having only six at most charts per page, which is kind of sparse, to be honest. I typically run between nine and twelve per page, but if you can render all of your stuff on different pages, you only have to load those widgets per navigation. So typically I build for directors and executives, and they almost always want to see an overview page, which is like one chart type from one page, another chart type for another page, and they want to see specific things on the overview, and as they go from page to page, they go into a more specific look or drill down into their data. But if you can break it up, it renders much faster. If you can stick with the simpler chart types, like bar charts, numeric, pie, anything that's not a table, you should be in good shape.   [00:05:13.230] - Mustansir Saifuddin That makes sense. Yeah, especially those cards are very useful. As you mentioned, when you're working with the C-levels, the information can be readily available. It's easy to grasp what's being presented on the initial overview page.   [00:05:27.230] - Hau Ngo Exactly.   [00:05:28.290] - Mustansir Saifuddin So that kind of leads me to my next question. This is good because we always get this inquiry, especially when you're dealing with a source, especially when you have multiple source systems feeding into your SAC model. Right. What constitutes like, a model, especially when you're dealing with data warehouse and S/4, what would you prefer?Usually you see from your experience, do you see a blend of those data sources or do you see a single data source and then working with that on the SAC side?   [00:06:16.520] - Hau Ngo Yeah, I would say typically when we first start off on a project, I see a blend and then it moves into a centralized data warehouse. And I say that because with SAC, you can get things up and running pretty quickly. So we can leverage this trick called in browser blending where you can say, I have data coming from multiple things. I want to them all mashed together on a dashboard. And if I were to select something like company code, that selection applies to all of the chart types regardless of the source of data. So to get those types of dashboards up and running quickly, to make sure that the information you're presenting is clear, understandable is what the user is looking for. That is a great starting point, but almost always you run into the data integration issue and that's almost always better done in a data warehouse because the tools are made for that.   [00:07:13.310] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, that makes sense. Well, especially I'm just thinking of a scenario where you have a need to quickly bring something up, especially when you're dealing with executives and they want information on their fingertips, and you try to kind of get information directly from the source system versus a model based on a data warehouse, things can get a little tricky.   [00:07:42.260] - Hau Ngo Yes. And with this tool, also, you get around that trick or that tricky scenario by showing these executives what you can do with the tool before committing three to six months into a lengthy implementation. They want to see what's possible upfront, and if they want to invest that fund towards that effort.   [00:08:04.380] - Mustansir Saifuddin It's a great advice, actually. I like that. So what I'm hearing is you can do a quick show and tell and then see what the capabilities are and how the tool can interact with a transactional system versus a data warehouse. And then once things are the way it's supposed to be from a business standpoint, you can create a model behind the scenes. Right. To make it more the reusability seems to go up, correct? Is that my understanding?   [00:08:37.110] - Hau Ngo Yeah, exactly. I consider this more like a high fidelity mock up where you're using production data. They're familiar with the figures, and you can get them most of the way there with business content. So regardless of which system that you have, the tools are there for you to kind of take apart and blend together in your browser with this tool.   [00:09:00.410] - Mustansir Saifuddin For sure. Yeah. So let me ask you this. Based on your experience, I know you talked about you've done multiple SAC implementations in your experience. Anything that stuck out for you, like, any example that you would like to share with our listeners?   [00:09:14.760] - Hau Ngo Yeah. So this is going to be, I would say, a tricky one to answer because I work with large teams where the project budget is $400 million, and then I work with small teams where it's just me plus the client, because newer companies are being formed now through divestiture where there's a larger firm, they spin off a smaller subdivision or subsidiary. And those folks, they know what they want. They're used to having information in a certain way, but they no longer have the staff or the team to deliver that. So I would say if you don't have a data warehouse, don't worry, you can use this tool. You can use other cloud based dashboard tool with your source data, whether it's ECC or S/4. But as you get more mature and as you consider purchasing a data warehouse, maybe you don't even need a large team for that either, because now SAP has another tool called Data Warehouse Cloud, which is a cloud based data warehousing tool that doesn't require the large upfront cost and the team to implement.   [00:10:25.400] - Mustansir Saifuddin That interesting. Yeah. I think the way the industry is going depending on the size of the implementation and the requirements. Right. You can take multiple approaches and there's no right or wrong answer. It depends on what your requirements are at that point in time, right?   [00:10:54.870] - Hau Ngo Yes, exactly. And it seems like now the tools are advancing that in a way that we can do more with less and we can get things done quicker than before. So it's pretty exciting.   [00:11:08.430] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, for sure, I think. And that's the key piece, right? I mean, you can spin up a dashboard in a matter of days and hours versus weeks and months. That used to be the case in the past.   [00:11:19.540] - Hau Ngo Yeah, exactly.   [00:11:23.050] - Mustansir Saifuddin That's an interesting segue into this idea of like, folks talk about getting things quickly and that means that a lot of times a lot of projects want to bypass our data warehouse. Right. What are your thoughts on that? What would be your advice to them or the right way to do it?   [00:11:47.290] - Hau Ngo Oh, sure. So if they're, I would say relatively small and nimble in terms of company size, you can create beautiful dashboards with S/4 data. You don't need a data warehouse if you happen to run S/4, so that there's a lot of business content there that you can leverage and extend. But if you are looking at a data warehouse, like I mentioned, data warehouse cloud is an option. But a lot of these cloud based tools, they seem to work better and they seem to work across different data sources as well. I would say just go ahead and give it a try. The takeaway here isn't so much the tool, it's trying to get the user buy in from your business. So I would focus more on that before really focusing on how do we do it, making sure if this is something that the users want to get done.   [00:12:44.470] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, for sure. I think that is probably one of the key takeaways. I always ask this question because my listeners like to hear, especially when you're talking about these kind of insights. What is the one takeaway when you talk about the balancing act between data modeling and data visualization when it comes to SAC?   [00:13:07.510] - Hau Ngo Oh, sure. I think in the past we used to have, I would call them clunkier tools like business objects or Lumira, where you need a dedicated resource or team of resources to maintain the server to do the development. What I've seen now is the transition to simpler tools, both the front end and the back end, the SAC visualization tool and the data warehousing tool that's coming out because they're so much easier to use. I would focus less on the reporting visualization need in SAC because you can get a dashboard out and running in an hour if everything is really clearly defined, so the effort is much less. Right. But the classic problem exists if you happen to be doing a lot of data transformation or merging data from different places, the data modeling efforts still remains, even though you can get it done quicker. The effort between visualization reporting versus back end modeling, the ratio is now leaning more on the back end. So before, if it's three to six months on the back end, maybe a month on the front end. Now it's more like a day at most on the front end, depending on how many revisions you want to go to.   [00:14:38.760] - Hau Ngo But the data validation is still there on the back end. So I would focus more on hiring developers for the back end who knows what they're doing and are familiar with the process. More so on the back end than the front end.   [00:14:52.450] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah. So I think it kind of leads up to that question about how do you architect your data? Right. In your source system? And what is that? The possibility of pulling the information in a way that it makes sense from whatever the business KPI that you're working on, correct?   [00:15:09.250] - Hau Ngo Yes, absolutely. And you'll find, as you know, the time sync is validation and there's really nothing that you can do to get around that, depending on how many sources of data you're combining, transforming, and the complexity that is still there.   [00:15:25.570] - Mustansir Saifuddin Yeah, for sure. And that's probably not going to go away until you have all these different definitions of the key indicators and how you measure it. And every company, every organization has their own way of doing it. So as long as that is well defined and well published, the front end work seems like it's become a lot more easier and better in terms of the visualization with Sac.   [00:15:56.170] - Hau Ngo Yeah, absolutely.   [00:15:58.450] - Mustansir Saifuddin Great. Hey, it's been great talking to you. How really good insights in today's session. Look forward to our next coming up soon. Thank you so much.   [00:16:09.200] - Hau Ngo Yeah, thank you, Mr. Have a good one.   [00:16:11.760] - Mustansir Saifuddin You too.   [00:16:15.530] - Mustansir Saifuddin Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. Hau shared some key pointers as you think about where to focus your efforts in SAC. His main takeaway, as we transition to simpler tools focus on data modeling. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation consultation by visiting Isolutionpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.  

In this next episode of Tech-Driven Business, Mustansir Saifuddin brings back Hau Ngo of Summerlin Analytics to share an update on SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). Hau first joined us for a 6-part series in 2021 to talk about SAC and what it means to enterprises as they move to the cloud. He revisits us to talk about what it takes for an architect to be successful in implementing SAC. Listen is for quick takeaways that you can put in to place today. With the wealth of learning tools available, SAC is no longer out of reach for clients or consultants.  Hau is an SAP Analytics Architect and an early adopter of SAP Analytics Cloud. In 2017, he helped a technology company in California consolidate global sales reporting across 7 different ERP systems. This effort culminated in one executive dashboard that displayed real-time information, eliminating weeks of manual coordination and data wrangling. Subsequently, Hau has presented his work at conferences such as SAPPHIRE 2019 in Orlando Florida, and has gone onward to help additional customers streamline their reporting processes and visualize the key company metrics. His experience with SAP Analytics Cloud extends to customers with various systems such as SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, BW/4HANA, and S/4HANA.  Connect with Us: LinkedIn: Hau Ngo Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    Episode Transcript Mustansir Saifuddin (00:03) Welcome to Tech-Driven Business. Brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners. In this episode, I welcome back Hau Ngo of Summerlin Analytics listen in as he talks about his real-life experience of SAP Analytics Cloud, specifically, how SAP is making it easier for clients, lessons he has learned since he last joined me in 2021, and more importantly, what you need to do to be successful with an SAC implementation.   Mustansir Saifuddin (00:51) Yeah, it's been a while. It has been a year and a half when we last spoke about SAC and the role of SAC in the business intelligence SAP world.   Hau Ngo (01:04) Yeah, I think so. And I think at that time, SAC was still relatively new and unknown. So it's good to catch up after some time in the field and see what other people are experiencing with the tool.   Mustansir Saifuddin (01:16) Yeah, for sure. I think it's come a long way since we last spoke, and for today's session, I would like to talk about some of the key ingredients, especially when you're making your reporting and analytics implementation right. And what makes them successful, especially when you're dealing with SAC.   Hau Ngo (01:35) Yeah, sounds good. And I would say now that things are starting to pick back up, projects are starting to come back online, a lot of people are starting to look at reporting as the key driver in the businesses again. And it's good to see that SAC is up there with the other cloud tools.   Mustansir Saifuddin (01:51) For sure. Yeah, I think we've seen a lot of good changes coming through the tool and how it has kind of developed over the past couple of years. So okay. With that, let me get into the first topic I would like to get your insights into. So when we talk about SAC, what is the role of the analytics architect, especially when it comes to implementing SAC?   Hau Ngo (02:20) Sure, I think that's a great initial question, and I think a lot of clients overlook communication as a quality that should be high up the list. Of course, technical competency and familiarity of the tool is a given. The resource should know where 80% of the time, where to find the option to change a setting or to enable a feature. And I think I've done about ten SAC projects so far, and I still ask my clients for direction when they come and ask for something I'm not clear about. But getting back to the communication part, I think this skill ranks nearly as high as the technical know-how, because building a dashboard is very collaborative and it's an effort that involves directors of finance or supply chain who then need to present the information to someone in the executive office. So folks at these level are exceptionally pressed for time and having a resource who communicates well, whether it's during the working sessions or through email makes this process go smoother, quicker, and more enjoyable.   Mustansir Saifuddin (03:30) Interesting. So it seems like one of the key skills required for having a successful implementation, especially when you're playing the architect role, is communication.   Hau Ngo (03:40) Yes, absolutely. Only because this tool is end-user friendly. And there's a lot of things now, I guess, two or three years later, written about this tool and the functionality, and SAP has done a wonderful job of marketing that. Where it gets into a little bit of trouble, I think, for a lot of end users and clients is they're not sure what the tool can do because it can do a lot. But what they have in their specific environment, whether it's Analytics Cloud to S/4 directly, or if they're connecting to the new Data Warehouse Cloud, or if they're connecting to HANA Data Warehouse, or BW Warehouse, or BW/4HANA. So depending on how it's used and what it's connected to, it can do certain things in some instances, but not another. And having an architect who maybe have a little bit of experience in all four different areas could definitely help walk them through that process.   Mustansir Saifuddin (04:40) That's interesting. Yeah, I think that makes sense, especially when you're dealing with the level of users who are more business focused and having that communication skill, as well as a way to understand what their requirements are. Right, I think that makes sense.   Hau Ngo (05:00) Yeah, absolutely.   Mustansir Saifuddin (05:01) So I think this kind of leads me into my next question. We always talk about this, right? Why does the business knowledge and collaboration with business users is so important, especially when you go about implementing SAC? Hau Ngo (05:15) Yeah. If you recall a couple of years ago, and this is maybe speaking to our age, but most of the reporting tools were excel-based, and now dashboards have been recognized as the more efficient way of presenting large amounts of data in a quicker way. And the challenge with this new approach is that each business department looks at different metrics and how they interpret the data differently. Right. So, for example, someone in finance looks at the profit and loss or maybe the sales margin numbers and may want key data points in a tabular review and in a specific order or grouping. Someone else in order fulfillment or customer service may like the larger numeric tiles that show daily sales numbers or bar tiles that show open orders for specific items that may not ship in time. So to add to that, each dashboard will be tailored to the preference of that particular executive. Maybe she's older and you have to use larger fonts and maybe consider something that's print ready. Or you may have a director who's younger and wants to see numbers on the go. So you may have to consider a mobile, responsive layout.   Hau Ngo (06:29) So all of this is to say that design dashboards and the data models that go with it is often highly customized and require a lot of interaction. More so than your typical back-end developer maybe used to.   Mustansir Saifuddin (06:42) I think that is important to know, especially when you talk about a demographics. Right. Who is my end client, especially the age. The way of presenting the information based on their key roles seems like one of the key reasons that you need to understand the business. And what I'm hearing from you. Collaboration is the key piece, right?   Hau Ngo (07:10) Yes, absolutely. Because you don't want to go back and forth with a higher-level executive. Too many times they are pressed for time. So however, you can shave off those cycles of back and forth, whether you're familiar with the process area or maybe you can anticipate the request. That definitely goes a long way.   Mustansir Saifuddin (07:31) For sure. So I think that let me ask you a personal question. What do you consider one of your biggest accomplishments when it comes to doing these implementations? Any personal favorites?   Hau Ngo (07:49) Yeah, I would have to say that learning new skills and learning them quickly has been exciting and rewarding. I would say during the first 15 years working with SAP, the technology has been relatively slow. Back then you had BW and ABAP for data warehousing and reporting. But just in the last five years, that has been a blur with Hana calculation views, S4 CDS views, analytical cloud and the application design, of course. And now with Data Warehouse Cloud and each one of these required learning and retooling and it's a very exciting time.   Mustansir Saifuddin (08:30) Absolutely. I think that kind of sums it up. Right. I mean, things have changed quite a bit in the past few years, especially when it comes to SAC and certain tools that are very business focus and the whole layout and the communication that it brings to the end users, I think is much different than what it was in the past.   Hau Ngo (08:55) Yeah, you can almost say we went from waterfall to agile very quickly.   Mustansir Saifuddin (09:02) That's a good comparison. Things were done a certain way for a very long time, especially when it comes to analytics. Now we are able to take that to the next level, right?   Hau Ngo (09:13) Yes, absolutely.   Mustansir Saifuddin (09:14) Especially with SAC some of the key ingredients that it contains. As a tool, from predictive to planning to the stories, everything is just giving you the information very quickly in a very precise way.   Hau Ngo (09:34) Yeah, and SAP has done a good job with that. They actually package a lot of the information where it's almost out of the box and implementation is very minimal to get your data into a presentable format quickly.   Mustansir Saifuddin (09:47) Absolutely. We always talk about these implementations and that question comes up. Right. Analytics implementations are challenging at times and especially when you're dealing with different levels of business users. What are some of the key indicators for a successful implementation? How would you quantify that?   Hau Ngo (10:12) If you ask a lot of people, I'm sure you'll get different answers. But I think the clarity of the project goals and limitations of the tools are important. Sometimes I see projects fail because the client expects more than what the people or the tool can deliver. In a limited time, the scope keeps expanding. But where I've often seen successes are when projects that have a team that constantly work together to define and agree to what's possible. Those projects tend to be more successful more often than not.   Mustansir Saifuddin (10:48) So I think it kind of sums it up with that statement you had just made. Right. As long as you have a very succinct definition of the requirements and then a resource or an expert who understands architecture can do things, these things in a very precise manner right. In a very timely delivery also.   Hau Ngo (11:13) To be honest, most of my projects, the one I enjoy the most, I actually learn from the client. So it's an oxymoron. You're hiring someone who's an expert in this field but that person is also learning both the functional business side and the technical side, sometimes, from the client. So it has to be collaborative for some of these things to work out well.   Mustansir Saifuddin (11:35) Yeah, I think that's a key statement you just made. Especially a lot of these kind of projects tend to go different ways depending on how requirements are defined and what kind of challenges you have when you come on board in these projects. Technical challenges, business challenges, et cetera. And when I look at it as a whole, it seems like the learning is on both sides, especially when you are interacting with the level of users in these kinds of cases is definitely different than working with an analyst, right?   Hau Ngo (12:21) Yes, absolutely.   Mustansir Saifuddin (12:24) Okay, great. So I know we kind of come to our time for at least this particular session. I would like to ask you this based on what we have covered so far, what is one of the key takeaways that you would want to leave the listeners with today?   Hau Ngo (12:42) I would say most of the new cloud-based tools that we see today, like analytics cloud, they're relatively easy to use, but still I see a lot of hesitation when it comes to adapting or even trying out these new technologies. So my advice is to just give it a try, even if it's just an evaluation, and learn what it can do and just as important, what it cannot do. There's a lot of tutorials, online video and written, so the barrier to entry isn't as high now as it's been in the past. You'll have to put in the work, of course, but you'll be surprised how quickly you can become an expert with these new tools. And after that, it's about sharing what you've learned and helping your team succeed.   Mustansir Saifuddin (13:28) That's a great advice. That's a great advice. I like it. Especially when you mentioned that there are so many tools available for anyone who is interested and has the desire to take that to the next level. So the information is available as long as you're willing to go out and explore.   Hau Ngo (13:48) Yes.   Mustansir Saifuddin (13:49) Great. Well, thank you so much, Hau. So it's been a pleasure talking with you and look forward to our next session.   Hau Ngo (13:56) Yeah, likewise, Mustansir, to dive into some deep conversation technical conversations next time. So talk to you then.   Mustansir Saifuddin (14:05) Thank you so much.   Hau Ngo (14:07) Yes, thank you.   Mustansir Saifuddin (14:11) Thanks for listening to Tech-Driven Business, brought to you by Innovative Solution Partners, Hau gave a great overview of SAP Analytics Cloud in today's environment. His main takeaway: take advantage of the many resources available to learn. The barrier to entry for SAC is low, so take advantage of it to learn all that you can. We would love to hear from you. Continue the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation by visiting Isolationpartners.com. Never miss a podcast by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Information is in the show notes.

In this next episode of Tech-Driven Business, Mustansir Saifuddin talks with Dawn Solomon of Haworth. With Dawn's decades of industry and tech experience, she shares what she has learned while implementing and using SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC). Dawn not only shares what has worked well, but also what to watch out for when implementing BPC; especially if you look to combine it with Microsoft Power BI. Her key takeaway: as a life-long learner, Dawn has been able to stay abreast of changing technology and support Haworth through it's refinement and use of SAP. Dawn Solomon is a Sr. SAP Business Process Analyst supporting HR and Finance in the Center of Excellence (COE) at Haworth Inc.  During Dawn's career she's done everything from Accounts Payable to being a Subject Matter Expert to joining the COE. Involved with multiple upgrades of the finance systems at Haworth, she has also supported Haworth globally including North America, Asia Pacific, and European sectors. This global support was for not only finance applications but some parts of Human Resources as Haworth moves to Success Factors. Dawn is an active volunteer with America SAP User Group (ASUG) where she shares her insights and expertise with others. Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: Dawn Solomon Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin @DawnSolomon5 YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.    

Mustansir Saifuddin continues the conversation with David C. Williams of AT&T whose background includes leading large-scale IT projects which result in large returns for the organization. In this episode, David dives into no-code and how companies are leveraging no-code to make a significant impact. Low-code and no-code have the power to transform business processes in an exponential way with a lower financial investment. It also opens the door for those that may not have the traditional tech background.  David also shares his latest venture, the "Business Model" book that he has authored to highlight how we can combine our past experience with our business passion to create our own business model. In other words, how his mom made "$1 out of $0.15. David's takeaway : be bold and courageous to take your idea boldly to where it should go. No-code and low-code is a great way to get it moving forward. During David's career with AT&T, he has created deep-link HTML marketing initiatives that garner 90 million monthly impressions, led Competitive Intelligence which helped shape AT&T's Mobile First strategy, has been responsible for supporting several Fortune500 companies encompassing $120M in revenue, and authored two patents for Reprogrammable RFID and bridging satellite and LTE technology. In his current role, David is responsible for hyper-automation & emerging technology to transform Customer/Employee Experience and Cost Structure for his organization. He leads the largest Robotics Process Automation program worldwide. His innovations are driving change across the company as his team has developed 600+ Bots automating 70M contacts, realizing $400M in operating income at over 3,000% ROI. Additionally, he also invented & sponsored a decision engine driving $200M credit reduction annually. David is the 2021 Legacy Award recipient at Black Engineer of the Year STEM Global Conference, 2x Dream in Black winner, AT&T Champion of Diversity Award winner, a proud mentor of multiple Employee Groups, & Diversity Ambassador. David's humble beginnings in the poorest corner of Dallas, TX, continual giving back through Solar Robot Workshops to the community, and rise through a corporate giant is encapsulated in his soon to be released book entitled, Business Model.  Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: David C. Williams Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners    Twitter: @dcwglobal @Mmsaifuddin   YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.

Mustansir Saifuddin continues the conversation with David C. Williams of AT&T who leads one of the largest Robotic Process Automation initiatives for AT&T. Now covering 70 million transactions daily with a 3000% ROI, David understands what it takes for a RPA initiative to be successful. He'll discuss the importance of giving a bot time to mature and the power of sustainability. David's belief in "culture trumps strategy" has allowed for him to build a team that always keeps improving their bots. He discusses how Corporate America can be a lot, but we are humans first. He follows his mom's mantra of making "$1 out of $0.15" to drive ingenuity and that "1" by "1" makes "11".  More importantly, David shares how the end game of creating hybrid solutions allows for collaboration tools and RPA to leverage the best from each solution.  During David's career with AT&T, he has created deep-link HTML marketing initiatives that garner 90 million monthly impressions, led Competitive Intelligence which helped shape AT&T's Mobile First strategy, has been responsible for supporting several Fortune500 companies encompassing $120M in revenue, and authored two patents for Reprogrammable RFID and bridging satellite and LTE technology. In his current role, David is responsible for hyper-automation & emerging technology to transform Customer/Employee Experience and Cost Structure for his organization. He leads the largest Robotics Process Automation program worldwide. His innovations are driving change across the company as his team has developed 600+ Bots automating 70M contacts, realizing $400M in operating income at over 3,000% ROI. Additionally, he also invented & sponsored a decision engine driving $200M credit reduction annually. David is the 2021 Legacy Award recipient at Black Engineer of the Year STEM Global Conference, 2x Dream in Black winner, AT&T Champion of Diversity Award winner, a proud mentor of multiple Employee Groups, & Diversity Ambassador. David's humble beginnings in the poorest corner of Dallas, TX, continual giving back through Solar Robot Workshops to the community, and rise through a corporate giant is encapsulated in his soon to be released book entitled, Business Model.  Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: David C. Williams Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @dcwglobal @Mmsaifuddin   YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.  

In this next series of episodes, I have the pleasure of speaking with David C. Williams, Assistant Vice President-Automation at AT&T. David understands how to use the power of IT to manage change quickly and effectively in times of uncertainty. He and his team were responsible for putting the technology in place to move AT&T's 40,000 reps from being in the office to being remote with the pandemic forced lockdown. Listen in to how David worked cross functionally to make this massive change in 5 weeks rather than 6 months.  During David's career with AT&T, he has created deep-link HTML marketing initiatives that garner 90 million monthly impressions, led Competitive Intelligence which helped shape AT&T's Mobile First strategy, has been responsible for supporting several Fortune500 companies encompassing $120M in revenue, and authored two patents for Reprogrammable RFID and bridging satellite and LTE technology. In his current role, David is responsible for hyper-automation & emerging technology to transform Customer/Employee Experience and Cost Structure for his organization. He leads the largest Robotics Process Automation program worldwide. His innovations are driving change across the company as his team has developed 600+ Bots automating 70M contacts, realizing $400M in operating income at over 3,000% ROI. Additionally, he also invented & sponsored a decision engine driving $200M credit reduction annually. David is the 2021 Legacy Award recipient at Black Engineer of the Year STEM Global Conference, 2x Dream in Black winner, AT&T Champion of Diversity Award winner, a proud mentor of multiple Employee Groups, & Diversity Ambassador. David's humble beginnings in the poorest corner of Dallas, TX, continual giving back through Solar Robot Workshops to the community, and rise through a corporate giant is encapsulated in his soon to be released book entitled, Business Model.  Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: David C. Williams Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.  

In this next episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Mark Stifter who's career focus has been on compliance. As tech professionals we often are at the receiving end of compliance requirements. But what does that really mean? Mark explains the four pillars of compliance, why it's important, and the successes and failures he's seen with companies as they implement their compliance strategies. Mark, president of Herndonwood Associates, is a global governance, risk and compliance entrepreneur with a cybersecurity background. He has extensive experience successfully managing teams and supporting organizations with the creation and implementation of IT compliance strategies and programs required due to growth, acquisition, divestiture, disruption and new or reinterpreted regulations. His background includes developing solutions that are sustainable, measurable and leverage automation using both proprietary and custom tools.  Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: Mark Stifter, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners,  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.  

In this final episode with Shabbir Aqeel Danish, we dive into how the data driven economy results in innovation and disruption. He'll share how businesses who embrace change, transformational leadership, and mass customization are becoming innovators and disruptors. Listen in as Shabbir shares what makes companies successful in this new economy as well as disruptors being seen in the media industry.  Shabbir currently serves as the co-founder and CFO of Exeest, a startup media tech company aimed at revolutionizing how premium film and tv content is bought and sold across the world. Prior to starting Exeest, he served as the Chief Financial Officer for NBCUniversal's IT where Shabbir drove a company-wide, multi-year technology transformation strategy, while managing a $0.5B global budget.   Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: Shabbir Danish  Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.  

In this episode, Shabbir Aqeel Danish rejoins me to share valuable insights on how mass customization can help companies grow and succeed in this new era. He'll share key takeaways on how mass customization and transformational leadership combine to make businesses successful.  Shabbir currently serves as the co-founder and CFO of Exeest, a startup media tech company aimed at revolutionizing how premium film and tv content is bought and sold across the world. Prior to starting Exeest, he served as the Chief Financial Officer for NBCUniversal's IT where Shabbir drove a company-wide, multi-year technology transformation strategy, while managing a $0.5B global budget.   Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: Shabbir Danish Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.  

In this next series of episodes, I have the pleasure of speaking with Shabbir Aqeel Danish who is passionate about seeing companies and teams succeed in the Digital Era. In this episode, he shares his insights on transformational leadership, the role of design thinking, and the opportunities for technology leaders to lead effectively. Shabbir currently serves as the co-founder and CFO of Exeest, a startup media tech company aimed at revolutionizing how premium film and tv content is bought and sold across the world. Prior to starting Exeest, he served as the Chief Financial Officer for NBCUniversal's IT where Shabbir drove a company-wide, multi-year technology transformation strategy, while managing a $0.5B global budget.   Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: Shabbir Danish , Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.  

In this next episode, I continue the conversation with Dave Feidner. We'll dive into the core of something I'm really passionate about: data. It is one of the defining factors between a good and great business. He highlights the key to a company's success by using data; including the different between lagging and indicating indicators.    Dave Feidner's purpose in life is to help build great companies, and enable all their associates to live ideal lives. He came to this realization after a long career building a network of international companies and obsessing about how best to help entrepreneurs and get leaders to work together. Today he serves leaders as a Professional EOS Implementer (Entrepreneurial Operating System), and though his coaching and speaking with peer groups within Vistage, EO and the Investable Mastermind.   Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: Dave Feidner,  Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.  

In this next episode, I continue diving into what it takes for businesses to grow and succeed from the people standpoint. Listen in as Dave Feidner discusses the difference between good and great companies, mistakes growth focused companies make, and the importance of staying true to the soul of your organization: its core values and core focus.  Dave Feidner's purpose in life is to help build great companies, and enable all their associates to live ideal lives. He came to this realization after a long career building a network of international companies and obsessing about how best to help entrepreneurs and get leaders to work together. Today he serves leaders as a Professional EOS Implementer (Entrepreneurial Operating System), and through his coaching and speaking with peer groups within Vistage, EO and the Investable Mastermind.   Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: Dave Feidner, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners , Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.  

We continue the conversation with William ("Bill") Newman, Industry Executive Advisor (Chief), Automotive for the Customer Innovation Office at SAP North America, about the Future of Work, especially within the Automotive Industry. Bill covers topics like hybrid work models, the role of technology in the future of work, setting expectations, and highlights how SAP is supporting its customers and employees. Bill has over 35 years of executive leadership, strategy, consulting, practice management experience balanced with extensive public speaking and higher education experience. A former leadership team member for Volkswagen's IT division, he is the author of two books on enterprise performance and has worked with many OEMs and suppliers across the automotive industry.  Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: Bill Newman, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners and schedule a free consultation.

In this next set of episodes, we switch gears and focus on the people component. William ("Bill") Newman, Industry Executive Advisor (Chief), Automotive for the Customer Innovation Office at SAP North America, discusses workforce issues that many businesses currently face: an aging workforce, a changing workforce, and how to survive when technology keeps changing and your workforce may not be ready.  Bill has over 35 years of executive leadership, strategy, consulting, practice management experience balanced with extensive public speaking and higher education experience. A former leadership team member for Volkswagen's IT division, he is the author of two books on enterprise performance and has worked with many OEMs and suppliers across the automotive industry.  Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: Bill Newman, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.  

In this episode Iver van de Zand, Vice President of Product & Solution Management for Augmented Business Intelligence at SAP, dives into what hybrid analytics really means. Having worked in business intelligence and performance management for over 25 years, Iver wears many hats on top of his day job. He's a thought leader, analytics evangelist, author, entrepreneur, consultant, and more. In this episode he'll discuss how SAP is supporting cloud and on-prem analytics, including what it means for those using SAP BusinessObjects.  Find out more about Iver at SAP or his own website: http://www.ivervandezand.com  Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: Iver Van de Zand, Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.

In this series of episodes, Iver van de Zand, rejoins me to talk about SAP's long-term analytics strategy. Vice President of Product & Solution Management for Augmented Business Intelligence at SAP, Iver sees the untapped potential of raw data and knows that people are the key to unlocking its power. In this episode he'll share where SAP is investing and the 3 pillars to SAP's analytics strategy: Closed loop of analytics, Analytics for the Enterprise, and Empowering the Intelligent Enterprise. Having worked in business intelligence and performance management for over 25 years, Iver wears many hats on top of his day job. He's a thought leader, analytics evangelist, author, entrepreneur, consultant, and more. Find out more about Iver or visit his website. Continue the conversation on: LinkedIn: Iver Van de Zand, Mustansir Saifuddin Innovative Solution Partners  Twitter: @Mmsaifuddin YouTube or learn more about our sponsor Innovative Solution Partners to schedule a free consultation.  

In this episode, I continue my conversation with Nichole Smith, VP of Human Experience Management (HXM) at SAP. In this episode we'll talk about the top industry trends Nichole sees in the IT space and how companies are leveraging these trends. This includes: moving to the cloud, simplifying business, and how companies can be agile, innovative, and be information rich.  Nichole's diverse background and insights create an engaging conversation on early-adopters vs those who wait. Connect on LinkedIn: Nichole Smith, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners, of find out more about Innovative Solution Partners Never miss an episode by subscribing to our YouTube Channel

Clients often ask what to look for when purchasing IT products and services from someone. That drove me to my next guest, Nichole Smith, a 3rd generation sales person. Her background includes obtaining SAP Certification in college, working as an IT consultant, and now being VP of Human Experience Management (HXM) at SAP. Since she's played multiple different roles in her career, she can better support clients in successfully buying and implementing SAP solutions.  In this first episode of a 2-part series, Nichole and I will talk about her career in STEM, what clients can expect from a good sales person and how a good sales-client relationship makes clients successful in their IT implementation. She'll also talk about what challenges salespeople face. She's seen in a lot in her career and is passionate about seeing her clients succeed with whatever solution or product she provides. Connect on LinkedIn: Nichole Smith,   Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners, of find out more about Innovative Solution Partners

In this episode, I continue my conversation with Torsten Welte and Jason Shearer about the power of SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and the TERMS Dashboard for mid-market organizations. We'll dive into further detail about how SAC and the TERMS dashboard allows for all businesses to take advantage of ready to go content, design tools, and analytics without needing a lot of time or dedicated IT personnel Join the conversation with Jason at his website Connect on LinkedIn: Jason Shearer, Torsten Welte, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners, Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners

In this series of episodes, I talk with Torsten Welte and Jason Shearer about the power of SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and the TERMS Dashboard for mid-market organizations. Torsten is SAP's Global Head of Aerospace & Defense Industries (A&D). Jason is an evangelist for SAP’s Business Technology Platform. Listen in to learn more about how TERMS Dashboard is helping mid-market companies survive challenges while managing budget and resources. Join the conversation with Jason at his website Connect on LinkedIn: Jason Shearer, Torsten Welte, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners, Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners

In this 2nd episode, I continue my conversation with Iver van de Zand, the Vice President of Product & Solution Management at SAP. We continue where we last left discussing the Data Driven Enterprise. Iver dives into how SAP is supporting Enterprises moving to the cloud especially with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC), SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), and more. SAP's ability to build a bridge between technology and business is creating a seamless solution for its customers. Find out more about Iver at website Connect on LinkedIn. Iver van de Zand,  Mustansir Saifuddin,  Innovative Solution Partners, or Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners

In this series of episodes, I talk with Iver van de Zand, who lives and breathes the power of data and analytics. From using analytics in his hobby of sailing to now being the Vice President of Product & Solution Management at SAP, Iver sees the untapped potential of raw data and knows that people are the key to unlocking its power. Having worked in business intelligence and performance management for over 25 years, Iver wears many hats on top of his day job. He’s a thought leader, analytics evangelist, author, entrepreneur, consultant, and more. In this episode he'll dive into the Data Driven Enterprise, hurdles companies face with the large amount of data we all now keep, the cloud, and what SAP is doing to assist its customers as a Data Superpower. Find out more about Iver: at SAP or his website. Connect on LinkedIn: Iver van de Zand, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners, or Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners   

In this 2nd episode of a 2 part series, I continue my discussion with a CIO that has seen it all, and one of his previous team members who got to do it all. Don Whittington is retired Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Florida Crystals Corporation, a vertically integrated sugar company with headquarters in West Palm Beach, Florida. James Kendrick is a consultant with a history of driving strategic clarity, solution delivery, and business performance with retail and industrial products leaders like Estée Lauder Companies, Florida Crystals, Corning and Dow/DuPont. I’ve had the pleasure to work with both of them and know firsthand how Don’s vision as a CIO and James’ ability to make it happen have a profound impact on how any organization can successfully take on IT projects like moving an SAP implementation to the cloud. Join me as we talk about their secrets to success. A little more background on each of them: Don’s career included many truly innovative initiatives, receiving many awards and accolades over the years. Most notably was his longtime innovation partnerships with SAP, Virtustream and PwC as well as his service on many industry boards and councils, including Chairperson for the SAP Global Agribusiness Advisory Council, SAP HANA Councils, and Virtustream Client Advisory Board.   He has served as a Director of America’s SAP User Group (ASUG) and ASUG representative for SAP’s Global Executive Network (SUGEN).  James’ focus is helping companies take advantage of cloud platforms, data and analytics, digital tools, and agile methods to modernize the core and add competitive advantage at the edge. He has held executive positions at Accenture, A. T. Kearney, Florida Crystals and multiple successful startups.  Connect on LinkedIn: Don Whittington, James Kendrick, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners,  Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners

In this new 2-part series I facilitate a discussion with a CIO that has seen it all, and one of his previous team members who got to do it all. Don Whittington is retired Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Florida Crystals Corporation, a vertically integrated sugar company with headquarters in West Palm Beach, Florida. James Kendrick is a consultant with a history of driving strategic clarity, solution delivery, and business performance with retail and industrial products leaders like Estée Lauder Companies, Florida Crystals, Corning and Dow/DuPont. I’ve had the pleasure to work with both of them and know firsthand how Don’s vision as a CIO and James’ ability to make it happen have a profound impact on how any organization can successfully take on IT projects like moving an SAP implementation to the cloud. Join me as we talk about their secrets to success.  A little more background on each of them: Don’s career included many truly innovative initiatives, receiving many awards and accolades over the years. Most notably was his longtime innovation partnerships with SAP, Virtustream and PwC as well as his service on many industry boards and councils, including Chairperson for the SAP Global Agribusiness Advisory Council, SAP HANA Councils, and Virtustream Client Advisory Board.   He has served as a Director of America’s SAP User Group (ASUG) and ASUG representative for SAP’s Global Executive Network (SUGEN).   James’ focus is helping companies take advantage of cloud platforms, data and analytics, digital tools, and agile methods to modernize the core and add competitive advantage at the edge. He has held executive positions at Accenture, A. T. Kearney, Florida Crystals and multiple successful startups.   Connect on LinkedIn:  Don Whittington,  James Kendrick, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners, Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners

In this 6th and final episode of our series on SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), Hau Ngo of Summerlin Analytics shares real life customer stories on successes and challenges faced by companies implementing SAC.  With 20 years of experience, customers often ask Hau for his help in delivering supply chain analytics.  Connect on LinkedIn:  Hau Ngo,  Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners,  Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners

In this 5th episode of a 6 part series, Hau Ngo of Summerlin Analytics flips the table and interviews me on how SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) handles financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting. Listen to understand how SAC can help your organization cut down time and improve your planning process. With 20 years of experience, customers often ask Hau for his help in delivering supply chain analytics.  Connect on LinkedIn:  Hau Ngo, Mustansir Saifuddin,  Innovative Solution Partners, Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners

In this 4th episode of a 6 part series, Hau Ngo of Summerlin Analytics and I examine SAP Analytics Designer, a part of SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). Analytics Designer is a robust tool that allows users to create custom chart types, gauges, and even change the user experience. Listen in to understand when to use it versus out of the box programming that SAC provides.  With 20 years of experience, customers often ask Hau for his help in delivering supply chain analytics.  Connect on LinkedIn:  Hau Ngo, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners,  or learn more about Innovative Solution Partners

In this 3rd episode of a 6 part series, Hau Ngo of Summerlin Analytics and I talk about the finer details you should think about as you begin designing reports in SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC); including user needs, company branding, and that more is not always better.  With 20 years of experience, customers often ask Hau for his help in delivering supply chain analytics.  Connect on LinkedIn:  Hau Ngo, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners, or Learn more about Innovative Solution Partners  

I continue my SAP Analytic Cloud (SAC) discussion with Hau Ngo of Summerline Analytics. In this episode we dive deeper into how you can get quick value from SAC. Listen in as we discuss the value of doing a Proof of Concept (POC) and understanding how different backend systems effects SAC.  Hau has built analytical applications, dashboards, and reports for many Fortune 500 companies that run on the SAP Platform. With 20 years of experience, customers often ask him for his help in delivering supply chain analytics.  Connect on LinkedIn:  Hau Ngo,  Mustansir Saifuddin,  Innovative Solution Partners. Or learn more about Innovative Solution Partners

In this episode we begin to look at SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) – a single cloud solution for business intelligence, enterprise planning, and predictive analytics. I’ve invited Hau Ngo, from Summerlin Analytics, to share his client focused experience. Hau has built analytical applications, dashboards, and reports for many Fortune 500 companies that run on the SAP Platform. With 20 years of experience, customers often ask him for his help in delivering supply chain analytics.  Follow this series of episodes to take a deep dive into SAC and how it can benefit your organization. Connect on LinkedIn:  Hau Ngo, Mustansir Saifuddin, Innovative Solution Partners, or learn more about Innovative Solution Partners  

Get ready to think differently about how technology driven solutions can lead to business success. Mustansir Saifuddin is the co-founder of Innovative Solution Partners. With a career that spans multiple industries and a variety of roles including a software quality assurance engineer to leading global teams and projects, he knows what it takes to fuse technology with what a business wants.