On 11/05/2023 it was the Australian SAP User Group (SAUG – pronounced “Sausage”) conference in Brisbane. I was speaking, but you do not want to hear about that, you want to hear about the dustbins and the food, and Stevie Winwood.
Dustbins – Part One
There has been a long-standing tradition, invented by Jim Spath about twenty years ago, that when writing about SAP conferences of any sort, you have to go into great detail about what the dustbins (trash cans to USA people) are like.
In this case the special guest stars were 1970 UK TV stars Ted Rodgers and Dusty Bin who performed their “3-2-1” act. For those young and/or outside the UK what that game involved was reading out to the contestant’s poems stuffed with false clues. They (contestants) had to pick a poem and based on which one they picked would win either a car, a holiday, a dustbin, or an S/4HANA Public Cloud ERP system.
In this case the contestant (a CIO of a leading Australian company) picked the poem that went “Car / Car / Car / Car / Car / Car / Car” and luckily that won them a new S/4HANA system. It was just like the olden days when I watched that show on TV.
Food Review
As in many countries “reality” TV shows are a big thing in Australia. For the last 14 years we have had “MasterChef Australia” and there is also “My Kitchen Rules” which pits potential chef teams from different Australian states against each other. In one of these shows – I forget which one – the team must host a party in their house for all the other contestants plus the judges. The thing is it is not really their house at all, it is some posh place given to them for the day so they can pretend it is their house. That is why you call it reality TV.
In any case whether it is in a fake house or in the studio there is a time limit for preparing the food, and a countdown to when they have to “plate up” the meal and they always do it with 0:07 seconds to spare, just like James Bond defusing a bomb. Did you notice the other day that all the “reality” TV shows in Hollywood had to stop when the scriptwriters went on strike?
In any event at the SAUG conference they had the winning teams from the last 14 years lined up in the exhibition area (plus some space aliens who had just won the inaugural “MasterChef – Moons of Saturn” contest) ready to “plate up” strange exotic meals during the breaks.
Talking about the exhibition area I was just amazed how big it was. I though there were a lot of sponsors at the events in Orlando and Las Vegas, but this was just ridiculous. It went on forever, there must have been five hundred stalls.
Anyway, now the really important business is out of the way I can start to talk about the content of the presentations. As always this will be a rambling, incoherent, stream of consciousness type review. I am the Donald Trump of blog writers, never able to stay on the same topic for more than a few seconds.
The important thing is that I am describing my – possibly insane – interpretation of what the speakers said rather than what they actually may have said. So, all mistakes in the following account are down to me, anything good comes from the speakers.
Keynote – Chris Peck – Ticket for a Runaway Train
Back in the year 2000 Chris Peck used to work for my organisation as a consultant, he now is very high up in the SAP ranks.
I noticed at the bottom of the slides a copyright message saying they were created by the Chief Storyteller at SAP. That is not as silly as it might sound – when you want to explain anything to anybody it turns out the human minds reacts (and retains the information) far better when the information is presented in the form of a story rather than just presenting s stream of facts.
In this case the story is about SAP implementations. The analogy used is what I would call “Thomas the Tank Engine” in that such an implementation could be described as a ride on a runaway train.
The idea as far a I could see was that back in the day you had the various stages of a “waterfall” project – vendor selection / configuration / build / ongoing support – and these are all different choo choo trains (choo choo) all leaving from different platforms at different times and so presumably they could arrive in the wrong order.
Nowadays you have all the various bits all on the same choo choo train (choo choo) rather like that science fiction film/series where an entire society lives on a train in motion. And of course, that new train flies up into the cloud like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John at the end of “Grease”.
Next there is a description of a subscription service and unless I got this totally wrong you ay a subscription and get a dedicated “customer success partner” to help you get the most out of your SAP implementation. That is nice, but did that not used to be standard, part of the 20% annual maintenance fee?
I always recall that on a Friday at work we would get visited by our contacts at SAP, Microsoft etc. and then they would try to sell us extras things during work and then we would all go to pizzas and beers or whatever which we had to pay for. And now we must pay a subscription service for someone from SAP to try and sell us extra things? I think a lot of people would pay not to have someone try and sell them extra things.
Lastly and on a totally unrelated note, at the end there was a screen shot of a news article about Orica (explosive company, big user of SAP, and from my dealings with them an excellent company to work for).
The thing about any sort of news article in any newspaper/magazine/online site is that if you know anything at all about the subject you will realise it is riddled with errors ranging from minor things like the names of people or organisations being wrong, dates wrong, and going all the way up to total falsehoods. Possibly if you were at the SAUG Brisbane conference and read this blog you will find it full of falsehoods as my memory of it and your memory if it might be wildly different.
Michael Crichton observed many years ago then when you read a news article and you know enough about the subject you can spot all the errors you just sigh and roll your eyes and/or laugh and wonder why the journalist did not do even basic research. Then you move on to the next news article which is on a subject you know nothing about and blindly believe every single word without even thinking about questioning it. He then said that some articles even mix up cause and effect which he deems the “wet pavements cause rain” style of journalism.
In the case of the Orica article shown on the screen there was only one error I could spot -COVID-29 as opposed to COVD-19 – but then I do not know enough about their S/4HANA project to be able to tell if anything else was wrong.
But the other day I did see an article on the internet which went like this “In the UK inflation is at a forty year high due to people struggling with the cost of living”. That is the textbook definition of “wet pavements cause rain”. Once you start looking for something you start seeing it everywhere.
Vicki from Sunwater – all about BTP
Sunwater is a state-owned company that runs the Queensland Water Infrastructure. As might be imagined it is a very asset-intensive company which is why Plant Maintenance in SAP has such a big role to play here.
They went live in September 2020 which is starting to seem like a long time ago now. I had predicted (based on the highly scientific show-of-hands method at SAP conferences) that the amount of organisation which were at least starting an S/4 conversion would be past the 50% point around 2023/2024. So, in a year or so if you have not even started an S/4HANA project people will start giving you odd looks.
Now we come to the evergreen topic of SAP product naming. The marketing people at SAP have decided that it is no longer enough to change the name of each product every year. They have decided they are not doing a good enough job unless they change the naming convention of the various versions of the product as well.
In this case we are talking about the “Asset Manager” which I presume is in an SAP BTP service. Here are the three versions Sunwater have had thus far:
I imagine they cannot wait until upgrade time in order to find out what the naming convention will be for the next version e.g., will it be 0524 for May 2024, or 2402 because it is the second version to be released in 2024 or maybe 2106 because it is the sixth version to be released in the 21st century?
Sunwater are building their first Fiori app. I am very happy to hear it as in my books I constantly harp on about how building a UI5 application is simple enough it can be down in-house as opposed to having to pay a consulting company ten billion dollars.
I am not saying the consulting company does not do a wonderful job – my organisation bought an off the shelf UI5 mobile app for entering work orders and I witnessed first-hand the end users doing cartwheels of delight and singing hallelujah which is not a reaction I have ever got to any of my ALV or DYNPRO SAP GUI programs.
The point is that I found the learning curve for UI5 to be less than that for Web Dynpro, which you would not expect to be the case as Web Dynpro is in ABAP and part of a UI5 app is in JavaScript. The trouble is ABAP developers are scared stiff of JavaScript, but they do not need to be, which is why I am publishing some blogs at the moment of things I am finding out from an SAP Press JavaScript book.
In short when a company creates its first in-house UI5 app that is fantastic but to be honest it does not really merit being viewed on the same level as the second coming of Christ, though it often is.
Moving onto the ever-popular subject of Artificial Intelligence. I am certainly not going to argue that such things are not already all around us, and I am definitely not going to argue that every single big tech company including SAP are rushing to embed ChatGPT things into their products. Some may wonder that since the primary characteristic of ChatGPT is that it makes things up and tells whopping great lies, is that the sort of thing you want to add to the critical applications that run your business? It is going to make life a lot more interesting, that is for sure.
So, we are heading for a “I would like a Big Mac please / Do you want AI with that?” type of world. However, in the rush towards this utopian goal many companies are claiming that any sort of computer technology is AI whether it is or not.
If you really wanted, you could argue that a program I write that adds up two numbers you input is artificial intelligence because it is mimicking a human adding up two numbers. I think someone at the conference asked – is EXCEL artificial intelligence? By the way did you know there is a way to upload and download Excel data to/from SAP?
Going back to Sunwater (by now you will have noticed by blogs are rambling stream-of-consciousness affairs, often with little or no relation to the presentations I am purporting to be reviewing) one big part of plant maintenance is measurement counter readings e.g., how much water has gone through this pipe this week.
In the same way that someone from the electricity board used to come round to your house and manually read your electricity meter but now there are “smart meters” in the business world you want to move from people wandering round a site manually noting down in a book the readings on various pieces of equipment and then manually typing them into SAP using transaction IH08 to some sort of automatic interface.
This is often referred to as the convergence of IT and OT with the latter standing for “Operational Technology”. As an absolute basic example where I work in the year 2000, we wanted the SAP system to know the weight of a truck standing on the weighbridge rather than the weighbridge operator looking at the weight on the scale and typing it into SAP. So, we built an interface.
When I heard from Sunwater the statement that “Eventually – in 24 months – we are going to get the readings directly from our instruments using AI” initially I was very puzzled. An interface that moves the value 524 from one system to another does not sound much like AI to me.
Eventually it became clear – it is easy to extract numbers from a digital device but some of the devices were analog or to paint a better picture the reading was a series of rotating cylinders, one for each digit of the number, with numbers painted on them with the current number pointing to the front, again like electricity meter reading used to be like. And sometimes the guy reading the meter looks at it from the wrong angle and charges me for five years of electricity at once (that actually happened) and when I try to query this the lady in the office says it must be right because the computer says so.
So, this is where AI/ML comes in to play. A machine is not going to find it very difficult to look at a digital readout because the numbers always look the same on every device. However, every such device with the rotating cylinders will have the reading look subtly different because they will be different sizes on every device and spaced at slightly different intervals etc. That is no problem at all for a human, but for a machine it is enormously difficult. So, you can have some sort of machine learning to train the machine doing the readings to interpret the readings like a human would do.
Professor Michael Roseman – Queensland Institute of Technology
I am just going to recap what I noted down. The points are going to seem random, but they were all seamlessly interlinked on the actual speech. And of course, I am going to go wandering off at random all the time.
When it comes to SAP transaction codes the problem right from the start was that you have mega-transactions like VA01 which can do ten billion things but to complete the transaction you need to do ten billion button clicks, constantly moving from tab to tab and field to field.
I have spent the last twenty odd years putting “Z” veneers over standard SAP transactions, defaulting certain values, hiding un-needed fields, putting everything on one screen, in essence lowering the number of button presses the end user needs to make.
Obviously, I am not the only one doing this, standard products like GUIXT had this very idea in mind, and in later years Screen Personas. The Fiori design has lots of small apps doing one thing rather than one big mega-app.
All these techniques reduce the effort for the end user. Michael showed a graph showing this effort reducing towards zero over time rather like the atomic half-life of a radioactive element. But in both cases that value can only ever approach zero, never get to zero – after all the end users must do something if they want the system in turn to do something back for them even if it is just “Hey ChatGPT, my boss wants me to write a program which will take a year, here is the technical and functional specifications, write it for me will you, whilst I goof off for a year, still getting paid”. Not that anyone would ever do that, of course. The idea would not even begin to cross their minds.
Michael postulated – what if you could get that value below zero? That is for every second you spend in one transaction that reduces the amount of time you have to spend in other transactions by more than one second.
That idea had never occurred to me, which is why I suppose I am not a professor. I think the idea is like Nuclear Fusion – when that starts working (which is always 30 years in the future (or in SAP terms SY-DATUM + ( 365.25 * 30) ) the idea is that the energy output is greater than the energy input.
I am having a hard time visualising how this could be – I am guessing this could take the form of suggestions e.g., you have just created a sales order, do you want me to automatically create some deliveries as well, or maybe the last 50 times this customer ordered fries with that, there are no fries in this sales order, did you maybe forget to add them, if so I can add them for you?
It would have to be smarter than the Amazon algorithm which says, “You bought a toilet seat last week, do you want to buy a toilet seat this week as well?”
This also begs the question – very often I want to make some sort of change on an online bank page, or online electricity page, or online telephone provider page, and the web page says you cannot make that change online, you need to phone us up. So, you phone them up and because they have laid off 95% of their call centre staff because the web page can do everything(!) you get told you are 65th in the queue please hang on and then you have to spend two hours listening to music and news stories about pandas, all interspersed with a recorded message saying why don’t you handle your query online? As an alternative you could also try and “talk” to an online chatbot on the webpage which cannot do anything at all. This is very strange – all day long I hear about ChatGPT and how all companies are investing massively in conversational AI, and yet the reality I see is Chatbots like NIBBY which are as dumb as a box of rocks, if not dumber.
What if you could avoid the agony of this procedure by having some sort of AI robot make the call for you? Then you could have one really stupid robot on one end of the phone and another really stupid robot on the other end, and the conversation would probably go for years before anyone intervened to stop it.
Talking about cutting costs by laying people off Professor Roseman showed a graph whereby over time the costs were cut by a large amount, but the revenue went down even faster. I can think of dozens of real-life examples of this sort of thing – the company is in trouble so in order to cut costs cut the budget for testing, cut the budget for training, cut all the call centre staff, maybe outsource development and so on and so forth and then get really puzzled when everything starts sliding downhill even faster than before.
One point he mentioned that stuck in my mind is that the bottleneck for new technology is not whether it works or not. It is whether the end users trust it. The ultimate example of this is driverless cars. It is quite possible the technology for this works and has worked for some time but there are two things working against, both to do with trust. First off, some products are marketed as driverless car technology when they are nothing of the sort and people take their hands of the wheel and start watching a movie or something and are really shocked when the car crashes.
The other point is that people believe what they want to believe regardless of any evidence for or against. In this case people say to me “there is no way a machine will ever be as good as driving a car as a human, no matter how many sensors or AI routines it has”. In this case I would ask the following question – every time you drive anywhere at all, would you say that 99% of people are excellent drivers and never make any mistakes at all, and the other 1% appear to be drunk and/or on drugs and are all over the place. Or is it the other way round? And when it starts raining do peoples driving abilities appear to get better or worse?
To go off on a huge digression we had “safety week” at work the other month and it was noted for an office worker the biggest risk to life and limb is driving to and from work. One of my colleagues noted that whilst the rule on motorways is to leave several “decals” between you and the car in front in case the car in front hits the breaks unexpectedly because a wombat runs out in front oof fit and the resulting crash kills you and the car in front but the wombat is OK, in reality the instant you slow down a little bit to leave such a “safety gap” between you and the car in front another car behind you will pull into that gap from another lane.
Thus if you told a machine it is important to keep such a gap in order to keep all the humans alive, it would most likely keep such a gap, but if you wanted the AI to act like a human you would have to explain to it “Humans are willing to risk death because they (incorrectly) think that pulling into such a gap will get them somewhere ( somewhere they do not really actually want to be going to in the first place) one second faster”. As we see every day a human has no problem at all justifying such a decision to themselves, so if a self-driving car does not follow that (obviously insane) logic everyone will laugh at it and say it is not as good at driving as a human is.
Going back to cutting call centre staff, the next example was some sort of supermarket chain in Denmark (or somewhere) which had a huge success by reversing the trend to do away with checkout operators and replace them with machines which are so difficult for the customers to operate that you have to have the same number of staff, or even more, standing by to tell people how to work them, and instead have “slow lanes” which have a human on the end, because a lot of people, especially the elderly, like to talk to a human being. To be honest I am not sure those automated machines in supermarket allows the customer to get out of the shop faster, but I am sure the idea is to make it a lot cheaper for the supermarket, and that would work if they did not have to employ all the extra staff to step in every time a customer gets into trouble, which is every time.
If you are going to replace people with robots, then I would suggest taking a leaf out of Japan’s book. They have one hotel there with no humans at all, just robots. Most importantly when checking in, one of the robots on the front desk is a six-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus Rex wearing a Pork Pie hat. I would view that as a positive check-in experience.
Silly Panel Time – 3 x SAP + 1 x Powerlink Queensland
Silly panel. Silly, silly panel. When the chairs go onto the stage at the front, the audience walk out the back.
Me – ABAP2XLSX
Then it was my turn. It occurred to me that since even after 10 years no-one had even heard of ABAP2XLSX, that is obvious because every single month someone re-invents the wheel on an SCN blog, maybe I could at least try and tell people in Australia that it exists.
Just in case you have not heard of it, ABAP2XLSX is a way of uploading/downloading data to/from ABAP and Excel. You can do everything programmatically in ABAP.
https://blogs.sap.com/2023/01/12/monthly-abap-to-excel-blog-january-2023/
https://blogs.sap.com/2023/02/11/monthly-abap-to-excel-blog-february-2023/
https://blogs.sap.com/2023/03/25/monthly-abap-to-excel-blog-march-2023/
For assorted reasons I could not do one in April or May, I hope to be able to do the next in the series in June.
Ariba – Andrew Dwyer – Transport Main Roads Queensland
Andrew was talking about how the Ariba implementation went at his organisation. This was of much more than academic interest to me since my organisation is currently undergoing a worldwide Ariba implementation. We tried in Australia ten years ago and it did not go as well as we would have hoped. However, Ariba is a very different product ten years on, different database (HANA), different UI (UI5), a different integration mechanism (CIG) and a different code base.
To my mind this sort of session is 100% the reason people should go to SAP conferences. You don’t want to listen to someone to try and sell you something, you want to hear from someone who has already bought something you are considering buying, and see how it went for them, and then either steer clear or take note of all the problems they encountered and how they got around them.
I was making notes as fast as I could, and they were all really technical so no point mentioning them here, but in essence they were a big list of “gotchas” – things you might not expect during the implementation be they gaps in the standard product you have to address via user exits or more architectural decisions you may get wrong if you are not careful.
Just to be clear – Andrew did not say one word that was negative about Ariba, and their implementation was a success in the end, as indeed ours will be, the major point is that this is not an “out of the box” type of thing (in my experience nothing ever is, no matter what the salesperson says) and here are some things to watch out for.
Nick Calder – HR – Catholic Schools Parramatta
Nick Calder was the chief HR consultant when my organisation (in Australia) put in SAP HR many years ago. These days of course SuccessFactors is the go for new HR implementations so that is the sphere he now works in, specifically for the Parramatta Catholic Schools organisation.
Without getting into all the details which went over my head in any case I got the basic ides which was twofold: -
Artificial Intelligence – University of Queensland
Scene: Microsoft cafetaria cafe. One table is occupied by a group of Microsoft engineers dressed as Vikings with horned helmets on. A man and his wife enter.
Man (Eric Idle): You sit here, dear.
Wife (Graham Chapman in drag): All right.
Man (to Waitress): Morning!
Waitress (Terry Jones, in drag as a bit of a rat-bag): Morning!
Man: Well, what've you got?
Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and ChatGPT; egg bacon and ChatGPT; egg bacon sausage and ChatGPT; ChatGPT bacon sausage and ChatGPT; ChatGPT egg ChatGPT ChatGPT bacon and ChatGPT; ChatGPT sausage ChatGPT ChatGPT bacon ChatGPT tomato and ChatGPT;
Vikings (starting to chant): ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT...
Waitress: ...ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT egg and ChatGPT; ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT baked beans ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT...
Vikings (singing): ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT!
Waitress: ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and ChatGPT.
Wife: Have you got anything without ChatGPT?
Waitress: Well, there's ChatGPT egg sausage and ChatGPT, that's not got much ChatGPT in it.
Wife: I don't want ANY ChatGPT!
Man: Why can't she have egg bacon ChatGPT and sausage?
Wife: THAT'S got ChatGPT in it!
Man: Hasn't got as much ChatGPT in it as ChatGPT egg sausage and ChatGPT, has it?
Vikings: ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT (crescendo through next few lines)
Wife: Could you do the egg bacon ChatGPT and sausage without the ChatGPT then?
Waitress: Urgghh!
Wife: What do you mean 'Urgghh'? I don't like ChatGPT!
Vikings: Lovely ChatGPT! Wonderful ChatGPT!)
Waitress: Shut up!
Vikings: Lovely ChatGPT! Wonderful ChatGPT!
Waitress: Shut up! (Vikings stop) Vikings! You can't have egg bacon ChatGPT and sausage without the ChatGPT.
Wife (shrieks): I don't like ChatGPT!
Man: Sshh, dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your ChatGPT. I love it. I'm having ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT baked beans ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT and ChatGPT!
Vikings (singing): ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT. Lovely ChatGPT! Wonderful ChatGPT!
Waitress: Shut up!! Baked beans are off.
Man: Well could I have her ChatGPT instead of the baked beans then?
Waitress: You mean ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT... (but it is too late and the Vikings drown her words)
Vikings (singing elaborately): ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT. Lovely ChatGPT! Wonderful ChatGPT! ChatGPT gee-pee-tee ChatGPT gee-pee-tee ChatGPT. Lovely ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT! ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT!
I am not sure this presentation even mentioned ChatGPT, but it was about AI.
They have a white paper they want everyone to read
Whitepaper: Redesigning Work with Artificial Intelligence.
I will not go into too much detail, because I did not make enough notes, but anyone who has worked in IT for any length of time is familiar with the „two by two“ matrix which looks a bit like this:-
I first saw one of those in 1997 when I transitioned from accounting to IT. In that case the consultants had prepared one of those grids saying high profits and high volumes were better than low profits and low volumes. Valuable information, well worth ten million dollars.
In this case the recommendation – which makes perfect sense to me – was only to give AI „mindless“ tasks e.g. at an airport matching the passengers faces to the face on their passport.
Hastings Deering – Caterpillar
We are not talking about the very hungry caterpillar here, who spent seven days eating assorted things and then turned into a butterfly.
Instead we are talking about what you might call „yellow machines“ which are used in the construction industry.
This talk was about how the company used SAP SIGNAVIO to help them. My notes are not as extensive as they might have been and boil down to „they think it is good“
Final Talk – Thing – Elliot H from a Secret Bank
Nine times out of ten a presenter is allowed to say what company they work for. I am allowed to do so, because I am not giving away trade secrets which – say – a competitor could use but instead talk about generic programming things. In the same way if Transport Main Roads Queensland give tips to help other companies implement Ariba in an easier manner then how can that possibly harm Transport Main Roads Queensland?
In this case though the Bank in question had approved the talk on condition of anonymity, and just wanted to be referred to as a „major Australian retail bank“. So the idea was that the exact name of the bank should never be mentioned.
The talk was all about how the bank that cannot be mentioned had acquired some sort of tealnt management application (the name of which also could not be mentioned) and had used SAP SIGNAVIO (100% owned by SAP by the way) to help map out the processes.
Many years ago SAP made much of a tool called ARIS to map out business processes and link them automatically to what was actually happening in the ERP system. That had the backing of Hasso Plattner. Later on a product called CELONIS was pushed by SAP to do the same sort of thing. Now that SAP actually owns SIGNAVIO I would guess that is now what SAP would push as the „go-to“ solution in this area.
In any event the name of the talent management product was covered up with a big black smudge in nine out of ten slides, which was not quite enough to totally hide the name from anyone looking for that name. I am not going to say what it was.
In the same way I am not going to say the name of the bank, even though it was mentioned in about half the slides, and indeed at the end of the email address the presenter gave at the end of the talk. After all I have shares in that bank. So you will not catch me giving away the identity of this bank, which is based in Queensland, and is often referred to by a three letter acronym, of which the middle letter is „O“.
Dustbins – Part Two
Going back to the dustbin subject I did not get any good photographs of any sadly, but they were not found wanting at this event. Any time I wanted to throw something away it was no problem at all, just as well as here are so many brochures i took from the thousands of exhibition hall sponsors just to be polite only to throw away thirty seconds later as soon as I was out of sight.
Stevie Winwood
Stevie Winwood was a pop star in the 1980’s famous for songs such as „Back in the High Life Again“. I have no idea how he got interested in SAP but for many years he has been popping up at SAPPHIRE and TECHED events all around the world, and many „minor“ events like the SAUG events.
You can spot him as he runs on the stage mid-way through a presentation dressed as a Jester, shouts something like „VALERIE“ and then hits the presenter with a bladder, and then runs away laughing hysterically. It happened to me during my talk, but it’s not the first time, I am used to it by now, I did not even pause in my delivery of the content.
Summary
This was a very good conference, focused more on customer stories than sales pitches, which is the correct focus, and also this time a huge effort was made to stop presenters running over time (I was guilty of that crime, which would have disqualified me at Toastmasters).
The next one in Australia is the main SAUG event in Sydney on 21st August 2023. I will do my ABAP2XLSX presentation again, and then find another subject for 2024.
Cheersy Cheers
Paul
SAUSAGES
Dustbins – Part One
There has been a long-standing tradition, invented by Jim Spath about twenty years ago, that when writing about SAP conferences of any sort, you have to go into great detail about what the dustbins (trash cans to USA people) are like.
In this case the special guest stars were 1970 UK TV stars Ted Rodgers and Dusty Bin who performed their “3-2-1” act. For those young and/or outside the UK what that game involved was reading out to the contestant’s poems stuffed with false clues. They (contestants) had to pick a poem and based on which one they picked would win either a car, a holiday, a dustbin, or an S/4HANA Public Cloud ERP system.
In this case the contestant (a CIO of a leading Australian company) picked the poem that went “Car / Car / Car / Car / Car / Car / Car” and luckily that won them a new S/4HANA system. It was just like the olden days when I watched that show on TV.
Food Review
As in many countries “reality” TV shows are a big thing in Australia. For the last 14 years we have had “MasterChef Australia” and there is also “My Kitchen Rules” which pits potential chef teams from different Australian states against each other. In one of these shows – I forget which one – the team must host a party in their house for all the other contestants plus the judges. The thing is it is not really their house at all, it is some posh place given to them for the day so they can pretend it is their house. That is why you call it reality TV.
In any case whether it is in a fake house or in the studio there is a time limit for preparing the food, and a countdown to when they have to “plate up” the meal and they always do it with 0:07 seconds to spare, just like James Bond defusing a bomb. Did you notice the other day that all the “reality” TV shows in Hollywood had to stop when the scriptwriters went on strike?
In any event at the SAUG conference they had the winning teams from the last 14 years lined up in the exhibition area (plus some space aliens who had just won the inaugural “MasterChef – Moons of Saturn” contest) ready to “plate up” strange exotic meals during the breaks.
Talking about the exhibition area I was just amazed how big it was. I though there were a lot of sponsors at the events in Orlando and Las Vegas, but this was just ridiculous. It went on forever, there must have been five hundred stalls.
Anyway, now the really important business is out of the way I can start to talk about the content of the presentations. As always this will be a rambling, incoherent, stream of consciousness type review. I am the Donald Trump of blog writers, never able to stay on the same topic for more than a few seconds.
The important thing is that I am describing my – possibly insane – interpretation of what the speakers said rather than what they actually may have said. So, all mistakes in the following account are down to me, anything good comes from the speakers.
Keynote – Chris Peck – Ticket for a Runaway Train
Back in the year 2000 Chris Peck used to work for my organisation as a consultant, he now is very high up in the SAP ranks.
I noticed at the bottom of the slides a copyright message saying they were created by the Chief Storyteller at SAP. That is not as silly as it might sound – when you want to explain anything to anybody it turns out the human minds reacts (and retains the information) far better when the information is presented in the form of a story rather than just presenting s stream of facts.
In this case the story is about SAP implementations. The analogy used is what I would call “Thomas the Tank Engine” in that such an implementation could be described as a ride on a runaway train.
The idea as far a I could see was that back in the day you had the various stages of a “waterfall” project – vendor selection / configuration / build / ongoing support – and these are all different choo choo trains (choo choo) all leaving from different platforms at different times and so presumably they could arrive in the wrong order.
Nowadays you have all the various bits all on the same choo choo train (choo choo) rather like that science fiction film/series where an entire society lives on a train in motion. And of course, that new train flies up into the cloud like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John at the end of “Grease”.
Next there is a description of a subscription service and unless I got this totally wrong you ay a subscription and get a dedicated “customer success partner” to help you get the most out of your SAP implementation. That is nice, but did that not used to be standard, part of the 20% annual maintenance fee?
I always recall that on a Friday at work we would get visited by our contacts at SAP, Microsoft etc. and then they would try to sell us extras things during work and then we would all go to pizzas and beers or whatever which we had to pay for. And now we must pay a subscription service for someone from SAP to try and sell us extra things? I think a lot of people would pay not to have someone try and sell them extra things.
Lastly and on a totally unrelated note, at the end there was a screen shot of a news article about Orica (explosive company, big user of SAP, and from my dealings with them an excellent company to work for).
The thing about any sort of news article in any newspaper/magazine/online site is that if you know anything at all about the subject you will realise it is riddled with errors ranging from minor things like the names of people or organisations being wrong, dates wrong, and going all the way up to total falsehoods. Possibly if you were at the SAUG Brisbane conference and read this blog you will find it full of falsehoods as my memory of it and your memory if it might be wildly different.
Michael Crichton observed many years ago then when you read a news article and you know enough about the subject you can spot all the errors you just sigh and roll your eyes and/or laugh and wonder why the journalist did not do even basic research. Then you move on to the next news article which is on a subject you know nothing about and blindly believe every single word without even thinking about questioning it. He then said that some articles even mix up cause and effect which he deems the “wet pavements cause rain” style of journalism.
In the case of the Orica article shown on the screen there was only one error I could spot -COVID-29 as opposed to COVD-19 – but then I do not know enough about their S/4HANA project to be able to tell if anything else was wrong.
But the other day I did see an article on the internet which went like this “In the UK inflation is at a forty year high due to people struggling with the cost of living”. That is the textbook definition of “wet pavements cause rain”. Once you start looking for something you start seeing it everywhere.
Vicki from Sunwater – all about BTP
Sunwater is a state-owned company that runs the Queensland Water Infrastructure. As might be imagined it is a very asset-intensive company which is why Plant Maintenance in SAP has such a big role to play here.
They went live in September 2020 which is starting to seem like a long time ago now. I had predicted (based on the highly scientific show-of-hands method at SAP conferences) that the amount of organisation which were at least starting an S/4 conversion would be past the 50% point around 2023/2024. So, in a year or so if you have not even started an S/4HANA project people will start giving you odd looks.
S/4HANA Adoption Bell Curve
Now we come to the evergreen topic of SAP product naming. The marketing people at SAP have decided that it is no longer enough to change the name of each product every year. They have decided they are not doing a good enough job unless they change the naming convention of the various versions of the product as well.
In this case we are talking about the “Asset Manager” which I presume is in an SAP BTP service. Here are the three versions Sunwater have had thus far:
- Version 4
- Version 2010 (presumably because it came out in 2010)
- Version 2205 (presumably because it came out in May 2022)
I imagine they cannot wait until upgrade time in order to find out what the naming convention will be for the next version e.g., will it be 0524 for May 2024, or 2402 because it is the second version to be released in 2024 or maybe 2106 because it is the sixth version to be released in the 21st century?
Sunwater are building their first Fiori app. I am very happy to hear it as in my books I constantly harp on about how building a UI5 application is simple enough it can be down in-house as opposed to having to pay a consulting company ten billion dollars.
I am not saying the consulting company does not do a wonderful job – my organisation bought an off the shelf UI5 mobile app for entering work orders and I witnessed first-hand the end users doing cartwheels of delight and singing hallelujah which is not a reaction I have ever got to any of my ALV or DYNPRO SAP GUI programs.
The point is that I found the learning curve for UI5 to be less than that for Web Dynpro, which you would not expect to be the case as Web Dynpro is in ABAP and part of a UI5 app is in JavaScript. The trouble is ABAP developers are scared stiff of JavaScript, but they do not need to be, which is why I am publishing some blogs at the moment of things I am finding out from an SAP Press JavaScript book.
In short when a company creates its first in-house UI5 app that is fantastic but to be honest it does not really merit being viewed on the same level as the second coming of Christ, though it often is.
Moving onto the ever-popular subject of Artificial Intelligence. I am certainly not going to argue that such things are not already all around us, and I am definitely not going to argue that every single big tech company including SAP are rushing to embed ChatGPT things into their products. Some may wonder that since the primary characteristic of ChatGPT is that it makes things up and tells whopping great lies, is that the sort of thing you want to add to the critical applications that run your business? It is going to make life a lot more interesting, that is for sure.
So, we are heading for a “I would like a Big Mac please / Do you want AI with that?” type of world. However, in the rush towards this utopian goal many companies are claiming that any sort of computer technology is AI whether it is or not.
If you really wanted, you could argue that a program I write that adds up two numbers you input is artificial intelligence because it is mimicking a human adding up two numbers. I think someone at the conference asked – is EXCEL artificial intelligence? By the way did you know there is a way to upload and download Excel data to/from SAP?
Going back to Sunwater (by now you will have noticed by blogs are rambling stream-of-consciousness affairs, often with little or no relation to the presentations I am purporting to be reviewing) one big part of plant maintenance is measurement counter readings e.g., how much water has gone through this pipe this week.
In the same way that someone from the electricity board used to come round to your house and manually read your electricity meter but now there are “smart meters” in the business world you want to move from people wandering round a site manually noting down in a book the readings on various pieces of equipment and then manually typing them into SAP using transaction IH08 to some sort of automatic interface.
This is often referred to as the convergence of IT and OT with the latter standing for “Operational Technology”. As an absolute basic example where I work in the year 2000, we wanted the SAP system to know the weight of a truck standing on the weighbridge rather than the weighbridge operator looking at the weight on the scale and typing it into SAP. So, we built an interface.
When I heard from Sunwater the statement that “Eventually – in 24 months – we are going to get the readings directly from our instruments using AI” initially I was very puzzled. An interface that moves the value 524 from one system to another does not sound much like AI to me.
Eventually it became clear – it is easy to extract numbers from a digital device but some of the devices were analog or to paint a better picture the reading was a series of rotating cylinders, one for each digit of the number, with numbers painted on them with the current number pointing to the front, again like electricity meter reading used to be like. And sometimes the guy reading the meter looks at it from the wrong angle and charges me for five years of electricity at once (that actually happened) and when I try to query this the lady in the office says it must be right because the computer says so.
So, this is where AI/ML comes in to play. A machine is not going to find it very difficult to look at a digital readout because the numbers always look the same on every device. However, every such device with the rotating cylinders will have the reading look subtly different because they will be different sizes on every device and spaced at slightly different intervals etc. That is no problem at all for a human, but for a machine it is enormously difficult. So, you can have some sort of machine learning to train the machine doing the readings to interpret the readings like a human would do.
Professor Michael Roseman – Queensland Institute of Technology
I am just going to recap what I noted down. The points are going to seem random, but they were all seamlessly interlinked on the actual speech. And of course, I am going to go wandering off at random all the time.
When it comes to SAP transaction codes the problem right from the start was that you have mega-transactions like VA01 which can do ten billion things but to complete the transaction you need to do ten billion button clicks, constantly moving from tab to tab and field to field.
I have spent the last twenty odd years putting “Z” veneers over standard SAP transactions, defaulting certain values, hiding un-needed fields, putting everything on one screen, in essence lowering the number of button presses the end user needs to make.
Obviously, I am not the only one doing this, standard products like GUIXT had this very idea in mind, and in later years Screen Personas. The Fiori design has lots of small apps doing one thing rather than one big mega-app.
All these techniques reduce the effort for the end user. Michael showed a graph showing this effort reducing towards zero over time rather like the atomic half-life of a radioactive element. But in both cases that value can only ever approach zero, never get to zero – after all the end users must do something if they want the system in turn to do something back for them even if it is just “Hey ChatGPT, my boss wants me to write a program which will take a year, here is the technical and functional specifications, write it for me will you, whilst I goof off for a year, still getting paid”. Not that anyone would ever do that, of course. The idea would not even begin to cross their minds.
Michael postulated – what if you could get that value below zero? That is for every second you spend in one transaction that reduces the amount of time you have to spend in other transactions by more than one second.
That idea had never occurred to me, which is why I suppose I am not a professor. I think the idea is like Nuclear Fusion – when that starts working (which is always 30 years in the future (or in SAP terms SY-DATUM + ( 365.25 * 30) ) the idea is that the energy output is greater than the energy input.
I am having a hard time visualising how this could be – I am guessing this could take the form of suggestions e.g., you have just created a sales order, do you want me to automatically create some deliveries as well, or maybe the last 50 times this customer ordered fries with that, there are no fries in this sales order, did you maybe forget to add them, if so I can add them for you?
It would have to be smarter than the Amazon algorithm which says, “You bought a toilet seat last week, do you want to buy a toilet seat this week as well?”
This also begs the question – very often I want to make some sort of change on an online bank page, or online electricity page, or online telephone provider page, and the web page says you cannot make that change online, you need to phone us up. So, you phone them up and because they have laid off 95% of their call centre staff because the web page can do everything(!) you get told you are 65th in the queue please hang on and then you have to spend two hours listening to music and news stories about pandas, all interspersed with a recorded message saying why don’t you handle your query online? As an alternative you could also try and “talk” to an online chatbot on the webpage which cannot do anything at all. This is very strange – all day long I hear about ChatGPT and how all companies are investing massively in conversational AI, and yet the reality I see is Chatbots like NIBBY which are as dumb as a box of rocks, if not dumber.
What if you could avoid the agony of this procedure by having some sort of AI robot make the call for you? Then you could have one really stupid robot on one end of the phone and another really stupid robot on the other end, and the conversation would probably go for years before anyone intervened to stop it.
Talking about cutting costs by laying people off Professor Roseman showed a graph whereby over time the costs were cut by a large amount, but the revenue went down even faster. I can think of dozens of real-life examples of this sort of thing – the company is in trouble so in order to cut costs cut the budget for testing, cut the budget for training, cut all the call centre staff, maybe outsource development and so on and so forth and then get really puzzled when everything starts sliding downhill even faster than before.
One point he mentioned that stuck in my mind is that the bottleneck for new technology is not whether it works or not. It is whether the end users trust it. The ultimate example of this is driverless cars. It is quite possible the technology for this works and has worked for some time but there are two things working against, both to do with trust. First off, some products are marketed as driverless car technology when they are nothing of the sort and people take their hands of the wheel and start watching a movie or something and are really shocked when the car crashes.
The other point is that people believe what they want to believe regardless of any evidence for or against. In this case people say to me “there is no way a machine will ever be as good as driving a car as a human, no matter how many sensors or AI routines it has”. In this case I would ask the following question – every time you drive anywhere at all, would you say that 99% of people are excellent drivers and never make any mistakes at all, and the other 1% appear to be drunk and/or on drugs and are all over the place. Or is it the other way round? And when it starts raining do peoples driving abilities appear to get better or worse?
To go off on a huge digression we had “safety week” at work the other month and it was noted for an office worker the biggest risk to life and limb is driving to and from work. One of my colleagues noted that whilst the rule on motorways is to leave several “decals” between you and the car in front in case the car in front hits the breaks unexpectedly because a wombat runs out in front oof fit and the resulting crash kills you and the car in front but the wombat is OK, in reality the instant you slow down a little bit to leave such a “safety gap” between you and the car in front another car behind you will pull into that gap from another lane.
Thus if you told a machine it is important to keep such a gap in order to keep all the humans alive, it would most likely keep such a gap, but if you wanted the AI to act like a human you would have to explain to it “Humans are willing to risk death because they (incorrectly) think that pulling into such a gap will get them somewhere ( somewhere they do not really actually want to be going to in the first place) one second faster”. As we see every day a human has no problem at all justifying such a decision to themselves, so if a self-driving car does not follow that (obviously insane) logic everyone will laugh at it and say it is not as good at driving as a human is.
Going back to cutting call centre staff, the next example was some sort of supermarket chain in Denmark (or somewhere) which had a huge success by reversing the trend to do away with checkout operators and replace them with machines which are so difficult for the customers to operate that you have to have the same number of staff, or even more, standing by to tell people how to work them, and instead have “slow lanes” which have a human on the end, because a lot of people, especially the elderly, like to talk to a human being. To be honest I am not sure those automated machines in supermarket allows the customer to get out of the shop faster, but I am sure the idea is to make it a lot cheaper for the supermarket, and that would work if they did not have to employ all the extra staff to step in every time a customer gets into trouble, which is every time.
If you are going to replace people with robots, then I would suggest taking a leaf out of Japan’s book. They have one hotel there with no humans at all, just robots. Most importantly when checking in, one of the robots on the front desk is a six-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus Rex wearing a Pork Pie hat. I would view that as a positive check-in experience.
Silly Panel Time – 3 x SAP + 1 x Powerlink Queensland
Silly panel. Silly, silly panel. When the chairs go onto the stage at the front, the audience walk out the back.
Me – ABAP2XLSX
Then it was my turn. It occurred to me that since even after 10 years no-one had even heard of ABAP2XLSX, that is obvious because every single month someone re-invents the wheel on an SCN blog, maybe I could at least try and tell people in Australia that it exists.
Just in case you have not heard of it, ABAP2XLSX is a way of uploading/downloading data to/from ABAP and Excel. You can do everything programmatically in ABAP.
https://blogs.sap.com/2023/01/12/monthly-abap-to-excel-blog-january-2023/
https://blogs.sap.com/2023/02/11/monthly-abap-to-excel-blog-february-2023/
https://blogs.sap.com/2023/03/25/monthly-abap-to-excel-blog-march-2023/
For assorted reasons I could not do one in April or May, I hope to be able to do the next in the series in June.
Ariba – Andrew Dwyer – Transport Main Roads Queensland
Andrew was talking about how the Ariba implementation went at his organisation. This was of much more than academic interest to me since my organisation is currently undergoing a worldwide Ariba implementation. We tried in Australia ten years ago and it did not go as well as we would have hoped. However, Ariba is a very different product ten years on, different database (HANA), different UI (UI5), a different integration mechanism (CIG) and a different code base.
To my mind this sort of session is 100% the reason people should go to SAP conferences. You don’t want to listen to someone to try and sell you something, you want to hear from someone who has already bought something you are considering buying, and see how it went for them, and then either steer clear or take note of all the problems they encountered and how they got around them.
I was making notes as fast as I could, and they were all really technical so no point mentioning them here, but in essence they were a big list of “gotchas” – things you might not expect during the implementation be they gaps in the standard product you have to address via user exits or more architectural decisions you may get wrong if you are not careful.
Just to be clear – Andrew did not say one word that was negative about Ariba, and their implementation was a success in the end, as indeed ours will be, the major point is that this is not an “out of the box” type of thing (in my experience nothing ever is, no matter what the salesperson says) and here are some things to watch out for.
Nick Calder – HR – Catholic Schools Parramatta
Nick Calder was the chief HR consultant when my organisation (in Australia) put in SAP HR many years ago. These days of course SuccessFactors is the go for new HR implementations so that is the sphere he now works in, specifically for the Parramatta Catholic Schools organisation.
Without getting into all the details which went over my head in any case I got the basic ides which was twofold: -
- What they were doing was ground-breaking and very specific to teaching because there are a bucket-load of HR/payroll type things that only apply to teachers and relief teachers
- This was done by extensions that “kept the core clean” as SAP would say. What many in IT would call the “Open-Closed Principle” that is keeping the existing software the same and yet enabling it to do extra things which is how user exits work in SAP
Artificial Intelligence – University of Queensland
Scene: Microsoft cafetaria cafe. One table is occupied by a group of Microsoft engineers dressed as Vikings with horned helmets on. A man and his wife enter.
Man (Eric Idle): You sit here, dear.
Wife (Graham Chapman in drag): All right.
Man (to Waitress): Morning!
Waitress (Terry Jones, in drag as a bit of a rat-bag): Morning!
Man: Well, what've you got?
Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and ChatGPT; egg bacon and ChatGPT; egg bacon sausage and ChatGPT; ChatGPT bacon sausage and ChatGPT; ChatGPT egg ChatGPT ChatGPT bacon and ChatGPT; ChatGPT sausage ChatGPT ChatGPT bacon ChatGPT tomato and ChatGPT;
Vikings (starting to chant): ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT...
Waitress: ...ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT egg and ChatGPT; ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT baked beans ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT...
Vikings (singing): ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT!
Waitress: ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and ChatGPT.
Wife: Have you got anything without ChatGPT?
Waitress: Well, there's ChatGPT egg sausage and ChatGPT, that's not got much ChatGPT in it.
Wife: I don't want ANY ChatGPT!
Man: Why can't she have egg bacon ChatGPT and sausage?
Wife: THAT'S got ChatGPT in it!
Man: Hasn't got as much ChatGPT in it as ChatGPT egg sausage and ChatGPT, has it?
Vikings: ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT (crescendo through next few lines)
Wife: Could you do the egg bacon ChatGPT and sausage without the ChatGPT then?
Waitress: Urgghh!
Wife: What do you mean 'Urgghh'? I don't like ChatGPT!
Vikings: Lovely ChatGPT! Wonderful ChatGPT!)
Waitress: Shut up!
Vikings: Lovely ChatGPT! Wonderful ChatGPT!
Waitress: Shut up! (Vikings stop) Vikings! You can't have egg bacon ChatGPT and sausage without the ChatGPT.
Wife (shrieks): I don't like ChatGPT!
Man: Sshh, dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your ChatGPT. I love it. I'm having ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT baked beans ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT and ChatGPT!
Vikings (singing): ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT. Lovely ChatGPT! Wonderful ChatGPT!
Waitress: Shut up!! Baked beans are off.
Man: Well could I have her ChatGPT instead of the baked beans then?
Waitress: You mean ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT... (but it is too late and the Vikings drown her words)
Vikings (singing elaborately): ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT. Lovely ChatGPT! Wonderful ChatGPT! ChatGPT gee-pee-tee ChatGPT gee-pee-tee ChatGPT. Lovely ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT! Lovely ChatGPT! ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT ChatGPT!
I am not sure this presentation even mentioned ChatGPT, but it was about AI.
They have a white paper they want everyone to read
Whitepaper: Redesigning Work with Artificial Intelligence.
I will not go into too much detail, because I did not make enough notes, but anyone who has worked in IT for any length of time is familiar with the „two by two“ matrix which looks a bit like this:-
Consultants Decision Matrix
I first saw one of those in 1997 when I transitioned from accounting to IT. In that case the consultants had prepared one of those grids saying high profits and high volumes were better than low profits and low volumes. Valuable information, well worth ten million dollars.
In this case the recommendation – which makes perfect sense to me – was only to give AI „mindless“ tasks e.g. at an airport matching the passengers faces to the face on their passport.
Hastings Deering – Caterpillar
We are not talking about the very hungry caterpillar here, who spent seven days eating assorted things and then turned into a butterfly.
Instead we are talking about what you might call „yellow machines“ which are used in the construction industry.
This talk was about how the company used SAP SIGNAVIO to help them. My notes are not as extensive as they might have been and boil down to „they think it is good“
Final Talk – Thing – Elliot H from a Secret Bank
Nine times out of ten a presenter is allowed to say what company they work for. I am allowed to do so, because I am not giving away trade secrets which – say – a competitor could use but instead talk about generic programming things. In the same way if Transport Main Roads Queensland give tips to help other companies implement Ariba in an easier manner then how can that possibly harm Transport Main Roads Queensland?
In this case though the Bank in question had approved the talk on condition of anonymity, and just wanted to be referred to as a „major Australian retail bank“. So the idea was that the exact name of the bank should never be mentioned.
The talk was all about how the bank that cannot be mentioned had acquired some sort of tealnt management application (the name of which also could not be mentioned) and had used SAP SIGNAVIO (100% owned by SAP by the way) to help map out the processes.
Many years ago SAP made much of a tool called ARIS to map out business processes and link them automatically to what was actually happening in the ERP system. That had the backing of Hasso Plattner. Later on a product called CELONIS was pushed by SAP to do the same sort of thing. Now that SAP actually owns SIGNAVIO I would guess that is now what SAP would push as the „go-to“ solution in this area.
In any event the name of the talent management product was covered up with a big black smudge in nine out of ten slides, which was not quite enough to totally hide the name from anyone looking for that name. I am not going to say what it was.
In the same way I am not going to say the name of the bank, even though it was mentioned in about half the slides, and indeed at the end of the email address the presenter gave at the end of the talk. After all I have shares in that bank. So you will not catch me giving away the identity of this bank, which is based in Queensland, and is often referred to by a three letter acronym, of which the middle letter is „O“.
Dustbins – Part Two
Going back to the dustbin subject I did not get any good photographs of any sadly, but they were not found wanting at this event. Any time I wanted to throw something away it was no problem at all, just as well as here are so many brochures i took from the thousands of exhibition hall sponsors just to be polite only to throw away thirty seconds later as soon as I was out of sight.
Stevie Winwood
Stevie Winwood was a pop star in the 1980’s famous for songs such as „Back in the High Life Again“. I have no idea how he got interested in SAP but for many years he has been popping up at SAPPHIRE and TECHED events all around the world, and many „minor“ events like the SAUG events.
You can spot him as he runs on the stage mid-way through a presentation dressed as a Jester, shouts something like „VALERIE“ and then hits the presenter with a bladder, and then runs away laughing hysterically. It happened to me during my talk, but it’s not the first time, I am used to it by now, I did not even pause in my delivery of the content.
Summary
This was a very good conference, focused more on customer stories than sales pitches, which is the correct focus, and also this time a huge effort was made to stop presenters running over time (I was guilty of that crime, which would have disqualified me at Toastmasters).
The next one in Australia is the main SAUG event in Sydney on 21st August 2023. I will do my ABAP2XLSX presentation again, and then find another subject for 2024.
Cheersy Cheers
Paul
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