UKI Premium Engagement Day – Accelerate Digital Transformation (and A Great Day Out!)
On Thursday May 18th, 29 key SAP Premium Engagement customers travelled to the Experience Centre in Clockhouse Place, London.
There were two main goals for the day:
- To provide our Premium Engagement (PE) Customers with information on the most up to date PE Offerings,
but equally as important,
- To provide opportunities for them to share with each other – to understand the journeys their peers were on, and to learn from their experiences, both best practices and what to avoid. The Experience Centre certainly came into its own on the day as it provided the perfect facility to stimulate interaction and discussions, and made all our presentations that much more engaging.
The day started off with the keynote address from Pip Plah, the Country Support Director, discussing the challenges of our rapidly changing world. From driverless cars to printing your own medication on 4D printers, the world as we know it is swiftly transforming. He went on to explain the theme of the day, which was using Premium Engagements to help your business’s digital transformation, and how our sessions throughout the day would explore this topic.
Glenn Svensson (Head of Digital Innovation for Premium Engagements, EMEA) then took this further and introduced our customers to the newest offering – Innovation Premium Engagements – for those customers looking to accelerate and manage their business innovations in complex SAP environments.
The best attended session of the event was “Operations and Support of Hybrid Landscapes” presented by Andy Lawrence (@ALMGuru). It was very clear that this is an important topic for many customers, and they appreciated Andy’s clear definition of the situation, and how SAP can assist Premium Engagement customers in this area.
The highlight of the day in terms of Premium Engagement sharing involved my conversation with Nick Giannakakis from British American Tobacco where he described his company’s journey to Advanced Customer Centre of Expertise Certification. Nick shared the motivation for such a journey, the steps taken, and the fantastic results achieved by these Gold Award Winners at the 2016 SAP Customer Centre of Expertise Awards.
Further opportunities to share included a panel discussion with Andrew Mayer from Vodafone, Doug Scott from AstraZeneca and Rohan Parikh from BP discussing their challenges and best practices regarding Solution Manager as their Single Source of Truth and how it enables them to innovate at a faster pace. In addition, a session entitled “Partnering with SAP Premium Engagements for Success” shared the experiences of Dave Richards from BP and Greg Clifford from Burberry with their MaxAttention Teams, the value they bring to their organisations, and led to a lively discussion with plenty of audience participation.
Over the lunch break there were micro-forums regarding Preferred Care for Cloud, Enterprise Support Value Maps and the Enterprise Support Advisory Council, and additionally, on the day there were presentations about SAP’s innovation in the Sports industry, plus introductory sessions for newer customers on Building and Running SAP like a Factory, and the Value Assurance Packages for S/4 HANA implementations.
By the time the event finished, customers were excited about the new offerings, and speaking to each other like old friends – both of our goals met. The day was coordinated by the fantastic Caroline Petit (@caroline_SAPUKI) who with the perfect mix of strategic thinking and attention to detail made this a memorable day, and one which customers are already asking us to run again – soon.