Don’t be an outsider – Glimpse of SAP Insider Financials 2012, Oct 16 -18, Singapore

After announced as an SAP Mentor, the first event I participated was SAP Insider Financials 2012 where Financials 2012 hosted along with HR 2012 and BI 2012. My interest was only on BI2012. But I am neither full time BI person nor the functional person, Since from the day I received invitation, I had a thought, what I would get from this event. Later when I explored the event website, from the tag “who attends” gave me some hope that I could get some learning from this 3 day event.

Hence I convinced my boss and registered for BI2012. I attended all the sessions on 16th and morning half on 17th, 18th.

Through this blog I would like to share some of my experience on this wonderful event.

Key note – Join the Decision Revolution; Driving Success with Analytics Solutions from SAP

It was the key note presentation by Kurt Bilafer, he shared SAP’s new decision revolution strategy , and also he called few customers ( Bharat Petroleum, MMG Limited), to share their success stories how SAP’s analytical solution help to improve their decision making capabilities, increasing performance and optimizing process. It is one of the very interesting key note I ever heard.

The hot spot in the keynote was the live demos on BPC, Mobile analytical solution and Visual Intelligence by Adam Binne and Jason Rose.

Later he declared about SCN and SAP Mentors, including me there are 6 mentors attended this conference.

It was wonderful to get to know about the similar interested people closely.

Well defined agenda

Agenda well planned for all the three days, I felt , it was hosted like typical European style, where we get 15 min break for each and every break out session. Apart from that we had usual meet the speaker, ask the expert schedules, hands on labs (I truly enjoyed the SAP analytics hands on Lab) and Sponsor’s booth. We also got some networking ribbons to identify the people working on similar area and to communicate with the thoughts and ideas with others.

In-depth breakout sessions

Below are few interesting session I attended.

Extend your analytics capabilities with SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis

It was hosted by Mani Gill, VP & GM, and Advanced Analytics Solution Management from SAP.  He shared how visual intelligence predictive analysis (The tool going to be released by November) would help on saving the ROI, he also showed some numbers when it get integrated with SAP HANA. I admired about the tool, but still there are lots of unanswered questions like, though we have explorer, why do we need another analytics tool. Finally I stopped him at the meet the experts hall and given my current organisations challenge and asked him for the suggestion, he is genuine answered all my queries .

We can get more about predictive analysis here,

http://www.experiencesaphana.com/community/solutions/predictive-analysis

http://scn.sap.com/community/predictive-analysis

Customer Case Study: Using SAP Business Objects Explorer to Drive Self-Service

It was hosted by fellow SAP Mentor James Oswald from Arch coal, it was amazing that he shared everything from scratch like what is Business objects explorer, how does it help both IT/BI users in better way, and also small and fast demo.

Since it was the customer case study, he shared even the best practices (Do and Don’ts) from their own experiences.  That gave me more insight and practical guidance.

More information on here,

http://www.dallasmarks.org/blog/category/explorer/

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer

Preventing, diagnosing, and resolving the 20 most common dashboard performance problems

It was one of the amazing session hosted by Dr. Bjarne Berg, Director SAP BI, North America, COMERIT, Co-author of SAP HANA: An Introduction. I didn’t believe within 45 min he shared more than 20 tips for tuning up the performance issue with dashboards. It was very useful. We desperately wanted the PPT which he used. It has almost 50 slides; each and every word in the presentation was useful.

Another similar 20 tips sessions from COMERIT was “20 Tips and Tricks to Improve Data Load Performance”, the interesting thing was they shared 2 to 3 slides and real example for using early watch report in solution manager for optimizing performance.

More information can get it from below,

wp.broadstreetdata.com/wp-content/uploads/BOCX-Speaker-Performance-Tuning_-Steve-Bickerton.pdf

Self-service data discovery with SAP Visual Intelligence

This is one of the most interactive sessions hosted by Jonas Yong, Analytics COE (Business Intelligence), APJ from SAP. It is about Visual Intelligence. He presented with his own style. Was more interactive and fun, Jason Rose also with us, and answered some of the query,

I was missed Jason’s Roadmap session, so I used the opportunity and shoot some query regarding roadmap and future innovation on VISI, he politely explained well back all the details in short.

More details we can get from here ,

http://scn.sap.com/community/visual-intelligence

www.sap.com/tryvisualintelligence

What every SAP customer now needs to know about SAP HANA

This is hosted by Narayan Krishnamoorthy, Solution Principal, HANA, Database &Technology, South East Asia from SAP.  This is not like the typical number giving HANA value proposal and technology sharing session, rather He shared some of the customer success story on HANA with more interesting videos (cutomers like USHA, The Tokyo Taxi,T-Mobile, Nongfu Spring ).

More about SAP HANA on here,

www.experiencesaphana.com

Maximize the benefits of BI and analytics by balancing enterprise versus departmental requirements

This is another interesting session by Adam Binnie. He clarified all the risk on departmental BI why we need to go for enterprise BI, and how if enterprise BI together with Departmental BI. He supposed to share some of his Demo, alas due to low bandwidth he couldn’t make this out, but it was very interesting, he explained the strategy using simple example as “chef” and the “super market”. 

He also helped to understand the security risks on mobile solutions. (This is the current challenge in my client, seems I really got what I want from this event).

A step-by-step guide to deploying SAP Business Objects Explorer and SAP HANA in the cloud

It was presented by Clint Vosloo, who really rocks the whole event, he shared step by step (even where to click the mouse, when to click the ctrl button, ) I didn’t believe how easy the HANA Implementation on cloud!! The presentation was wonderful.  When Clint opened talk for questions, the question raised by one of the CTO is “How can we get this PPT?”

Indeed one of the must attend session.

Social Media Lounge

It was busy with its usual social media marketing, with the ducks series as below. 

And also under control by Lynn Bruno, another inspirational woman I met. Her recent blog about social media marketing is below, quite interesting.

http://blog.womeninconsulting.org/women-in-business/5-timeless-social-media-marketing-tips/

Finally all the sessions were done and after bidding my fellow Mentors Good Bye returned to regular work. This event gives me more understanding and filled me up with more information, now I need to digest and do some research on each of these topics and obviously love share some of my deep insights on each of these areas with the community.