The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP

Learn about SAP’s IT Strategy in the cloud with Sahil Shah’s latest blog.

Written by Axel Buelow, SVP & Head of Application Services

The Migration to HANA should not be seen as a normal, technical database migration. It provides a huge opportunity to positively impact the business – to run faster, smarter and simpler. Companies can and should use their HANA migration to assess which business processes need acceleration or to think about areas where they could run processes differently or even introduce brand-new ones.

In order for this to happen, IT and the business need to collaborate. It’s a process of education. IT can educate the business on HANA’s potential to bring about change. This sparks ideas and the business is able to come up with new and better ways to do things. The business can educate IT on processes, process pain points and new business potential.

I saw this when SAP Global IT implemented HANA for the SAP Facility Management. We now use smart meters to capture energy consumption in our data centers and company facilities and have captured millions of records that provide a real-time view of our energy consumption. We can react now much faster, avoid unnecessary energy consumption and contribute to our sustainability targets. IT couldn’t have built this kind of analysis without the process knowledge of the facilities team.

This is why IT and the business have to collaborate. In our recent CRM on HANA migration, we worked closely with the business. These were our three key steps to collaboration:

1. Roadmap: We had a joint business and IT roadmap, which I referenced in my last blog post [link]. Two years ago, we started with by-side scenarios, which swiftly ramped up our HANA knowledge. Then we implemented BI on HANA, which gave us the chance to test our new apps. And now we are working on our big Business Suite on HANA migrations: CRM on HANA is already migrated, followed by ERP on HANA later this year.
2. Collaboration model:  We established a clear collaboration model, with one CRM on HANA sponsor from the business and one from Global IT. All the HANA responsibilities were bundled under these two sponsors, who had regular meetings to align before reporting jointly to top management.
3. One team: we drew resources from all over SAP, but during the 2.5 month migration of CRM to HANA, we worked as one team under one roof. Our project team came from the business units, Application Services and Infrastructure Services (both within IT), from development and from our support organization. Having such mixed project skills meant that we overcame the project borders and everyone worked as one team. We were partners.

Having had our learning curve with CRM on HANA, we are now working on the ERP on HANA implementation. It is a far larger project for us, with more users, modifications, add-ons and interfaces. However, we are also able to focus on more value scenarios, so will be able to include Fast Closing  and the Financial Cockpit in one program with the migration. The business now better understands the potential that the HANA in-memory technology can provide to them, and we in IT understand much more about business processes and priorities.

(This is the second in series of blog posts on the SAP CRM on HANA go-live. To read the first post on the migration of CRM on HANA please follow this link: “SAP Runs SAP CRM on HANA“.)

In his previous blog, Peter Todorov from the IT Security and Risk Office described how to protect SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP (all versions) and AS Java version 7.10 and newer. As we are operating multiple systems with releases prior to 7.10, Peter now explains how to harden the cipher suite configuration of your AS Java (v. 7.0x  and older) and how to mitigate the BEAST attacks.

Read Peter’s blog here.

Peter Todorov from the IT Security & Risk Office has taken the time to explain how you can configure your SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP or AS Java 7.10 and newer system to protect it against BEAST.

Read Peter’s blog here.

Oliver Bussmann, SAP Global CIO, divulges his secret to living a balanced lifestyle as an executive and a family man. Find out the four, interconnected dimensions that Oliver believes are crucial to achieve giving back and maintaining a balanced life.

Read the blog here.

Maximilian Adrian, from the IT Security & Risk Office, has shared his advice on what you should have in mind when defining an IT Security Management process. In his blog, he also reveals the key to having a successful security framework.

Read Maximilian’s blog here.