At the June ASUG Chicago Chapter Meeting, ASUG members shared stories of their transformation successes and challenges, connecting with other SAP customers and hearing from partners and vendors throughout a full day of keynote presentations, breakout sessions, and networking opportunities.
Held at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois, the strongly attended June 15 event—overseen by ASUG Chapter Coordinator Kaaron Johnson—kicked off with a keynote discussion of Walgreens Boots Alliance’s journey toward a world-class scan-based trading solution, which earned the Business Innovator prize during the 2023 SAP Innovation Awards.
From there, following a networking break, ASUG members selected one of three tracks to attend across multiple sets of morning and afternoon sessions, gaining key business and strategy insights from SAP partner- or vendor-led presentations.
- Pyramid Analytics presented its Decision Intelligence Platform, an AI-driven platform that allows users to directly query data to SAP Business Warehouse (BW) and SAP BW/4HANA, and features deep functional integration with SAP BW, SAP BW4/HANA, and SAP HANA, from business hierarchies and business logic to currency calculations and model parameters.
- Worksoft discussed the modern challenges of S/4HANA migration, sharing customer stories, emphasizing the role of automation in both hybrid/brownfield or greenfield approaches, and noting that empowering people within the business can accelerate one’s understanding of processes.
- SNP Transformations detailed Kodak’s journey to SAP S/4HANA and the Cloud, a 12-month undertaking that involved cleaning and carving out data, moving to a modern architecture in Azure, and establishing a new digital core in SAP S/4HANA.
- BCC Distribution and Pregis discussed barcode automation for inventory control with SAP Inventory Management and Warehouse Management, focusing on SAP mobile scanning and pallet barcode label printing as applicable for SAP ECC 6.0, Suite on HANA, and S/4HANA environments.
- Vision33 discussed two-tier ERP strategy and special projects toolkits (for acquisitions, subsidiaries, divestitures, incubations, and autonomous divisions) for large enterprises, citing case studies with Under Armour and Swagelok.
- Anurag Barua, Digital Transformation Leader at SAP America, talked about expanding and accelerating adoption of SAP S/4HANA with Embedded Analytics.
- David Branley, Product Manager – Localization Cross Product Strategy with SAP Globalization Services, discussed the SAP Software Localization portfolio, identifying localization as a key strength of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
- VerNeil Mesecher Jr., Sr. Director – Customer Engagement Events Liaison, SAP North America, discussed the importance of supporting each customer’s choice on their innovation path and the “No Customer Left Behind” strategy to provide alternatives to SAP S/4HANA Cloud migration ahead of the 2027 deadline on mainstream maintenance on core applications of SAP Business Suite 7.
- Barua discussed SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, and its capabilities for accelerating customers’ business transformations.
- And Walgreens Boots Alliance detailed its SAP S/4HANA archiving strategy for reducing active data storage while ensuring proper processes for stable archiving and data retrieval.
Finally, attendees at the ASUG Chicago Chapter meeting heard from Chet Harter, SAP Signavio Center of Excellence, on the topic of building an intelligent enterprise with the business process management (BPM) tool, detailing the role that change management has to play in ensuring the success of organization-wide process improvement. After closing remarks and giveaways of select prizes, attendees congregated to close out the meeting with a networking-friendly “SAPpy Hour” afternoon social.
Anupam Jaiswal, Engineering & Product Development – Engineering at Ecoservity, attended the Chapter meeting in hopes of connecting with peers and hearing from speakers. “It was a refreshing conference for the ‘network effect’ visible in two different dimensions,” he said.
Following their keynote, Walgreens Boots Alliance team members “used the conference to network with other customers about their experiences, both good and bad, and also to share the problems they’ve solved and are looking to take to more business areas,” Jaiswal noted.
In addition, Jaiswal reacted positively to the event’s SAP presence. “SAP showed not only the capabilities of their products but also how network effects are tangible with them,” he said, citing the closing keynote on SAP Signavio and its focus on how Signavio uses other industry peers’ key performance indicators (KPIs) to compare with customers’ KPIs and project areas of improvement.