Welcome to the latest edition of Your SAP Investment Unleashed, a column from Kristen Scheffler, Vice President of Customer Evolution for North America, SAP. As part of SAP Customer Evolution, Kristen is focused on supporting, guiding, educating, listening to, and enabling customers to get the most out of their existing SAP investments.
With leaves falling, temperatures cooling, and the holidays ahead, what better way to kick off October—one of my favorite months of the year—than by gathering for ASUG Best Practices (Oct. 14–16; register here) in Houston, Texas?
Attending events like these is always a pleasure. Connecting with our SAP customers, discussing the most pressing opportunities in SAP technology, and hearing from experts on the latest innovations is a win-win-win. And bringing together leaders from core industries like oil, gas, energy, chemicals, mill products, mining, and industrial manufacturing to take on the toughest challenges facing their industries will make for a truly transformative meeting of the minds from North America’s SAP community.
This year, I’m fortunate to be hosting two sessions at ASUG Best Practices focused on what technology professionals from all industries need to know today: how to get the most value out of your existing SAP investments. Spoiler alert: everything that I will be talking about is already yours!
First up, in “One Skill, Two Skill, Upskill, New Skill” (Oct. 15; 11:25 a.m.), I’ll dive into two topics we hear about from customers across every industry: training and enablement. (And make more than a few Dr. Seuss references along the way.) As many of us experience in today’s rapidly evolving business environment, keeping up with the pace of change is a constant challenge. Training employees on the latest innovations and technologies can be a real hurdle to business transformation.
Between bringing new hires up to speed and supporting the career growth of current employees, all of us have to constantly review assets to ensure we have the right and relevant training materials and resources in hand and available. In addition, attracting and retaining talent involves providing them with clear career success maps that prioritize their continuous training and development.
Did you know that you already have access to a large library of SAP instructor-led, self-paced training courses? Did you know that this library is already included within your SAP Support investment? In this session, I’ll guide attendees to a plethora of valuable SAP training materials, courses, resources, and tools available to your team and show you how and where you can access these resources to help employees continuously evolve in their careers.
In our second session, we’ll move from Seuss to Shakespeare with the age-old question: “To SAP S/4HANA, Or Not to SAP S/4HANA?” In this session, we’ll reflect on the current challenges faced by SAP customers who’ve not yet made the jump to SAP S/4HANA and the enterprise-wide questions that have been raised as a result: When’s the right time to invest in digital transformation? What type of deployment should we choose? Do we need to take all of our existing data with us, or can we be more selective? What about our custom code? Will that work in SAP S/4HANA?
Within SAP S/4HANA, customers are faced with many choices and options to consider, but they don’t have to go through it alone. That’s where this session comes in. Let’s discuss your current ERP system setup, and what needs you have related to the current state of your company’s technology roadmap. Let’s help you take advantage of the tools and services that you already own, within your existing SAP investments, to guide you on the what, when, and how of migrating to SAP S/4HANA.
Finally, at ASUG Best Practices, ASUG is offering member-exclusive 1:1 appointments that will allow members to spend dedicated sessions with SAP experts to dive deep into their organizations’ most pressing and business-specific questions. I’ll be participating in this on behalf of the SAP Customer Evolution team, and if you’d like to meet to discuss how SAP can technically support your transition to the cloud, I’m here for you, to help ensure that you understand the tools, resources, and education included within your existing SAP investments to propel you forward in business transformation.
Are you looking forward to ASUG Best Practices as well? I hope to see you there.
Kristen Scheffler is Vice President of Customer Evolution for SAP North America.