The ASUG Carolinas Chapter kicked off its 2025 schedule with an important message: there can be “no transformation without innovation.”
Held March 28 in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the NC State Dorothy and Roy Park Alumni Center, this strongly attended meeting featured highly interactive presentations and conversations designed to help members of the ASUG community extract the most value from their SAP investments.
Faced with both improving operational excellence and accelerating time-to-value, CIOs must work to reconcile such conflicting directives to help shape their companies’ digital landscapes. In an opening discussion, the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)'s ability to let businesses continue to develop applications and processes while stabilizing their digital cores emerged as a potential solution to this problem.
Following that opening presentation by Sovanta, VerNeil Mesecher led a live Menti survey to learn more about the backgrounds and interests of Chapter members and shared the ASUG value proposition with the audience—many of whom were attending their first ASUG Carolinas Chapter meeting.
Amid multiple networking breaks, interactive breakout sessions, and dialogue around the importance of lifelong learning in the SAP ecosystem, attendees tackled important topics like capital expenditure (through IQX Business Solutions’ discussion of CapEx management within SAP), manufacturing strategy (in CNT Management Consulting’s session on building an SAP digital manufacturing roadmap), and custom code transformations (via smartShift’s presentation on code remediation options for those who’ve made the transition to SAP S/4HANA).
Education has always been a key focus of the Carolinas Chapter, and last year's meeting included panel discussions around building both technical and soft skills for a successful career. Bob Bucy, ASUG Carolinas Chapter Chair, and Kristen Scheffler, Vice President of Customer Engagement at SAP North America, continued this theme leading a discussion on "how to learn." This highly interactive session drove a great deal of discussion around the room and featured research-based tips contributed by Meagan (Luttenton) Knoll, Senior Affiliate Faculty at Grand Valley State University. For those who missed the meeting, an ASUG Power Peer Group will share this information again at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference.
Based on the results of the Menti survey, the day wrapped up with breakout groups that shared key insights and experiences around SAP S/4HANA, SAP BTP, AI, and RISE with SAP — part of our “Bring It!” approach that encourages members to gather around and get their specific questions answered.
All this, and attendees were treated to a surprise musical guest — as Bob Bucy, ASUG Carolinas Chapter Chair, took a seat at the piano and wrapped up lunch leading his fellow community members in a singalong of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” Play it again, Bob!
Sofia Gallo-Rolon, ASUG Chapter Coordinator, and Bob Bucy, Carolinas Chapter Chair, contributed to this recap.