The question of how to activate the true power of the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) will be top of mind for many of those in attendance at the upcoming ASUG Best Practices: SAP S/4HANA® and SAP BTP conference (March 7–9, 2023, in Glendale, AZ).
From customer-led sessions to hands-on demonstrations, the anticipated event will take a 360-degree view of the SAP ecosystem and address the most critical challenges organizations and their teams face, from configuring SAP BTP to achieve business goals to establishing successful SAP S/4HANA® Cloud business cases. Within these key topics of interest, the conference will also explore the dynamic nature of relationships between customers and SAP representatives, digging into relevant services that SAP offers clients to support their SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP efforts.
One such session, “Lessons Learned with Implementing and Procuring SAP BTP,” will focus on the challenges of moving to BTP, from what to select to how to overcome any hurdles encountered in the implementation, by examining the role that customer success partners play in helping customers overcome them.
Consultant and longtime ASUG customer member Tim Nguyen will lead the session alongside Terri Ransick, SAP BTP Customer Success Partner, US West & Regulated Industries, SAP. They will discuss their working relationship around Nguyen’s SAP implementation projects, in a transparent, no-stone-left-unturned conversation.
“In the Right Direction, In the Right Order, From the Start”
Consulting for a public utilities organization, Nguyen discovered the requirement for BTP while discussing the organization’s use case on SAP Intelligent Asset Management with SAP ActiveAttention, a premium support team dedicated to helping him understand the use case. “We didn’t choose BTP,” Nguyen recalled wryly. “BTP chose us.”
After connecting with architects, pre-sales, and other SAP representatives to realize the use case for BTP implementation, Nguyen’s client proceeded with software purchasing. He was assigned Ransick as his SAP BTP Customer Success Partner.
“SAP has post-sales resources that assist customers in being successful,” said Nguyen. “SAP understands the challenges and therefore is putting resources forward.” Together, the two refined the use case for Nguyen’s client and then worked together to execute it successfully.
“Part of my job is helping customers figure out how to adopt these solutions,” said Ransick. “Most customers don’t have that knowledge, but SAP has tons of knowledge. You just need to figure out where that knowledge is and what processes your customers need to go through. I put together [value maps] that point customers in the right direction, in the right order, from the start.”
Nguyen and Ransick will detail their working partnership while addressing what they’ve learned about the specifics of BTP, its integrations with SAP and non-SAP systems as a cloud-based platform, and the benefits they’ve seen from implementation.
“One benefit is that BTP was pre-built and already done,” said Nguyen. “The engine is handled and supported by SAP, and we can just consume it. It’s a very quick adoption curve, in theory. And being able to speed up the development cycle and also maintain the currency of the platform, because we don’t have to deal with upgrades and patches, is another benefit I see.”
Ransick added, “As a former basis administrator, I also think it's great that BTP lets you clear out your custom code and get everything out of the way, whenever your [SAP] S/4HANA system needs an update, a security patch, or anything that's going to come in automatically. You're not standing in the way with a whole bunch of customizations that are going to stop you and take months to go through. You have a lot less maintenance on your backend, whatever it is.”