Empowering our members to make their voices heard and connect with peers, the ASUG Chapter events provide an invaluable platform for customers in the SAP ecosystem to network and learn from one another.
Earlier this month, on August 3, the New Jersey and New York City Metro Chapters joined forces to host a collaborative meeting at Topgolf Edison. As the New York City Chapter Coordinator, I had the privilege of attending this meeting in person alongside Kaaron Johnson, New Jersey Chapter Coordinator at ASUG.
Personally, this was my first time coordinating a joint meeting between two Chapters, and I was most excited to see what new opportunities for collaboration this structure could create for our event. For both the New Jersey and NYC Metro Chapters, this was one of the largest events in recent ASUG history, and our attendees came from at least six different surrounding states, with their companies’ primary locations covering an even larger geographic area.
Our educational sessions focused on Messer Americas’ collaboration with Applexus on their SAP journey, Under Armour’s experience navigating SAP Patch Days, and Aumento Technologies’ practice with SAP Business Technology Platform. Following those sessions, attendees enjoyed two hours of networking and golfing during our traditional SAPpy Hour. I myself had never golfed before, but Topgolf was selected as our meeting location in part because it’s beginner-friendly, making the meeting even more appealing to members and adding a fun new element to its educational benefits. I joined a lively group of members at one of the golfing bays; in between healthy rounds of competition, I listened as they debated which mini games they would participate in next.
Part of a Community
Speaking with Laura Lambeseder, Senior Manager of Business Applications at AdvanSix, I soon discovered that this event was Laura’s first Chapter meeting, though she’s local to New Jersey. Reflecting on her biggest takeaways from the meeting, she explained that she enjoyed learning about Messer Americas’ migration to SAP Integration Suite from Sneha Anil Nikam, Manager of SAP Development & Integration at Messer Americas, and Madhukar Eshwarachar, Associate Vice President of Applexus Technologies. As a more recent SAP user, Laura noted, this meeting served as a great, approachable introduction to SAP and made her feel part of a community.
However, the Chapter meeting was not Laura’s first ASUG event, as she attended the ASUG Best Practices: SAP for Chemicals conference in Texas this past June. Diane King, Business Development Account Executive at Copperleaf Technologies, attended this same conference. Speaking with Diane at the Chapter meeting, I learned that she was in town for the event and native to Houston, and that she had met Laura at the Chemicals conference. For both Laura and Diane, reconnecting at the Chapter event and seeing familiar faces from the ASUG ecosystem were among the day’s highlights.
Diane was in attendance with colleague Nicolas Cavallo, Account Executive at Copperleaf, who's local to the NYC Metropolitan area. In discussing his first ASUG Chapter Meeting, Nicolas spoke enthusiastically about how the meeting created a unique opportunity to meet a wide range of users from different industries. Typically, SAP-user events are more industry-specific, so Chapter meetings are unusually accessible for those seeking to expand their networks more broadly. Copperleaf, which provides enterprise decisions analytics software solutions for asset investment planning, saw its solution become an SAP Endorsed App earlier this year; Nicolas is also new to ASUG. The organization’s Chapter events, he explained, presented an easy way to “get off the ground” and engage in productive discussions with SAP users from his region.
Delivering on Our Mission
ASUG members tend to alternate between attending New York City and New Jersey Chapter events, and so combining the two into a joint event provided many of them with an opportunity to come together, expand their network, and effectively double their member benefit. Alongside my ASUG colleague Kaaron, I was delighted to provide them with this collaborative space on behalf of ASUG. It’s our perspective that these events are critical to the success of ASUG’s mission in helping our members get the most out of their investment in SAP technology.
It was an encouraging sight to see each golfing bay busy with representatives from different companies, sharing challenges and lessons learned with their fellow SAP customers. The ASUG Communities Team strives to continue to provide these fruitful social environments for our members; many of the networking connections we see our attendees make lead to invaluable professional opportunities, from members teaming up on projects to group brainstorm sessions yielding eureka moments. We look forward to continuing to build these networks to support our members in the months, and years, to come.
Krysta Schauer is Chapter Coordinator at ASUG. For more information about upcoming ASUG Chapter events, click here. For any questions, contact communities@asug.com.