At the recent itelligence 2016 user conference (theme: “Making Digital Real”), I was invited to do a presentation on “Evangelism and the Future of Digital Marketing”, talking about the transformation of the marketing function, the importance of the end-to-end customer experience, and the SAP CEC solutions.
Despite some video glitches (thank you, PPT for Mac — grrr), the feedback was very positive: “Genuinely being thought-provoked”.
You can see and download the presentation on slideshare.
Out of the various presentations I attended, the highlight was Chris Burns and Alan Cecchini of Newcastle University, presenting their project to move to the SAP HANA platform.
The first phase is a migration of ERP, BW, CRM, and SRM from Oracle to SAP HANA without making any application changes except for some tuning. The QA was completed in early May, and the system is due to go into production in early July.
Some key quotes from the presentation:
Here’s the project summary!
Here are more details on the project, from the presentation:
Why does Newcastle University want to move to HANA?
Just moving the data from Oracle to SAP HANA — without any other changes — resulted in big storage gains: about 75% reduction, for both ERP and BW.
On average, the move to SAP HANA resulted in a 2x speed gain, without any changes, although some processes were slower before optimization. In order to test SAP’s claims, such as “regardless of data volume and complexity, any question can be answered,” the team did a series of comparison tests:
Test 1: Confirmation and Clearing report — display applicant numbers for all courses for academic year 2015.
Test 2: SAP ERP report —
Test 3: Data Feed, write all applicant records to file
Test 4: BW on HANA
The team also looked at transforming the end user experience using SAP HANA and the Fiori interface.
One example application allowed users to search for different elements. The application using native HANA search procedure, and required just 5 lines of code for a single dialog box regardless of type of item searched. This compared to 300 lines of code in Oracle, with multiple dialog boxes for different types of search.
The team also looked into the feasibility of using Fiori tiles and a real-time data push of data to show a real-time view of the student clearing process, showing the number of students accepted for different courses.
Benefits that Newcastle University has got, or expects:
HANA will enable real-time number crunching, allowing business modeling, projections and predictions to take place on the fly.
Summary of expected SAP HANA benefits:
Faster
Simpler
Cheaper
Creating the Business Case
The team built a business case on “speeds and feeds”, but with the idea that the released capacity could be used to do do innovation.
itelligence UK CTO Andy Steer did a great presentation explaining the pragmatic steps the audience could take to get to S/4HANA
Two key slides caught my eye: First, Andy explained that S/4HANA is indeed new, but inevitable for SAP Customers, and not to be feared: “nobody expects to run Microsoft Dynamics on Oracle, or Oracle eBusiness on DB2…”
And that waiting to make a decision is in fact a decision — to forego keycurrent and future enhancements.
Overall, it was another great itelligence conference. It continues to be one of my favorite of the year, and I highly recommend that you attend next year if you get the chance!
[This post originally appeared on my Business Analytics and Digital Business blog]
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