Posts by Carolyn Brock

I’ll be at SAPPHIRE NOW from Orlando this year, and, like most attendees, I’m planning my agenda. My home base will be the Cloud Campus, featuring 5 topics:

• Application Services (which also feature solutions from our partners)
• SuccessFactors Solutions
• Collaboration Services
• Cloud Technology

The Cloud Campus offers demonstrations and discussions about SAP’s newest cloud solutions for Finance, Sales, and Procurement. If you are interested in Human Capital Management (HCM) you’ll find sessions featuring SuccessFactors, a new subsidiary and a leader in cloud computing. Also check out the test drive area where you can get hands on experience with our solutions via various mobile devices.

Consider adding the following six sessions to your agenda. All sessions take place in the Cloud Campus Theatre. And, if you are wanting to develop a master plan for your company’s cloud strategy, be sure to send someone to the ASUG Cloud Preconference Day Seminar.

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Excerpt by Keith Klesh, Director of Marketing, EntryPoint

Episode 3 - Decisions, Decisions and a ByD Selection

Making the move to a new business system is not a task any company takes lightly. Many variables need to be considered and hard decisions need to be made – well before any keyboards are punched.

These early episodes in our series have been covering the build-up to a project kick-off including the issues with the current systems and why the executive team felt that now is the right time to make a change. Today, we dive a little deeper into the overall decision process including how much time the evaluation took, what had to be considered and what were some of the concerns.

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Excerpt by Keith Klesh, Director of Marketing, EntryPoint

Episode 2 - Why Make this Change Now

In our previous post we covered the current state of EntryPoint’s systems and their effect on how the company is being run.  This second episode in the series highlights the thoughts and reasons behind why the executive team feels that the right time to move forward with implementing a new system is now.

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Excerpt by Keith Klesh, Director of Marketing, EntryPoint

Episode 1 - The Current State of the Systems

Have you ever wondered if you have the same business issues or the same common fears and concerns as other companies when it comes to making a major change in the way you run your business?  Maybe you have wondered how the implementation process works, what the steps are, which areas may cause problems and how you would get past them. Or, maybe you have heard that an ERP system is only for larger companies and you want to see how it can work for a small-midsize business.

This blog/video series will provide you with direct insight into the thought process of the executive team as they acknowledge the issues they have with their current business systems, describe the decision process to make this change, explain why they chose ByD, how they worked through their fears and concerns, and how this new system fits into their long-term plans.

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Guest post by Chris Edson, Managing Director of Edson Consulting. 

Following Rod Clarke’s blog; ‘Sapphire can change your life’, Chris Edson compares last week’s Sapphire, Madrid with its 1998 counterpart.

Many things have changed since ’98.  Not only have we entered a new millennium but we’ve witnessed the power of technology first-hand as we watched the events of 9/11 unfold before our eyes.  Social Media has arrived; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter; which have revolutionised the way we communicate.  The world has 1 billion more inhabitants and last month saw the birth of the seven billionth person.  Back in Madrid, the fact that the pesetas in our pockets had been replaced by euros was not the only change.

I asked people at Sapphire what changes they’d noticed and the response was ‘almost everything’s changed’! On the surface, the conference seems to have transformed from large theatre presentations to lots of smaller ‘Microforums’ – meetings of around 15 people at conference tables. Other sessions were held in closed meeting rooms allowing customers to discuss specific topics openly. The Meet our Customers sessions were also very popular and the key note speeches are no longer held in auditoriums but delivered on the conference floor and shown in each hall on large screens.

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Guest post by Serena Fu, SAP

Do you want to know about the SAP University Alliance Program? Let’s take the first insight of what the UAP is really about.

This is to launch the SAP Business ByDesign Education in China universities as a teaching and Reference Platform for Innovation in Information Management.

Just before the Chinese National Holiday, we were welcoming the university professors from Xi’an, Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou attended this training event which was organized by ByDesign Reference Systems China and ByDesign Solution Product Management China team.

The two-day session mainly covered the SAP Product Strategy, approaches of teaching ByDesign in universities, business integration, the organizational management in ByDesign, CRM concepts, Adaptation of the Business Platform in the Enterprise and also the SAP Business ByDesign Innovation in the Cloud.

In the meanwhile, we prepared a live system for all our participants so that they could tried the study cases through the real system. Really appreciated our ByDesign experts to support on the hands-on session.

 SAP Business ByDesign is brand new to our professors which shows the innovation and leading-edge technology of SAP. The solution benefits large-scale business management applications without the need for a large IT infrastructure. That’s the reason we received positive feedbacks in the end.

“It’s really cool! That would be a perfect combination of theory and practice if we can introduce the system to our undergradutes” Mr .Zhang,  the professor from Shanghai Institue of Forerign Trade commented during the practice. Questions raised, opinions discussed. That’s a quite kind of interaction between the SAP experts and the outsides. All of our participants were too absorbed in the live-on system till late to celebrate the up-coming holiday.

Guest post by Sina Moatamed

Sina Moatamed, Former CIO and now IT strategist and consultant

Guest post by Manju Bansal

How technology can create entrepreneurs at the bottom of the economic pile

Two completely unrelated facts caught my attention the other day. One, there are about 4 Billion people on the planet who lie squarely at the bottom of the economic pyramid, eking out a marginal existence on about US$2-3 per day, give or take. Two, there are over 825 Million mobile phone subscribers in India and poor rural subscribers have them just as much as their urban richer counterparts.

On the face of it, there is little to connect these 2 disparate facts. But if you think about, we have technology today that can make true micro-scale entrepreneurs out of many of these folks and save the government a good deal of money that would otherwise be flushed down some unproductive social program. Okay, so it does sound like a bit of a Utopian pie-in-the-sky project, but stay with me for a bit…simply put, the key will be to substantially changing the economics of the back-end supply chain so that the entrepreneur at the bottom of the pile can make a living wage. And engendering that kind of a change is a matter of business strategy not public policy. Here is how I think this could work…..

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Guest post by Sina Moatamed

Guest post by Detlef Aden, GiS

Globally wind energy is becoming one of the most important components in the energy mix, joining a German trend. These wind energy plants are attracting public interest. This means that expectations for these plants rise as well. Wind energy plants must be reliable in their energy production. The historical approach of letting a wind energy plant run till it stops or crashes is no longer desired or economically justifiable.

The operators of such plants, or wind parks, are dependent on them working efficiently with as little downtime as possible. The less downtime, the higher the yield and the more interesting it becomes for investors. Modern plants are more efficient, but also more complex and susceptible to error. Preventive maintenance measures substantially lower plant availability. If maintenance is required, it must be provided quickly and competently. “Time is money” in the wind industry.

Comprehensive maintenance software solutions are complex, and very few medium-size or smaller enterprises can implement them. Therefore many enterprises have a heterogeneous mix of non-integrated systems and spread-sheets.

This is a challenge as managing multi-faceted maintenance tasks require deep process know-how and a comprehensive portfolio of ideas and possibilities.

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