Greater industry collaboration will help move customers to the latest tech
The annual UK and Ireland SAP User Group Connect in Birmingham at the start of December, gave a little insight into the challenges SAP faces.
It clearly costs loads of money to support each variant of its products and SAP wants people to move from the old Enterprise Core Components (ECC) ERP system that has been running in many organisations for years, over to a more modern ERP.
Last year’s Connect event saw SAP making a big push to get people to go to Rise, its cloud-based ERP platform. But for many, this is too big a step to make. Arguably, many businesses that have deployed ECC, have been running the ERP for years, which means it is a pretty stable platform.
Convincing a finance chief to move to the latest and greatest SAP product is not an easy conversation for CIOs.
When Computer Weekly met up with Conor Riordan, chair of the UK and Ireland SAP User Group (UKISUG), and asked him about the issues many of the user group’s members face, he said that everyone wants to get to the end point, which is SAP Rise. However, he says: “We just can’t get there as fast as SAP wants us to go.”
One of the phrases Riordan and others used during the conference keynote is that the move to Rise is more of a “marathon” than a “sprint”.
Although upgrading SAP will offer new functionality like a more modern user experience through Fiori, it is not going to be the main business driver for upgrading. Drawing on his own experience, Riordan, says the most important consideration is the ability to go live with no business impact. For a lot of companies, success is when a project goes live without business disruption.
The challenge with running a stable older ERP platform is that putting in new functionality that is now available, such as the use of artificial intelligence in modern business application software, is harder than if it is built directly into the product.
It can seem like there is a push from SAP and the IT industry to make sure businesses spend a lot of money upgrading but Riordan believes businesses cannot stand still, and that includes the software they use. Using a publicly listed company as an example, Riordan points out that there is a constant need to be more efficient in business and drive better earnings per share to get better margins. This, in turn, means the business is rated as a growth company by the financial markets.
Businesses are under pressure to innovate. But buying the latest product is not always the quickest answer. The industry needs to work with customers to achieve a goal that helps both the ERP provider and the customer.