Inside SAP Issue 21 2013

Issue 21 | Autumn 2013

www.insidesap.com.au

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

YOUR NEXT MOVE

Careers and Education

CERTIFICATION – IS IT WORTH IT? EDUCATING THE NEXT GENERATION OF SAP PROFESSIONALS

PP 255003/09024

2013 SAP SALARY SURVEY CASE STUDIES FIRE & RESCUE NSW; UGL UNIPART

PROFILE ALEXANDRA CARVALHO BLAZES THE TRAIL

TECHNOLOGY SUITE ON HANA LAUNCHES IN ANZ

Top tips for recruiting and retaining the right people in SAP Recruiting, then retaining the right people in SAP can be a daunting and challenging experience in a candidate-scarce, competitive SAP market.

SAP-run organisations all seek people who have the right SAP skills, fit within their culture and contribute to maximising the benefits of their SAP investment. If it wasn’t hard enough to find them, then the challenge is to keep them!

Finding, then keeping, the best SAP people, is possible. Read on for the top tips from the Director of Australia’s leading SAP Resource Provider.

3 Don’t hire at the last minute The future can’t be predicted, but planning your SAP resourcing for the next twelve months will prepare you for the challenges you see coming and those you don’t! Involve your SAP resource provider early – they have visibility of contractor end dates and those seeking opportunities in the permanent market with the skills you require. Prior planning is the key to securing the right SAP resource at the right time, so partner and be prepared.

Leanne O’Connor Director – Systems and People

1 Find an SAP specialist As an SAP specialist focuses exclusively on the SAP marketplace, they are best placed to find you the right people. Premium candidates engage an SAP resource provider who understands the SAP product suite, the SAP industry, their individual capabilities and how to match them with the right role. An SAP specialist has access to the right SAP people for your business.

Partner with your service providers, investing more time in fewer supplier relationships to get the best recruitment outcomes. Preferred supplier agreements (PSA) provide a platform for mutually beneficial relationships. The benefits are numerous including, costs savings, transparency, single point of contact, efficiencies and management reporting.

2 You can try yourself, but...

Only twenty percent of candidates are actively seeking opportunities, so this means that eighty percent will not see your vacancy!

The best SAP candidates are often working for someone else (including your competitors!) and may not be looking for a new role. With an extensive network of active and passive SAP candidates, an SAP specialist can source the best SAP people, not just those looking now. In addition, the time spent internally on recruitment tasks is considerable and often fruitless, distracting you from your core business.

An SAP resource provider will streamline the process, saving you frustration, time and money.

4 Clearly define your SAP requirements Having a comprehensive job specification (yes, even for contract roles!) demonstrates professionalism and will always attract greater interest and commitment from prospective candidates. Clearly articulate your company vision, current and future SAP landscape, salary and start date. Having a clear recruitment process and timeframe allows management of candidate expectations. When competing in the market for SAP resources, it’s crucial to give candidates a great impression of your organisation from the outset.

5 Move quickly when you need to To secure your desired candidate, be prepared to make decisions quickly. In a scarce market, SAP candidates have multiple opportunities.

You might be perfect for each other, but more often than not, timing is everything. By having formal approval to recruit before you commence the process and by tightly managing timeframes from shortlist to hire, will ensure the one you want doesn’t get away.

6 Build a diverse and challenging SAP landscape

Implementing the latest SAP tools and technologies will attract and retain great SAP people to your organisation. Not only would you keep pace with your competitors, meet the demands of your business and gain continuous improvement benefits, you will also keep your people challenged and retained. Do you have the capability to evaluate, champion and then invest in emerging technologies?

7 Look inside and out It’s great to look outside for SAP talent. You get to choose from a broad pool of SAP skills and experience, then select the best person to bring a fresh perspective, new skills and industry experience to the team.

As good, is to promote from within. This contributes to a great company culture, boosts morale and builds employee loyalty. Importantly, it gives the opportunity for employees to further their SAP career without leaving your organisation. Is there a SAP super user that could become your next SAP super star?

8 Consider the inexperienced With a shortage of SAP talent in the market, consider hiring IT graduates with the right motivations and attitude, and develop their SAP skills. Many universities now offer SAP studies as part of their curriculum and in conjunction with SAP, participate in the SAP University Alliances Program. This program develops highly qualified graduates who will contribute to the core SAP competencies of their future employers.

Recruit for attitude. Train for results.

9 Look abroad The challenge now and in the future for all SAP-run organisations is a skills shortage within Australia, particularly in emerging technologies.

The first SAP offshore installation was in 1972, the first in Australia was 1987, so the global market had a 15 year head start! There are highly skilled candidates in more mature markets, so be open to sponsoring them into permanent positions, and for contract positions, engage SAP resource providers holding a DIAC labour on-hire agreement.

For more information on recruiting and retaining the SAP talent you need – contact Leanne O’Connor on 1300 897 820 Systems and People Pty Ltd t 1300 897 820 f 1300 897 920 leanne.oconnor@systemsandpeople.com.au www.systemsandpeople.com.au

melbourne • sydney

recruitment

consulting

contractor management

melbourne • sydney

CONTENTS

11

13

15

24

28

38

4

Editor’s note

18

Certification: is it worth the trouble?

5

Quarterly news roundup

22

Searching in a bigger pond

8

News in focus: SAP lifts Standard Support fees

24

Skilling up the next generation of SAP superstars

27

Young ICT Explorers to expand in 2013

Interview 9 11

Anthony McMahon: HANA, mobility breaking new customer ground for SAP Sean O’Brien: Driving urban innovation

Profile 13

Alexandra Carvalho: Blazing the trail for female geeks

Special feature: Careers and education 15

2013 SAP Salary Survey: are you getting paid what you’re worth?

37

Is your business prepared for the Superannuation Guarantee changes? – Peter Stulcbauer

38

Taking analytics to the world

40

Will SAP ride the wave of enterprise mobility? – Donrich W. Jordaan

Case studies

Collaboration

28

Better systems, safer communities: Fire & Rescue NSW

43

Next generation networking – Lynton Howes

32

Riding the rails to success: UGL UniPart

45

On the Move

Technology

48

New books

34

Dawn of a new era: SAP Business Suite on HANA

50

Event calendar

36

51

Partner directory

Counting the cost of implementing SAP Business One – Dennis Marketos

www.insidesap.com.au 3

EDITOR

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Managing Editor/Publisher

From the Editor What are your career goals for 2013? Are you looking to start your career in SAP, take the next step into a more senior role, or skill up in a new solution area?

In previous years, our Autumn edition has focused on our annual Top 10 Most Influential People in SAP list, but this year, we decided to retire this feature in favour of a Careers and Education special, to help all our readers reach higher levels of career success. This feature includes the latest SAP salary data, sourced from a range of expert SAP recruiters, trends in SAP education and training, and a look at the real value of SAP certification in the Australian market.

A number of SAP executives have stopped off in Sydney recently, and we have taken the opportunity to fi nd out what’s happening on the regional and global stage. Sean O’Brien has given us an update on Urban Matters and public safety, Kurt Bilafer outlines progress on analytics across APJ, and Anthony McMahon tells how Australia is leading the way globally in both HANA and mobile deals.

Speaking of HANA, NSW Fire and Rescue has become the fi rst NSW Government agency to deploy the in-memory technology, and they shared the rationale behind this investment, as well as their roadmap for the future.

Also blazing a trail for others is Alexandra Carvalho – who last year became the fi rst female SAP Mentor appointed in the Asia-Pacific region. We profi le her in this edition, and fi nd out what it’s like being a ‘geek’ girl in SAP. From a technology perspective, 2013 has also brought the landmark release, SAP Business Suite on HANA, hailed as one of the most significant changes to the solution in many years.

We hope the edition provides you with plenty of inspiration on how you can make your mark on the SAP ecosystem in 2013.

Freya Purnell Managing Editor, Inside SAP P.s. Don’t forget, print subscriptions to Inside SAP are now free for Australian and New Zealand readers, so your colleagues cam sign up for their own copy of the magazine at www.insidesap.com.au/subscribe. Interested in ordering bulk copies to give to your staff, users or clients? Email us at editor@insidesap.com.au.

4 Inside SAP magazine

Freya Purnell t. (02) 9929 5465 m. 0412 602 579 freya@flapjack.com.au

Journalist/Editorial Assistant Eleanor Reader t. (02) 9929 5465 eleanor@flapjack.com.au

Creative Director Justin Knights t. (02) 9929 5465 m. 0425 292 075 justin@flapjack.com.au

Advertising Sales Laura Blackwell t. 02 8011 4822 m. 0412 685 864 laura@flapjack.com.au

Editorial Advisory Committee Stuart Dickinson (Oxygen Business Solutions), Paul Hawking (Victoria University), Calvin Kally (KALtech), Kevin Killey (IBM), Iain Macleod (CSC), Gough Venter (Stream), Mick Windsor (Windsor Business Solutions)

Contributors Dennis Marketos, Peter Stulcbauer, Donrich W. Jordaan, Lynton Howes

Published by FlapJack Media Pty Ltd Suite 7, Level 9, 122 Arthur St North Sydney NSW 2060 ABN: 93 142 878 135 © 2013 FlapJack Media Pty Ltd. Inside SAP is published four times a year by FlapJack Media Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publishers. FlapJack Media Pty Ltd makes no representation or warranties with respect to this magazine or its contents including, without limitation, material communicated by third parties.

FlapJack Media Pty Ltd does not warrant that the information available in this magazine is accurate, complete or current.

Opinions expressed are those of the respective authors and not necessarily of the publisher. Neither FlapJack Media Pty Ltd nor any persons involved in the preparation of this publication will be liable for any loss or damage as a result of use of or reliance upon advice, representation, statement, opinion or conclusion expressed in Inside SAP magazine.

NEWS ROUNDUP

Making news this quarter From SAP SAP has recorded double-digit growth for the twelfth consecutive quarter in the Asia-Pacific Japan region after announcing record fourth quarter and full year revenues in the region in 2012. Mobile revenues continue to dominate growth, while applications, analytics, HANA and database and technology businesses also grew.

Japan and China were the biggest contributors to the revenue growth, followed by India, with notable momentum in the SME space.

SAP has taken on ‘big data’ competition Oracle, IBM and Microsoft with the launch of Business Suite on HANA. The new solution brings together SAP’s popular integrated applications with the analytical platform to allow customers to process both transactional and analytical data in real-time. According to SAP, this development makes it the only vendor to offer business apps that analyse transactional data in real time on a single in-memory platform.

SAP Research has moved its operations previously located at the Future Logistics Living Lab in Sydney to Brisbane. According to an SAP ANZ spokesperson, the change “will enable SAP Research in Australia to improve its focus on key programs such as HANA Sensor and Sustainable Business Networks, maximise its business impact, increase the relevance of R&D activities for SAP, and engage in research commercialisation opportunities”.

Customers who design and build their own solutions are now able to utilise SAP MaxAttention as a support option. The expanded offering contains a wide range of services to minimise technical risks associated with the optimisation of complex software in the operational phase. “By offering the same premium level of support for standard and custom solutions delivered

by SAP, we cover our customers’ end-to-end business process,” said Uwe Hommel, executive vice president, SAP Active Global Support.

SAP has announced it will acquire inventory optimisation vendor SmartOps – enabling it to develop ‘real-time supply chain’ software solutions on the SAP HANA platform. “With the addition of SmartOps, SAP will be able to dramatically accelerate and improve the performance of real-time worldclass supply chain management solutions that give customers the decisive competitive edge to succeed and grow their business,” said Abdul Razack, senior vice president and head of customer engagement and strategic projects, SAP. As part of the acquisition, SmartOps employees will join SAP. The transaction was expected to close during the fi rst quarter of 2013.

SAP has pulled out of its SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Madrid in 2013, instead focusing its efforts on “dedicated customer-centric events” for customers and partners in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In a statement, SAP said it plans to expand existing SAP Forum events and schedule additional SAP Forums in key markets, with programs and content to be customised to the needs of local and regional customers and partners.

Sydney’s Equinix data centre has been chosen to host SAP’s fi rst multi-tenant cloud solutions for Australian customers. SuccessFactors began offering its SaaS solutions within the data centre on 18 October 2012 after the company re-examined its global data centre footprint. Vice president of SuccessFactors, Robert Yue, said customers can now enjoy the privacy and security of retaining their data on Australian shores.

More than 500 SuccessFactors partners will be transitioned into the SAP PartnerEdge program in 2013 after SAP announced the program is now supporting an expanded portfolio of SAP cloud solutions. PartnerEdge has been designed for partners that resell, build or provide implementation services for SAP solutions across the SAP portfolio. The move will also make partnering easier, with one contract enabling partners to sell all the cloud solutions available, rather than one contract per cloud solution.

www.insidesap.com.au 5

NEWS ROUNDUP

Everjoy Consulting has been approved under the NSW Government Contingent Workforce Scheme as of March 2013. The approval allows Everjoy to provide contingent resources to all departments of NSW Government, something they have only been able to offer private sector clients in the past. “We see this appointment as an opportunity to assist the NSW Government to achieve ROI through their SAP projects within a shorter period,” said Adrian Everett, managing director, Everjoy Consulting.

Project news Luxottica Retail Australia has become the fi rst SAP customer in APJ to go live with SAP Social Media Analytics by Netbase. The company signed up for a 24-month subscription in a bid to utilise the customer web insights and incorporate them in campaigns. Greg Harbor, regional vice president – cloud sales and GTM, SAP APJ said the solution provides Luxottica’s marketing team with accurate, real-time analytics that allow them to understand markets through the social web. “It processes billions of social media posts across millions of sites globally to extract structured insights that Luxottica Retail Australia can use to quickly discover market needs and trends,” he said.

State government-owned electricity provider, Hydro Tasmania, has chosen UXC Oxygen to implement and maintain a new SAP ERP platform. The new system will allow the utilities company to modernise its software infrastructure and remain competitive in the market. Hydro Tasmania settled on Oxygen for the project due to its expertise in the SAP space and experience in the SAP market. Oxygen predicts the project will exceed $25 million for the implementation and ongoing support.

Tender documents released in February 2013 reveal the Tasmanian Government may shift its whole-of-government HR and payroll system to the cloud. The current system has been in place for 17 years and uses a multi-tenanted consortium model that includes 10 payroll systems that calculate and pay nearly $1 billion each year for a total of 28,000 employees across 43 awards and agreements. The government has tendered for an independent consultant to assess the current system, conduct a feasibility study and createe a detailed roadmap of the HR/payroll infrastructure.

According to the tender, the feasibility study should include the “consideration of a move to a more contemporary environment (Software-as-a-Service or cloud environment) to deliver efficiencies”.

One of Australasia’s largest beverage manufacturers and distributors, Frucor, has implemented the SAP HANA platform to run its SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse application. The platform integrates structured and unstructured data from internal and external sources, performs server-intensive transformation in the main memory and can work on detailed data without aggregations. SAP partner, Realtech, worked with Frucor to implement the solution into the company’s cloud operating environment, making it one of the fi rst implementations of SAP HANA in New Zealand. The project went live in December, with a continuing roll out through January.

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6 Inside SAP magazine

Partner news SAP Gold Channel partner NTT DATA Business Solutions announced the acquisition of business analytics and SAP HANA consulting firm, Innogence, in December last year. Innogence has been integrated into NTT DATA’s Australian state-based delivery model under the newly formed Enterprise Information Division, to be headed by Phil Cameron, former CEO of Innogence. Now the largest SAP business analytics and SAP database and technology practice in the Asia-Pacific, the company is ready to take on tier one integrators.

SAP has partnered with Samsung in a bid to make mobile devices running the Android operating system more secure for enterprise use. The two companies will collaborate to produce SAP KNOX, an end-to-end secure solution that provides security hardening from hardware through to the application layer. The solution will build on the foundation of the SAFE Certification and provide users enhanced security at all levels of the Android platform.

IBM and SAP have partnered to launch a global service for cloud and ‘big data’ called IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+, which will allow enterprises to access, run and store all their SAP applications in the cloud from data centres across the globe. SCE+ is intended to go beyond public IaaS clouds by offering high service-level agreements, security and reliability along with elasticity and subscription-based pricing. The service enables enterprises’ access from the cloud to core applications such as ERP, CRM, analytics, social business and mobile computing and will support SAP applications include BusinessObjects and Business Suite software.

NTT DATA Corporation has cracked $1 billion in SAP software-related services globally at the completion of its fiscal third quarter.

The IT services provider attributes its ‘cohesive Global ONE strategy’ - that aligns capabilities and client services in support of SAP solutions – for the double-digit growth it has experienced in mature markets across North America, Europe and emerging Asian markets.

NEWS IN FOCUS STANDARD SUPPORT

SAP lifts Standard Support fees SAP’s decision to raise Standard Support fees has been met with some discontent among users, however the backlash has been much more muted than the backlash four years ago in response to the cost hike of SAP’s Enterprise Support service. Eleanor Reader reports.

SAP customers were informed on 6 February 2013 that Standard Support fees would increase from 18 per cent to 19 per cent on all new maintenance contracts signed after 15 July.

In 2008, SAP sparked controversy when it announced all customers would be transitioned to the SAP Enterprise Support service, which provides a premium level of services but carries a cost of 22 per cent.

User groups around the world rallied against the change, resulting in SAP making pricing concessions and restoring the Standard Support option in 2010.

In an interview with IDG News Service’s Chris Kanarakus, Andreas Oczko, a board member of German SAP user group DSAG, noted that SAP is handling the upcoming Standard Support price change better than past increases, given that it is providing customers with six months’ advance notice and won’t try to apply the additional costs to current contracts.

However, he did add that any increase in maintenance fees at all is “a pity”, and that SAP’s “customer base is growing and as far as I understand the way support works, when the number of customers grows, the cost of support does not go up”.

The pricing change does not apply to SAP’s Business One application or Enterprise Support.

SAP is encouraging customers to take advantage of the opportunity to purchase new licenses with SAP Standard Support ahead of this change at the existing rate.

“We want to inform our clients early to enable a better budget planning and adjustment for 2013,” SAP said in a statement.

The company signalled that a price increase would apply to Standard Support from the end of 2012, indicating in an official presentation back in March 2010 that the list price would only be locked in until this date.

This compares with Enterprise Support, which is locked in until the end of 2016.

Frank Scalvo, a blogger and independent analyst from consulting firm Strativa, has been vocal in his criticism of the change this time around, encouraging the SAP ecosystem to question the value gained from the increase.

“Normally the cost to support mature products decreases over time, as issues with the program code are resolved. Offshoring of application support and deflection of support activities to SAP’s user and partner network also have introduced support efficiencies. Shouldn’t SAP

8 Inside SAP magazine

be considering a reduction in maintenance fees rather than an increase?” Scalvo questioned in a blog post.

Referencing the public outcry in reaction to the increase in 2008, he said: “Now SAP appears to be trying to impose a smaller price increase, with no apparent improvement in service, in hopes customers will not notice.”

The lack of a solid explanation behind the timing of the increase appears to be one of the main sore spots for customers and industry commentators.

Doug Henschen, executive editor of InformationWeek, wrote in an article on 6 February: “SAP could have been more forthright in handling this one. First, it didn’t offer much of an explanation for the price increase in its initial announcement beyond the statement, ‘In order to ensure the same high level of quality support in the future’. That throw-away line just made subsequent statements about ‘expansion of value’ seem like trumped-up afterthoughts”.

Bridgette Chambers, Americas’ SAP User Group (ASUG) CEO, also commented on the change: “We took a position during the Enterprise Support rollout that we believe SAP customers need to have a choice with their support options, and they still do today. Regarding customer investment, ASUG does not support any cost increases for any of our members.”

Dennis Howlett of ZDNet has suggested that a need for revenue can’t be behind the increase.

“Right now, SAP maintenance and support revenue is around the $11 billion mark. If SAP is to be taken at its word, then the best case revenue impact adds something around $25-30 million to the top line, but likely much lower. In SAP terms, that’s petty cash,” Howlett said.

“My guess is that this move by SAP is designed to lock in ‘steady state’ customers to the current price as a long term revenue protection measure while it attempts to encourage customers to switch to the Business Suite run on HANA and so re-ignite the core apps sales engine.”

Financial services firm Morgan Stanley has agreed with this assessment, stating in a research note that the rise in Support Standard rates will only have a “a trivial impact” financially to SAP. “Rather, we believe the aim is to narrow the price gap between Standard and Enterprise Support for the install base so customers remain on Enterprise,” it stated.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

ANTHONY MCMAHON INTERVIEW

As SAP HANA and Syclo gain traction in the AsiaPacific Japan region, they are proving to be the catalyst for SAP to bring new customers into the fold. Freya Purnell and Eleanor Reader report.

Breaking new ground for SAP Since its launch in December 2010, SAP HANA has typically been adopted for one of three use cases – by SAP Business Warehouse customers, who are looking for a boost in performance, by customers implementing a HANA-specific application, such as Profitability Analysis (CO-PA) or Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC), or by customers seeking to use its real-time capabilities to do something completely new.

According to Anthony McMahon, senior vice president, database and technology, SAP APJ, those in the latter group – tempted by the transformational benefits of the platform – are typically not SAP customers, creating the opportunity for the company to broaden its footprint.

“It could be an Oracle or custom application, and they are either just frustrated with what they can’t do, or there is a market factor that is driving them to do something different,” McMahon says.

This trend is helped along by the fact that SAP has been committed to ensuring HANA is seen as a next generation application platform that is not just limited to SAP customers, but can support those running a diverse range of solutions.

“The risk then is that the technology will be constrained for what the potential is,” McMahon says. “The way that many customers today are going to market is changing because of social, the cloud, and mobility, and the way they run their business has changed. It’s not all going to happen in SAP and that’s what we want HANA to enable.”

Australia has proven to be a fruitful market for SAP HANA, with five of the top 10 largest deals in the region coming from our shores.

In another positive for the Australian market, SAP has also recognised that it needs new consumption models for HANA, so that the platform is accessible for a wider range of customers. Two business models already exist – a perpetual licence direct from SAP for large projects, or purchasing by the hour through Amazon Web Services.

SAP is now working with partners on a consumption model

that will be suitable for mid-market enterprises, who may previously have thought HANA was out of their reach.

“We are working through that model right now. I’m not saying it’s going to be cheap, but as long as it delivers the business value, then they will use it, and they shouldn’t have to feel like they have got to outlay millions of euros or Australian dollars to get that technology,” McMahon says.

Suite on HANA breathing new life into ERP The focus has now shifted, of course, to the launch of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. The first two rampup customers in APJ were India’s Avon Cycles and Bangkok Airways, with another 20 customers in the region also signing up for ramp-up. While the momentum is building, McMahon is not necessarily expecting a huge revenue spike from the release.

“It’s a major breakthrough, but the actual revenue we are going to generate from it is not going to be significant.

We are pricing it in the same way they might buy an Oracle transactional database, which is 15 per cent of the software maintenance value. But it’s going to change the way that they are using the ERP system today, and it’s going to also change the way that SAP is developing the future generation of ERP, knowing now that we can do the analytic piece and the transactional piece in real-time,” McMahon says.

Whether customers should consider Suite on HANA really depends on what is motivating the move.

“If you are a brand-new SAP customer, you might as well go straight to HANA. For an existing customer, it really is a conversation on what business process do you get an advantage from, or how are you going to change the way you operate, because the fact that it runs faster in real-time is only relevant if they are going to do something differently.”

The role of Sybase With so much focus on HANA, the Sybase portfolio has

www.insidesap.com.au 9

ANTHONY MCMAHON INTERVIEW

been somewhat overshadowed in the data platform space.

“What we have been doing both in our roadmap and development, and our discussion with customers is positioning what we call the real-time data platform, which is really a combination of all that great pedigree from the Sybase assets with HANA at the core,” McMahon says.

He says SAP has been working with customers to ensure they understand the respective benefits and applications of the standalone ASE and IQ products, but they have also brought the best parts of those solutions into HANA. The recent release of IQ 16 is the result of continued investment in the Sybase products, and McMahon says that without the push towards big data in HANA, the IQ development path may have been different to its current focus on building a near-line storage capability.

“It’s the core of the real-time platform, but it’s an acknowledgement that these assets have to operate and compete. It’s been a good story for existing Sybase customers, and I think it’s a good story for people migrating from competitive database products that have already bet on the application piece with us,” he says.

Mobile momentum Australia has not only been fertile ground for HANA, but following the Syclo acquisition a year ago, Australia has also

been the best performing country globally for SAP’s mobile business.

Eight of the top 10 mobile deals in Australia over the last year came from the Syclo portfolio, reflecting the strength of asset-intensive industries in Australia, such as utilities, transportation, and oil and gas. This is motivated by a desire for efficiencies, particularly in industries with capital expenditures, and also a continued drive for risk management around maintenance.

But the maturity of the Australian market, and a willingness to try new things, is also creating this momentum.

“Everyone is talking about what they are going to do with their customer’s customer, or to enable their partners or their employees to interact and interrogate the data and the systems they have,” McMahon says.

“Smartphone adoption is probably faster and more entrenched in the way people do business in markets like Korea, however Australia is really embracing the tablet side and using that to see how it can differentiate their business.

“When the NBN comes out as well, that is going to encourage new business models. There is a certain amount of competitiveness and expectation that comes out of the Korean market, which is premised on the fact that the fastest broadband and highest adoption.”

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

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SEAN O’BRIEN INTERVIEW

Driving urban innovation Sean O’Brien, SAP’s global lead for Urban Matters and public safety, visited Sydney recently. He told Eleanor Reader about the major challenges facing governments in the management of urban environments, and how SAP is providing the technology to help them innovate.

ISAP: Why did SAP launch the Urban Matters initiative?

Sean O’Brien: Before we launched Urban Matters, we looked at the challenges we saw when serving a lot of SAP cities in urban governments, which we have been doing since the 1990s.

We saw the market was changing; SAP was changing. Urban innovation is the key enabler to solve a lot of the issues around sustainability, security, safety and being green, so we launched SAP Urban Matters in May last year. It aims to do two things – improve the lives of people that live in urban environments and improve the economies that enable growth and communities to thrive in those urban environments.

ISAP: What are the major challenges governments are facing today?

SO: Cities are constantly competing globally for skills, resources, technology and investment. A major challenge we see cities face is how can they be the best city, or how they can address the fundamental issues to make cities holistically the most liveable, the best run or the most competitive. How to innovate is always a major challenge.

There are eight dimensions cities are benchmarked on, [including] economy, social and cultural capital, infrastructure, sustainability, resilience, global attractiveness, is it safe, green and clean, and welcoming. There’s not a simple solution; cities are very complex systems. What technology does is enable cities to look across all the things that they are doing and make sure that the people, the processes, the information, the strategy and execution, and the performance are all coordinated.

ISAP: How much commonality do you see in governments around the world, and what differences are there in the level of technological maturity?

SO: The level of maturity in terms of technology is very different, the level of understanding about the potential

technology is very different and the financial ability to execute around technology is very different. If you’re watching Europe and North America, austerity is stifling innovation. So you have this convergence of very unusual factors where you have got emerging countries and economies like China and India that have money, are growing very quickly and have an understanding of the power of technology – but their level of technology adoption has not been the same as Western Europe and North America. But on the same note, they don’t have the barriers that North America and Western Europe do around austerity and debt.

The great thing is we are no longer relying on Western Europe and North America to do all the technology innovation. Culturally, what we have found in the public sector with SAP is Australia is very much a pioneer and is much less risk-averse than other parts of the world.

Australia is a first-adopter kind of culture and often a risk-taker – not crazy risk, but we are seeing that ability to innovate. Now when I travel, I am actually using examples from Australia, from India, from China, from Latin America, from Africa, from the Middle East, because disruptive, gamechanging innovation comes from all parts of the world.

ISAP: What are the potential applications for HANA in the government sector?

SO: The potential is phenomenal. We see three trends in government – mobile first, then cloud and real-time. When we looked at HANA, the question was ‘where is it that we have the greatest need for real-time?’. What we found is it is in public safety and security agencies like the police, fire departments, medical services, border agencies and the intelligence community. In public safety and security, there is a convergence – the volume of data is creating huge challenges for people. The ability to analyse huge volumes of data is a key challenge and

www.insidesap.com.au 11

the ability to deploy that in a way that somebody who receives that information can make a decision quickly is a challenge. So this convergence of volume, velocity and access has created a huge demand for real-time in public security.

ISAP: Are governments wary about making significant new technology investments?

SO: We have seen a shift where governments used to do very big transformational projects. That’s still relevant, but more and more they are wanting to do smaller technology projects – quick time to buy, quick time to benefit, has an immediate impact, must be seen and visible outside, and there is a much stronger political connection to those projects. That’s the thing that’s very different. This is why mobile, real-time and cloud is relevant because these things can be delivered very quickly.

ISAP: In Australia, where do you see potential in terms of taking government and urban management to the next level?

SO: Cloud, mobile and real-time. I think mobile first is really a game changing technology for how government delivers, consumes and executes services. I have heard lots of stories about how mobile has been deployed in Australia and I think that’s going to continue. More and more cloud technology will be deployed in innovative ways.

This ability to have real-time analysis of information, predictive analysis and to deploy that in devices and to enable citizens to consume some of that information is very key and I think open government and open data is driving that really in a big way.

ISAP: How can we stimulate innovation in urban management, when it comes to technology investment?

SO: The role of the CIO has been changing or they are being introduced in many cities or urban governments as chief innovation officers. I think the key is technology is seen as an innovation driver in government. Is the right funding from federal and state government being put into innovation around technology, and are the people that are trying to solve the problems in government aware of the power of technology to solve those problems? Are technology companies and solution companies engaging at the right level with government and are they willing to co-innovate with government to bring in disruptive technology?

What doesn’t work is if you think to be a ‘smart’ city, you just choose one vendor, flick a switch and the next day you are smart – it doesn’t work that way. It’s a constant challenge and it requires many, many people in the ecosystem, many components, many parts of the community, many parts of the government to come together with technology companies to make small incremental innovations that can then have a disruptive impact.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

12 Inside SAP magazine

Are the people that are trying to solve the problems in government aware of the power of technology to solve those problems?

Sean O’Brien, global lead, Urban Matters and public safety, SAP

Case study: A vision of green Known as the Oxford of the East, the historical city of Pune in India has a rich legacy in education and is the country’s sixth largest and fastest-growing city. The Pune Municipal Corporation has been administering the city and serving citizens since 1950 and has taken the initiative of implementing e-Governance.

With the city facing problems such as air and water pollution, the first priority of the Pune Municipal Corporation is to keep the city clean and green, says Tejaunsh Nyati, CEO, Nyati Infosys.

With fast growing urbanisation and the development of manufacturing plants in many areas, many trees were cut and no record was kept. They decided that to rectify the problem they would need to plant more trees and ensure the trees already there were wellmaintained and not being damaged or cut down.

To be able to manage their green spaces correctly, they needed to count how many trees there were, so they decided to create a tree census and engaged SAP as the implementation partner on the project.

“They came to us and said we want to do a census of all the trees in the city and we want to take a picture of the tree, what type of tree it is, its condition, the geographic location and we want to have a real-time view so we could see all the trees,” says Sean O’Brien, global lead, Urban Matters and public safety, SAP. Because Pune’s gardeners and officials didn’t own laptops or desktops, smartphones and other mobile devices were deployed and a mobile solution was created to complete the tree census.

The Mobile Tree Census app was developed on the SAP Mobile platform, which captured the height, width, latitude and longitude of the trees along with logging their scientific names in real-time. All the data was then superimposed on Pune’s geographic information system map to get the exact detail of the city’s green cover.

According to O’Brien, the project was completed in four months and the solution has now been rolled out in other cities.

PROFILE

ALEXANDRA CARVALHO

Blazing the trail for female geeks BI Group managing partner Alexandra Carvalho broke new ground when she was appointed as the first female SAP Mentor in the APAC region. She spoke to Freya Purnell about her SAP journey and what she sees as the next big things in BI. Alexandra Carvalho might not look like the stereotypical geek – but she certainly has the credentials to earn the title. Having trained as an electrical engineer in computer science, she joined PwC’s graduate program, and received her entrée to the SAP world 15 years ago when she was sent to Philadelphia in the US to be trained in ABAP. “At that point, if you knew any little thing about SAP, you knew more than anyone else because it was something quite new,” Carvalho says.

After two years slaving over the day-to-day code work involved in doing ABAP only, she became disenchanted with not being able to see the bigger picture, and was inspired instead to move into business intelligence (BI).

“I couldn’t understand the context in terms of the value added, and I wanted to see more of the business and how I could actually deliver something where I could see the results,” she says.

Fortunately, an opportunity arose to complete BW training, and she was off. Her very first project was an SAP BW implementation for CRM for an electricity company.

It was the start of more than a decade in the BI space, holding various roles from developer to lead project manager, solution architect and data manager.

Carvalho’s experience stretches across BW, CRM and SRM particularly in the logistics, utilities and mining industries. Now managing partner of management consultancy BI Group, where she has worked since 2006, Carvalho has also been very active in the SAP community both in Australia and further afield through the SAP Community Network.

In 2012, she became the first female SAP Mentor from the Asia-Pacific region – an achievement she was “over the moon” about.

It was particularly pleasing for Carvalho given her commitment to helping other women find their feet in

the SAP community in Australia. She says women who are SAP consultants and have moved to Australia from overseas, perhaps with a partner, can find it difficult to land their first job, so she uses her own network to help them get established.

“It was important not only because I was an SAP Mentor, but because I could actually represent women in our region. They can see another woman who knows SAP, is a very technical person, knows the technology and they can actually relate to me. Because there is always this misconception that women are not technical,” she says.

Even with the skills and experience at their disposal, Carvalho believes women have to fight to move through the ranks of the SAP community, which is still very male-dominated.

“I’m very technical and got into the business side of things, but when people first look at you, they don’t expect a woman to be a geek, as we’re called. There is an expectation that a geek is a man, and I don’t tick those boxes,” she says.

“What I say to any woman I come cross is it is hard, but it’s not impossible. If you really want it and set your mind to it, you will get there, but you do need to have that extra level of training and determination.”

Disruptive innovation in BI In the business intelligence space, the most significant shift Carvalho has observed in recent years is the availability of tools such as HANA to tackle the challenges of big data, which has truly changed how data

www.insidesap.com.au 13

ALEXANDRA CARVALHO PROFILE

can be analysed – quickly, accurately and in new ways.

Having worked with a Melbourne-based electricity company on a big data project, she points to utilities as an industry which is being transformed by the ability to better analyse electricity consumption so they can negotiate better rates when buying from distributors.

“Having HANA and being able to analyse big data was a massive change, and they managed to save millions and millions of dollars in just knowing the right consumption and how much they needed to buy from their suppliers,” she says.

‘Pervasive BI’ is another major change, in terms of how end users actually access BI. “This is democratising business intelligence. The fact that we now have DIY tools like Visual Intelligence, where SAP is promoting heavily the capacity of users to interact and do their own reporting, means that they can see things they couldn’t see before, and become more effective at work. So it’s a combination of DIY analytics, mobility and big data in HANA, that if you put them together, it’s really powerful.”

When people first look at you, they don’t expect a woman to be a geek.

Alexandra Carvalho, managing director, BI Group

Still a bumpy road Despite these advances and the opportunities they present, Carvalho still sees customers struggling to embrace SAP BW. “Even though obviously CIOs really want to get their heads around what’s happening in the organisation, when they see the roadmap of the BI project in terms of cost and implementation, there is the fact that it is a heavily technical solution, and that’s the biggest drawback in terms of having more clients adopting business intelligence, especially BW,” she says.

The integration of BusinessObjects has provided more entry points for clients into BI, that don’t necessarily require the big-bang BW approach.

“You can actually use Data Services and integrate BOBJ for non-SAP clients like small to medium enterprises or other clients that are not interested in going down the track of a BW implementation,” Carvalho says.

And while the integration of SAP and BusinessObjects has improved with some fine-tuning of the relationship, having so many tools in the portfolio is still very confusing for clients.

“My take is that SAP will, in the near future, probably consolidate the tools based on their functionality, and improve the interface so it’s much better,” she says. “Knowing BW is a very small percentage of the analytics market, SAP is trying to actually bet on those [organisations] that are non-SAP, and they are not big enterprises. Now they are looking at bringing the ones that are not prepared to invest in large-scale SAP implementations but they can still invest in SAP BOBJ for reporting.”

14 Inside SAP magazine

Especially with the emergence of HANA, there is much talk about what the future is for SAP BW – but Carvalho believes there will a natural evolution of the product.

“BW is going to be the enterprise data warehouse where you bring all the data together from the various SAP systems as well as the non-SAP legacy systems, but we may have HANA as being the SAP BI system running in-memory. So I expect BW to be there in the future, and the technology underlying to change to be in-memory.”

Looking forward to continuing her role in the SAP community, now as an SAP Mentor, Carvalho’s advice to other women seeking to carve out a career in SAP is perhaps not surprising – to find a mentor.

“You are responsible for your own results. I attach myself to people I respect, and I am always getting their feedback and listening to them to fi nd ways of improving.

Find someone you trust and keep putting one step in front of the other – just move forward and don’t stop because someone’s telling you it’s not for you.”

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

CAREERS AND EDUCATION SALARY SURVEY

Are you getting paid what you’re worth?

Competition in the ANZ market for SAP professionals with the right skills for the right projects is still fierce. Inside SAP has gathered current salary data from leading SAP recruiters, and found out where they’re seeing strongest demand.

By Freya Purnell and Eleanor Reader.

SAP roles in the mining, utilities and banking and fi nance industries across Australia currently offer the highest salaries for SAP professionals.

Utilities (SAP IS-U), retail (SAP IS-Retail) and mining generally pay very well for specialist industry-specifi c SAP skillsets, says Peter Acheson, CEO of Peoplebank.

“ERP platforms are like the plumbing for a house. They have become core infrastructure for major corporations and once implemented drive efficiency, productivity and underpin all core business processes,” he says. “As a result, there continue to be a number of large-scale projects across all industries which are driving demand. Current examples are Australia Post and the utilities sector.”

But the mining sector continues to be the standout, offering the most generous salaries in the ecosystem, says Adrian Everett, managing director, Everjoy Consulting.

“Mining would be the clear leader, both on contract and permanent,” he says.

Systems and People director, Leanne O’Connor, agrees that the utilities and mining, oil and gas industries have the highest paying salaries, but also mentions consulting and professional services and FMCG as having strong salary offerings at the moment.

Skills in demand Recruiters are constantly searching for SAP professionals with high demand skillsets at the right price and the right time.

It will probably come as no surprise that new dimension technologies such as SAP HANA are high on recruiters’ ‘shopping list’ at the moment.

“The ability to understand and articulate the benefits of recent technology developments around HANA and mobility is a signifi cant advantage,” says Everett.

Acheson says the highest demand he is seeing is for ABAP developers, professionals with experience in logistics, materials management, Human Capital Management (HCM), e-recruitment, human resources, and SAP trainers.

“We also see high demand for architects and project managers, however the highest demand is for functional consultants with specialist module or industry experience, such as IS-Retail, IS-U, CRM, PS, FICO and FICA,” he says.

O’Connor is also seeing strong appetite for functional consultants, with CRM, SRM and APO proving the most desirable at present.

“Other roles that are high in demand are BW/ BO specialists, solution architects, PO (PI) developers and CRM developers across the FMCG, utilities, retail and SI consulting organisation sectors,” she says.

And while technical skills are highly regarded, Everett says his team is seeing requests for SAP professionals who have true business-facing skills, across all roles and sectors.

“We see the key driver for demand to be the ability to liaise with a business in relation to project needs, best practice and similar,” he says.

www.insidesap.com.au 15

CAREERS AND EDUCATION SALARY SURVEY

High value skills It is still a highly competitive marketplace, so for SAP professionals to differentiate themselves it is important to invest in skills that are deemed valuable by the ecosystem.

Everett names HANA and mobility skills as “extremely valuable” at present, “particularly when [candidates are] capable of translating the technologies into the business language and ultimately return on investment”.

Generally speaking, Acheson says individuals who have an “in-depth and core module background coupled with

industry-specifi c skills” are high in demand. Specifi c skill areas he names include ABAP developers, FICO and HCM functional specialists.

Valuable technical and business skills for O’Connor are BW/BO, PO (PI), CRM functional and technical, mobility solutions, functional confi guration in niche modules and business analysis.

On the other side of the coin, she deems soft skills such as communication, consulting and customer engagement as very valuable.

Table 1: Permanent salary data Role

Permanent (range, annual salary) National average

State by state

CIO/IT Director

$200,000 – $250,000

Typically a 10% premium for WA

SAP Project Manager

$140,000 – $170,000, can be as high as $200,000

Typically a 10% premium for WA

$90,000 – $130,000

NSW: $120,000 – $130,000 Qld: $100,000 – $125,000 VIC: $120,000 ACT: $130,000 – $150,000 Vic: $120,000 WA: $100,000

$100,000 – $120,000

NSW: $120,000 Qld: $100,000 – $115,000 ACT: $87,000 – $150,000 Vic: $120,00 – $130,000 WA: $110,00

SAP Functional Specialist

$110,000 – $150,000

NSW: $120,000 – $130,000 Qld: $100,000 – $135,000 ACT: $120,000 – $150,000 Vic: $120,000 – $130,000 WA: $140,000

SAP Technical Specialist

$120,000 – $160,000

Typically a 10% premium for WA

Database Administrator

$100,000 – $140,000

Typically a 10% premium for WA

$130,000 – $200,000

NSW: $150,000 VIC: $150,000 ACT: $174,000 Qld: $110,000

SAP Applications Manager

$150,000 – $180,000

NSW: $150,000 VIC: $150,000 ACT: $174,000 Qld: $110,000

SAP Trainer

$100,000 – $160,000

SAP ABAP

SAP Basis Administrator

Solution Architect

16 Inside SAP magazine

Emerging areas

says Acheson.

All three recruitment specialists name SAP HANA as an emerging technical platform where the demand for

Everett also names mobility as an area in the SAP ecosystem that will continue to see growth.

Along with HANA, O’Connor says emerging skills areas

expertise will only continue to rise.

“We expect to see this take off over the next 12 months and to grow to the same demand as something like SQL,”

to watch include BusinessObjects – including Data Services – GRC and IDM, PPM, BPC and SuccessFactors.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Inside SAP would like to thank Systems and People, Peoplebank, Greythorn and Everjoy Consulting for contributing salary data and market insights for this article.

Table 2: Contract salary data Role

Contract (range, per day) National average

CIO/IT Director

$1500+

SAP Project Manager

$850 – $1300, can be as high as $1500

State by state

$600 – $950

NSW: $650 – $800, Govt – $900 ACT: $1000 Vic: $650 – $850 Qld: $600

$600 – $950

NSW: $520 – $800 Qld: $640 ACT: $880 Vic: $520 – 850

SAP Functional Specialist

$800 – $1000

NSW: $880 – $1000 Qld: $840 ACT: $1040 Vic: $880 – $1000

SAP Technical Specialist

$700 – $1200

NSW: $900 – $1200 Vic: $900 Typically a 10% premium for WA

Database Administrator

$500 – $950

Typically a 10% premium for WA

$900 – $1300

NSW: $1100 – $1200 Vic: $1200 ACT: $1040 Qld: $960

SAP Applications Manager

$900 – $1400

NSW: $1000 – $1200 ACT: $1040 Vic: $1000 Qld: $960

SAP Trainer

$700 – $900; can be as high as $1200

Typically a 10% premium for WA

SAP ABAP

SAP Basis Administrator

Solution Architect

Careers and education

certification

solution area.

“It validates that they possess the skills needed to contribute value as part of a project team, and is heavily based on training, although some initial experience is needed to pass,” she says.

By contrast, Professional-level certification validates the skills of a team lead or project manager with at least four years of experience, with a much broader integration knowledge and experience required to pass exams.

Criticisms of certification

Is certification worth the trouble?

SAP certification has been promoted by the vendor worldwide as a means of validating consultants’ skills and experience. But some in the ecosystem have questioned whether it is really serving as a mark of quality, or if it is an expensive credential with little value to employers. Freya Purnell reports.

SAP introduced a multi-tiered certification process across a variety of solution and skill areas about five years ago.

SAP’s director of global certification, Susan Martin, says the usual motivation for SAP professionals to become certified is to formally validate their skills to potential employers or customers, but it also has value to the individual in building thier self-esteem and confidence in their ability.

“For SAP, we take our responsibility to our customers very seriously, and the aim of the certification is to validate that individuals in the ecosystem have the necessary skills to ensure business success for our customers,” she says.

Certification is currently available at the Associate and Professional level. Martin says the Associate certification is aimed at those in the first few years of experience in a particular

18 Inside SAP magazine

Over the years, a number of criticisms have been raised regarding SAP certification, particularly the Associate qualification, centred around what value it provides to consultants and to their prospective employers.

Back in 2010, a group dubbed the ‘Certification Five’ (including Dennis Howlett, Jon Reed, Leonardo de Araujo, Martin Gillet and Michael Koch) started discussions on the SAP Community Network and with SAP Education on what it perceived to be the shortcomings of the certification process.

This group identified some of the issues as certification bringing little value to the hiring process and lacking ‘trusted’ status; that multiple choice exams were the only assessment used; that it did not recognise the process-oriented approach of ERP; and that a proposed Masters-level certification, for those with more than seven years’ experience, was never officially introduced.

The Certification Five also made a series of recommendations to SAP Education on how it should overhaul the process, including that certification should be tied more closely to relevant field experience and problem-solving skills, especially at the Professional level; that a certification ‘influence council’ of customers, partners and community leaders should be established; that SAP should strengthen online exam preparation; and that they should help customers by educating them on how to evaluate and hire SAP professionals.

SAP has acted on some of these areas, but in recent years, other criticisms have arisen: that due to the theoretical nature of Associate-level certification, candidates can pass the exams without ever having worked on the SAP solution in question, and that some candidates have been able to share exam questions and so effectively gain certification by cheating.

Given the misgivings of the industry, is SAP certification therefore really worth the time and expense?

The answer, it would seem, depends on the market the consultant is working in, and why they are completing certification in the first place.

Value depends on the aim Tom Cenens, SAP technical expert at Infinite Solutions Belgium and SAP Mentor, is a member of SAP’s global Certification Engagement and Influence Council (CEIC), which brings together representatives from SAP, SAP user groups, universities, SAP Mentors and partners.

Cenens believes the most important value of certification is the journey to learn something new that students undertake when

they sign up for an SAP certification exam.

Paul Hawking, SAP academic program director, College of Business, Victoria University and SAP Mentor, agrees that the process of undertaking certification can be valuable for the knowledge gained along the way, but in terms of its impact on employment outcomes, the effect is limited.

“The content of the education is good, particularly if you are working in that area already, but the endpoint of certification I don’t think holds much value in Australia,” he says.

While practical experience still tends to be more highly valued than certification in mature markets, it can provide an extra ‘string to the bow’ for those trying to break into the ranks of SAP professionals.

Victoria University offers Associate-level certification through its uAcademy, but Hawking says he is very honest with his students, explaining that it will not guarantee them employment on completion but might add a slight advantage.

“You won’t go running through the door and get a job, but it will give you an advantage over other people who are at the same level as you when you’re seeking employment.”

John Moy, SAP developer and Mentor, agrees.

“If you are trying to break into the industry, I don’t believe certification is your path to riches,” he says. “Some level of experience is the first thing people look for, then certification helps to differentiate between people with equal experience.”

Indeed, certification does not seem to rank highly amongst the required attributes for SAP jobs in Australia. A random sampling of SAP roles listed on seek.com.au reveals that very few listed SAP certification as a prerequisite – of 100 jobs, only three required certification (for roles as an SAP MM Consultant, an SAP IS Retail Consultant, and a Consultant in SAP EAM/Plant Management), and one more stated that candidates with certification would be given priority.

While Moy says he does not often see developers who hold SAP certification, he does not take these qualifications at face value, but conducts his own basic testing with candidates he is considering for employment. Through this testing, he has observed a positive correlation between the skills certified consultants demonstrate and their area of certification.

“I have generally been happy with the people I have had that are certified, but I don’t actively seek it from candidates either,” he says. “Some of the best developers I know don’t have certification. They are independents who can rely on their reputation to land work. They know they don’t need to pay for certification because it adds no value to their job prospects.”

Having said this, Moy does believe that there is a real role for a method of assessing the capability and skills of individuals.

“In an ideal world, if certification was highly valued, accurate and accessible, people could truly be judged on where they were in terms of being up-to-date with the technology. That would really help, because at the moment, customers don’t really know if they are getting the best and most recent advice,” he says.

Different markets, different value Martin agrees that to a certain extent, SAP certification carries

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Careers and education

certification

more weight in some markets than others, but argues that this is associated with the maturity of those geographic regions and the sophistication of the SAP ecosystem there.

“Certification will always be only one in a set of criteria that a customer or employer will use to make a smart business decision. In some markets, it can be easier to get references, proof of project experience and so on than in others, so the weighting may differ,” Martin says.

But perhaps the strongest voicing of discontent on certification has come from those who have been disappointed when what they felt SAP certification promised – usually a fast-track to a job as an SAP consultant – has not been delivered. This typically arises in developing markets, where certification has been ‘sold’ as a differentiator in highly competitive skills marketplaces.

The partner view SAP Education publishes a list of SAP partners and the number and type of certifications their consultants hold, and from this, it is clear that some clearly see certification as an asset for their people, while for others it’s not a priority.

UXC Oxygen has a high number of certifications among its consultants, and Mark Finlayson, general manager – consulting, says having their people certified is an important part of the company’s go-to-market strategy.

“It certainly differentiates us in the market and we are very proud of how many of our consultants attain certification,”

Finlayson says. “It’s important for our team to feel that they are certified and are able to be referenced by SAP as a certified consultant. It certainly also helps for them to build some selfesteem and capability to deliver consulting services.”

Certification is one of several strategies that UXC Oxygen employs for staff development, and helps the company attract and retain the best consultants in the market. In addition, it provides a “comfort factor” for customers.

Finlayson also says obtaining certifications in emerging technology areas such as SAP HANA also provides a competitive advantage.

“We were early adopters in XI/PI as well, and we had half a dozen people certified about a year or eight months before it really took off. That does mean people saw us as market leaders at the time, because we had already invested in it. We have also been early adopters SAP HANA and Suite on HANA certification, because we see that as being the next big wave.”

Areas for improvement On the issue of exam security, Martin says all certification programs can be vulnerable to exposure, and SAP is no exception.

“If a certification is of value, there will unfortunately always be people who are willing to disclose test questions – some out of a misplaced feeling of obligation to peers and colleagues, and some out of criminal commercial interest. So we treat test

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security very seriously, and the Certification team is constantly monitoring the situation with a range of early warning systems.”

Cenens also reports that improving the integrity of the certification process has been a priority for SAP in recent years – by taking legal action against websites that try to sell certification questions, renewing questions on a regular basis and implementing stricter rules around how certification exams are conducted by centres.

In addition, he says new types of questions have been introduced to improve the value of certification and prevent candidates gaining an unfair advantage by sharing questions.

“Work-related items have been introduced and the latest professional certification on SAP HANA Implementation and Modelling holds a case study item which requires that the candidate has sufficient insight in order to work through a good number of questions. This means that without project experience, the candidate would fail to pass these questions,” Cenens says.

Another issue raised by members of the ecosystem is that it can be difficult to verify a consultant’s certification status. At the moment, consultancies and companies can contact their local SAP Education team to check the certification status of a potential employee or contractor, but according to Martin, the company plans to launch a credential management platform for the certified community in the next few months.

“This will have a ‘clearing house’ facility for credential verification, as well as the ability for individuals to publish their credentials to a prospective employer or customer, or to be included in a registry of certified individuals with a geographical and product-related search function,” she says.

There is also the question of quality – should the assessment processes be more rigorous to ensure that candidates who pass have to demonstrate higher skill levels? Cenens believes they should “In my opinion, certifications could benefit from having hands-on question items where the candidate actually has to perform one or more actions in a live SAP environment. New item types such as case studies and work-related items address the issue of ‘pure’ theoretical questions to some extent already so progress has been made, but I would still like to see more on this front,” he says.

Cenens also thinks further education of customers and partners is required, so they understand that not all certification is created equal. This may help to create more awareness of the Professional-level certification, which is held in higher regard.

One of the criticisms raised by members of the ecosystem is that Professional-level certification is not as readily available in Australia, so making this more accessible might also improve market take-up. Finalyson says he is forced to send his people overseas to complete Professional-level certification.

“It’s a costly exercise, so I definitely would support them bringing that to Australia. I would also like to see them doing some more hybrid class time/online-type certification in the higher levels of certification rather than full coursework, because those would help us spread our investments.”

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CAREERS AND EDUCATION

OFFSHORE RECRUITMENT

Searching in a bigger pond

Finding Australia too small a market for the skills you need? Eleanor Reader gets some tips from an expert recruiter on how to safely source SAP skills offshore.

Finding SAP resources with the necessary business and technical skills at the right rate and the right time has never been easy.

In Australia, the stakes are even higher due to the size of our SAP ecosystem and the level of market maturity compared to global counterparts in Europe and the US. Combine these factors with the economic and demographic conditions that shape our local market, and it is easy to see why sourcing skills offshore has become a regular and oftentimes necessary occurrence.

Leanne O’Connor, director of SAP recruitment provider Systems and People, says that despite the changing economic climate, it has always been a challenge to source skills in Australia.

“There is no question that the market has been more subdued in the last six months, and this has had a positive effect on the availability and supply of resources, however that also depends on the SAP skillsets that you are seeking,” she says.

Skillsets in the mature SAP technologies and the core modules of ECC are generally more plentiful in Australia,

22 Inside SAP magazine

and can therefore be sought out locally. Typically it’s the recent influx of niche solutions that are forcing companies to look further afield, as they struggle to fi nd people with the necessary skills at value for money and in the required timeframes.

“There is a higher demand for skills in SAP HANA, SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, and BusinessObjects because many customers are implementing these technologies, but there are fewer skills on the market due to the infancy of the implementation of these products in the domestic market,” she says.

While sourcing mature SAP skills offshore will generally guarantee you a cheaper price than you would pay in Australia, this isn’t always the case where these new technologies are concerned.

“If you seek new dimension SAP skills, don’t expect they are going to be cheaper offshore, due to the infancy of products, scarcity of resources and strong customer demand.

Often it is the level of choice, availability and skills required that motivate customers to source offshore, rather than price,” O’Connor says.

Skills that are readily available on the market, such as ABAP, Basis and ECC core modules are generally obtained at cheaper prices overseas, primarily due to the maturity of these skills, coupled with the candidate’s lack of local experience.

“Clients are always looking for price competitiveness and often it is cheaper to source skills offshore because candidates have a lack of local experience, and in many cases less experience overall, which compensates for lower rates,” she says.

To obtain niche skills such as those relating to industry solutions (IS), modules such as PPM and APO, and the strong demand areas including BusinessObjects, companies may well need to search offshore, but for some SAP areas, local expertise will be crucial for success.

“There are legal and regulatory differences between countries, and for some SAP skills, it does not make sense to seek them abroad. For example, Australian payroll experience will generally only be held by local candidates,” O’Connor says.

Other skillsets that organisations should avoid sourcing offshore include those that require heavy reliance on business analysis, customer engagement and stakeholder management – particularly if the candidate’s communication and soft skills are not as strong as a local candidate could provide.

“Given the advantages of hiring locally, you may choose not to source offshore skills that are readily available on the local market unless cost is a significant motivation,” O’Connor says.

Tips for sourcing skills offshore The smaller Australian SAP marketplace provides a key advantage when it comes to recruitment – there are usually only a few degrees of separation between members of the community, so it is easier to verify skill levels through professional connections. This luxury is often not available in the global market, so due diligence becomes even more important.

Check candidates are who they say they are Make sure the person you are interviewing is the person that will end up performing the role within the organisation. O’Connor recommends avoiding hiring people on the basis of a telephone interview only – use Skype for video interviews.

“There have been examples of where interviews are held with someone that is actually not the person that you think you are interviewing, as CVs can be copied and other candidates can ‘step in’ for telephone interviews,” she says.

Be thorough with interviews and references Apply a more stringent interviewing and reference checking process than you would for a local candidate – particularly when a candidate is not known to you or can’t be easily referenced through your local network.

Assess motivations A thorough assessment of candidate motivations is very important. Why do they want to work in Australia?

Have they visited the country before? Do they know the costs and what it is like to live and work here? Do family commitments need to be assessed?

“It can be quite a commitment on both sides to bring a candidate into Australia from offshore,” O’Connor says.

“The last thing you want is to execute a long lead time offshore hiring process and the candidate never arrives or they don’t fit the role or they need to return home for family reasons.”

Check eligibility to work Ensure candidates provide proof of eligibility to work in Australia. If they don’t have working rights, for a permanent role, the hiring organisation must be prepared to sponsor that person on a 457 working visa. For contract roles, only utilise providers who hold a labour on-hire agreement with the Department of Immigration. Thoroughly check a candidate’s right to work via VEVO (visa entitlement verification online) and know your sponsorship obligations under the 457 visa program.

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CAREERS AND EDUCATION

EDUCATION TRENDS

Skilling up the next generation of SAP superstars With SAP resources in the ANZ market under pressure, Eleanor Reader looks at how SAP education and training offerings are evolving to meet market needs.

Finding people with the right combination of communication skills, solution expertise and business process knowledge to be valuable contributors to SAP teams has been a battle for many years.

Education and training in SAP is delivered by a range of providers and through different modes – from undergraduate courses offered by universities, to short courses in specific solution areas delivered by SAP Education and private providers, either in classrooms or online.

Devendra Malladi, chief operating officer, education, SAP Asia-Pacific Japan (APJ), says across the region there continues to be a steady demand for basic ERP skills that are coupled with strong domain experience in sectors like government/public sector, mining and resources, banking and financial services, retail, and transportation and logistics.

“We are also seeing high demand in the new technologies like SAP HANA, mobile, cloud, analytics and in our extended ERP solutions like Collaborative Procurement, Supply Chain Management, and Customer Relationship Management. Strong customer adoption is driving demand for training from both existing and aspiring SAP consultants,” he says.

Dr Sue Foster, lecturer in the School of Information Management and Systems at Monash University, says as a starting point, students need to be able to understand the difference between IT and business.

“They need to understand business processes really well. Yes, we can teach them IT skills, but they need to understand what is going on in the business so that they can manage company processes and structures and talk efficiently and knowledgeably about those.”

Offering various learning resources The role of SAP Education includes maximising return on investment for SAP customers and partners by ensuring the quantity and quality of skilled resources for deployment of SAP software; and driving innovation by maximising user adoption and end user productivity through SAP education software and services.

Several initiatives are underway at SAP Education that can be

24 Inside SAP magazine

broadly categorised under SAP training, and education, software and services.

A trend towards non-traditional classroom training has swept across the APJ region, and SAP Education’s latest initiatives reflect this.

“This segment is growing faster than the traditional classroom training. We are also seeing an increased demand from universities and students seeking SAP skills to be part of their existing curriculums. In some countries the local governments are funding these capacity building initiatives along with the universities and colleges,” Malladi says.

“User adoption has also emerged as a top priority to drive employee productivity and reduce cost to competence for employees. Customers are setting up and enhancing their ‘Learning Centres of Excellence’ within their SAP competency centres with a view to drive this change.”

In the realm of SAP training, the company continues to invest heavily in flexible learning options for students in a broad range of formats, including:  Virtual live classes;  Self-paced e-learning and e-academies;  U-academies for universities – self-paced learning courses for university students;  Mobile apps for individual online training on various handheld devices, such as the SAP Learn Now offering introduced last year;  Offline learning – specific courses such as ASE Quickstart and others are now available on encrypted USB drives for offline learning; and  SAP Learning Hub – a learning portal for web access to all SAP Education online content. ANZ customers are among the early adopters for this learning avenue.

Under the category of education, software and services, SAP Education launched SAP Workforce Performance Builder software in 2012, which allows customers to drive end user productivity and reduce their cost to competence.

“Investments in learning platforms and in tools such as SAP Workforce Performance Builder to help build and manage customised training and deliver context-sensitive help to end users is also on the rise,” Malladi says.

In parallel, SAP has also launched quick starter packs for rapid implementation of SAP Education products.

“This helps reduce time and cost to implementation and allows customers to unlock business benefits sooner,” he added.

SAP Education in ANZ Malladi says sustained high growth of SAP license revenues in ANZ continues to drive demand for resources in the region.

“This is a challenging task given the rate of innovation and the myriad, dynamic nature of the skills that the market will need from time to time. We work closely with our ecosystem partners on bottom up workforce planning so that SAP Education resources and schedules are better aligned to the demand.”

There are currently several universities and TAFEs signed up to offer uAcademy courses in ANZ, and SAP Education is also committed to encouraging non-traditional training options.

More than 40 per cent of the classroom training courses in the US are now delivered as Virtual Live Classrooms (VLC), whereas in ANZ it is below 5 per cent.

“We continue to encourage our customers and partners to explore non-traditional classroom training options such as VLC, e-learning, and SAP Learning Hub, as these options significantly reduce the cost of classroom infrastructure and travel, and allow more people to get trained with limited budgets and resources,” says Malladi.

The push toward non-traditional classroom options has been seen recently in Australia, with SAP establishing partnerships with Brisbane North Institute TAFE (BNIT) and University of Queensland to curb the IT skills shortage in Queensland.

BNIT is the first TAFE in Australia to offer the online, selfpaced SAP courses as a part of SAP’s uAcademy, a skills-based learning program targeted at business and IT students.

The partnership was forged in November 2012, with the catalyst being a government agency – and mutual client of both companies – who wanted more flexible access to training programs through SAP. Wayne Bell, manager corporate sales, BNIT, says after a soft launch in December last year, they started to promote the course in January 2013 and have seen a lot of interest.

“They’re very interested in the fact they’ve now got another option for SAP, it’s more flexible, they can do it fully online without having any face-to-face contact and without bringing in any consultants or trainers directly from SAP,” he says.

“We expect now that it will start to ramp up as people start to develop their training plans for the year.”

Training the trainers In a rapidly transforming area such as SAP, keeping ahead of changes when educating students is not easy, and often requires university professionals to immerse themselves in the ecosystem to ensure they are giving students the most up-to-date information.

Paul Hawking, SAP Mentor and senior lecturer in information technology at Victoria University, says being a Mentor works to his advantage when it comes to managing the rate of change in terms of solutions and software.

“That gives me access to a huge number of resources, and as an educator over the years, one of my strengths is knowing where all the SAP resources are. Really, my job is not just for universities, but to help the User Group and the general SAP community try and understand a lot of these things and communicate into the different parts of the ecosystem,” he says.

Keeping up with what is happening with technology, the industry and SAP is a huge part of the job, says Foster.

“I am an SAP User Group member, I roll with business analysts and look after organisational change in training. Also, when I can I attend SAP summits, conferences and plenaries,” she says.

Continuous upgrading of skills is also important for SAP Education trainers, who receive ongoing training in the latest releases, many of whom also participate in early enablement ‘boot camps’ and are required to get certified in all new technologies before they can teach a class.

SAP Education also uses product development teams and consulting experts as trainer multipliers, as they have deeper knowledge of the products initially, according to Malladi.

Providing skills in new product areas Ramp-Up Knowledge Transfers (RKTs) are used to deliver early product and task-related knowledge to experienced SAP and partner consultants involved in ramp-up projects.

In addition, SAP Online Knowledge Products (OKPs) provide role-specific learning maps that give trainers and consultants

www.insidesap.com.au 25

CAREERS AND EDUCATION

EDUCATION TRENDS

firsthand information on architecture, scenarios, processes, and functionality. This is supplemented by implementation and operation guides of the newest SAP solutions.

Malladi admits that the launch of several new solutions in SAP HANA, mobile and cloud does make enablement a challenging task.

“We work closely with the development teams in SAP Labs to quickly bring both early enablement and follow-up courses to the market. We also design courses to be available through all modes of training: classroom-based, virtual delivery, and e-learning/online options, which allow learners to get the knowledge they require in the best possible format that suits their particular needs,” he says.

SAP HANA has been the fastest growing product in SAP’s history and also the fastest selling training of all time. Currently, thousands of people have been trained in SAP HANA globally, with more than 30 per cent of that number in APJ. Informal education can also be useful when it comes to these new solution areas. Hawking says the ecosystem has filled the

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gap where SAP Education has struggled; because skill shortages are a greater risk to SAP than the revenue stream they gain to lose through SAP Education, a lot of these new resources and tutorials are free.

“Even though SAP Education is trying to provide more flexible learning environments, they are finding it a challenge to keep up with the rate of change,” he says. “As a result, the SAP Community Network (SCN) is providing a whole lot of educational materials and the HANA Academy has been set up as an alternative to SAP Education for HANA education.”

Looking to the future of SAP education in Australia, Hawking says the speed of change in the SAP world will force companies to contemplate how they develop their internal knowledge communities.

“The risk of having that sort of knowledge with one person is very significant if that person leaves the company, so companies will have to start looking at how they are going to do knowledge transfers inside their organisation and start knowledge communities. Hopefully the SCN will be a major component of that for companies,” he says.

“I think the future of SAP education in Australia will rely on a whole lot of different ways for people to gather their knowledge, including some core knowledge from SAP Education and other knowledge coming from the SCN, the User Group events and the SAP forums.”

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CAREERS AND EDUCATION YOUNG ICT EXPLORERS

Young ICT Explorers to expand in 2013 Since its launch in 2010, Young ICT Explorers has succeeded in its goal of encouraging and inspiring Australian school children to get more involved and be creative with Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Now in 2013, the competition created by SAP has announced it will be expanding the event to three states. Eleanor Reader reports.

This year’s Young ICT Explorers competition will now include Victoria as well as New South Wales and Queensland.

Travis Joy, event coordinator at SAP, says the expansion is a result of the success of last year’s event.

“SAP came on board this year and wanted to expand it purely because of how fantastic it was. It just shows the commitment from SAP to the program and to corporate social responsibility,” he said.

Young ICT Explorers aligns itself with the school curriculum to enable students to apply what they learn in their classroom and develop it into a technology-related project.

Schools across the three states can register candidates, and then the pupils get to work creating projects such as iPhone/ mobile phone applications, computer games, websites, digital media, short films and animations and robots.

After projects are submitted, finalists are chosen to attend a judging event hosted at the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland or Victoria University, where they have the opportunity to present their project to a judging panel of academia, industry partners and ICT professionals.

Each project is assessed on the criteria of creativity, uniqueness, quality, level of difficulty and project documentation.

Joy recalls an impressive project in 2012 from Newington College in NSW which saw students build an app which linked up to a live feed at the school, effectively keeping them on top of timetabling, school commitments and extracurricular activities.

“That was quite impressive of them to try something like that,” Joy says.

This year’s expansion doesn’t look like it will be the last for the competition, with Joy saying he hopes the event will become Australia-wide in the next few years before perhaps extending to New Zealand.

“The highlight of running these IT events is to get more young people involved in IT and to make a real difference. It’s something that the government’s trying to address, but they’re not really being as proactive as SAP,” he said.

Greg Miller, chief operating officer, SAP Australia and New Zealand agrees that now is the time to tackle the ICT skills shortage.

“At a time when the Australian landscape is not seen as an innovation leader and is witnessing a decline in applications for IT degrees, it becomes ever more critical that we take action to address this at the grassroots level to drive a turnaround for the future of our industry, our country and our company,” he says.

Members of the Australian SAP ecosystem are invited to get involved either by volunteering to judge, helping to staff the judging event or inviting their children’s schools to get involved.

“We’re quite willing to bring on board anybody that wants to help with Young ICT Explorers,” Joy said.

“We had the SAP Research department help us out last year with both events, and this year we’re looking to become a bit broader and include more people in the SAP family.”

The deadline for registration of candidates by schools is 31 May 2013. Project submissions close 5 July in Queensland and 12 July in NSW and Victoria.

The invitation-only Judging Event will be hosted on 10 August in Queensland, 17 August in NSW and 24 August in Victoria, with the lucky winners taking home fantastic prizes.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Further details are online at www.youngictexplorers.net.au. To get involved in Young ICT Explorers 2013, contact Travis Joy at travis.joy@sap.com.

www.insidesap.com.au 27

case study

Fire & Rescue NSW

Better systems, safer communities Fire & Rescue NSW has become the first NSW Government agency to implement SAP HANA, as part of a broader vision to gain greater insight into the operations of the emergency services sector through the more effective use of SAP. Freya Purnell reports.

Fire & Rescue NSW is one of the world’s largest urban fire and rescue services, managing fire emergencies in major cities and towns across the state, and maintaining strategic alliances with other emergency services, including the NSW Rural Fire Service, Ambulance Service of NSW, NSW Police Force, and the NSW State Emergency Service.

Boosting business intelligence Over the last year, Fire & Rescue NSW has been implementing a strategy whereby each month a legacy system has been retired, with the functionality and business processes moved into SAP. Within two years, the organisation expects to hold almost all its information – regarding people, assets, fleet, equipment and inventory – within a single instance of SAP, according to Fire & Rescue NSW chief information officer, Richard Host.

“When you have this unified source of truth about your entire organisation, you need to have an extremely capable and fast reporting layer over the top of all that,” Host says.

28 Inside SAP magazine

However, the current BW environment was struggling to deliver the required performance, and so this was one of the original drivers for considering SAP HANA. Even having upgraded to the latest version of BW, data loads were still taking 14 hours overnight, and as this represented only a subset of the data to be processed, the organisation would soon hit “the 24-hour wall”.

These load times were also creating issues with completing financial end of month on a timely basis.

Gavin Brown, assistant director, SAP services, Fire & Rescue NSW, says, “We can’t be in a situation where it takes a day to get a load of data across for changes to the General Ledger (GL) – we want to do real-time loads effectively out of the GL. Our monthly close is exceptionally good, being completed by the end of day three, but reporting takes significantly longer, so we want to bring that back to a much earlier point in time.”

In addition, Fire & Rescue NSW was attracted to HANA by the ability to streamline the resources required to build and run reports.

“We are one of the few governments I believe where we have all the emergency services on a single instance of SAP, and that offers us the opportunity to have what may end up being one of the most powerful systems of its kind in the world.”

Richard Host, chief information officer, Fire & Rescue NSW

“Traditional data warehouses require a lot of people resource to build the structures and summary information to run reports in a reasonable length of time. In HANA, there isn’t a need to do that to anything like the same extent,” Host says. “That saves on labour, and as we expand, those roles won’t exist, so we wanted to reinvigorate our reporting from the beginning with a new way of doing things.”

HANA will enable Fire & Rescue NSW to access unified real-time reporting, and enable the organisation to push data analysis and reporting tools out to end users, again streamlining the resources required and delivering new capabilities in what-if analysis.

“In the past, it has taken days and weeks to produce reports, and the business then has to digest and understand them. They can’t do what-if analysis around understanding what impacts what,” Brown says. “This tool will actually allow our business to do that, and we will also be looking closely at implementing SAP Business Planning and Consolidation.”

The bigger picture While the adoption of HANA makes sense for Fire & Rescue NSW purely from the business intelligence and reporting perspective, it is also part of a much larger vision for the organisation’s technology roadmap. Host says they will be looking closely at how SAP can run entirely in HANA down the track. Getting a feel for the technology to understand its potential capabilities is essential to see where it could take the organisation in the future, particularly when the migration of all legacy systems to SAP is complete.

“This is a pathway into HANA through a fairly wellunderstood business intelligence route, but the plan is to actually grow it from there,” Host says.

Fire & Rescue NSW hopes to also use SAP in emergency management, where the ability to perform analytics and heuristics across vast amounts of real-time information becomes crucial.

“Real-time reporting will actually give us guidance as to how to manage emergencies, where our resources are, and what decisions we need to make in real time, so that’s the ultimate goal and destination for this,” Host says.

“We are one of the few governments I believe where we have all the emergency services on a single instance of SAP, and that offers us the opportunity to have what may end up being

one of the most powerful systems of its kind in the world.”

Another important aspect for the organisation is the native integration of Esri geospatial capabilities into HANA, as spatial information is critical for emergency services organisations.

“It can take up to four hours to do some of our spatial queries, as we model scenarios. We are expecting that HANA could bring that down a thousand times,” Host says.

Over time, data will also be imported from other operational systems, not just SAP, to enable Fire & Rescue to perform modelling on five years’ worth of operational information, to drive further insights into the organisation.

Implementation The implementation of HANA is already well underway at Fire & Rescue NSW, with the executive sponsorship of the Deputy Chief Executive.

With the Dell hardware for the system already in place, Fire & Rescue NSW expected to have its environment up and running, and the BW environment migrated to HANA using a rapid deployment solution from SAP, by April – effectively making the solution live in less than 90 days.

The next phase of the project, which will run until June, will be working through the business intelligence needs of the organisation. Brown says that this actually represents the most challenging part of the HANA implementation process, rather than the technology itself. For Fire & Rescue NSW, BI can vary from the typical financial and HR through to incidents and community safety activities, and being able to analyse the data in these areas could potentially change the way the organisation operates.

“That’s the real work effort at the moment – understanding what are the key drivers of the business, and then what the BI needs are around the outside of that.

We’ve already got standard KPIs, but what we want to do is work out what happens if we push this lever over here, and you can only do that with real-time analytics technology like HANA,” Brown says.

“We want answers to the questions we haven’t asked yet,” Host adds.

Managing change Organisational change is an important component of all SAP projects, and Fire & Rescue NSW uses industry partners to help guide the change process.

www.insidesap.com.au 29

case study

Fire & Rescue NSW

With the implementation of HANA, channelling the enthusiasm of users for the new systems is expected to be more of an issue than encouraging adoption.

“We expect to be dealing with the flood of requests for real-time analysis that will inevitably come when they see it,” Host says.

Brown agrees.

“We have held off on delivering some technologies because we know exactly that is going to happen, and they will start asking for more data that we physically can’t get in to our current BW environment in a timely manner,” he says. “We need the HANA technology there to actually get the data in, so then we can get it out again. The change management will be slowing people down, because our client agencies are super keen to get more information.”

Next steps The next phase of the project could involve using the HANA environment for reporting on qualifications and learning data. The Emergency Services SAP environment currently captures this data for 95,000 people, including volunteers and permanent and retained firefighters, which details their level of capability and skills to operate various assets and equipment.

“The Emergency Services SAP System has that

information for the three emergency services agencies – the Rural Fire Service, State Emergency Service and Fire & Rescue. We know who is qualified in certain positions and what skills enhancements they have done as well, so that’s very important,” Brown says.

The Emergency Services agencies have also kicked off an enterprise asset management project across all three agencies, which together have around 8000 vehicles and 400,000 pieces of equipment that must be managed.

“That will tell us when we should replace assets, and how they should be managed and maintained in the most cost-effective manner. So from a safety and financial point of view, you need reporting across a very large number of things,” says Host.

It is this focus on safety that truly drives the technology priorities for Fire & Rescue NSW. “We believe that having better systems will lead to a safer community, and so we strive all the time to improve our systems. It’s not about being first, it’s about getting the capability as fast as we can,” Host says.

“It’s rare that an entire emergency services sector can have all that information at their disposal, and now we need HANA to use it for more than transactional reasons, to actually get insights and make decisions about things that we may not even realise we should be making decisions about.”

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CASE STUDY

UGL LIMITED

Riding the rails to success Project Rail Map Industry: Client: Project leads: Version: SAP solutions: Integrators:

Railway transportation UGL Limited CEO, SAP IT Team SAP ECC 6.0 Solution Manager, PLM, CS, WM, MM, FICO, COPA BPSE Consulting, BluLeader

Australia’s rail services are a hotbed of expansion, with a 2012 freight industry valuation of nearly $8.9 billion and passenger revenue close to $7.5 billion. While the fundamentals of railway design have, for the most part, remained the same, the technology driving this evolving transportation industry has become its own intricate system of tracks and switches. Just as steel is the backbone of railway equipment, SAP is the foundation on which much of the industry’s data centre is built.

UGL Limited, a global leader in outsourced engineering and construction, property services and asset management and maintenance, is a major player in Australia’s railway equipment manufacturing industry. Its 2012 revenue was nearly $4.8 billion. UGL’s Rail division, which includes a 20 per cent stake in Metro Trains Melbourne, offers rail customers an integrated solution for design, engineering, manufacturing, maintenance, refurbishment and asset management of locomotives, passenger cars, trams and freight wagons.

In December 2011, UGL renewed its Main Train maintenance and logistics contract with RailCorp, an Australian government agency that delivers public transportation services in New South Wales as well as interstate passenger rail services. Under the new seven-

32 Inside SAP magazine

year, $1.4 billion contract, UGL would continue to provide heavy maintenance and logistics management services on 1 050 passenger cars.

To service the contract, UGL joined forces with Unipart Rail, an engineering and logistics consultancy, to create the joint venture UGL Unipart. UGL had an SAP ERP system in place that covered fi nancials, asset management and project management, but realised a new system would need to be established to support the new RailCorp contract.

BPSE Consulting climbs aboard to lead SAP management UGL Unipart’s SAP system had to be “full steam ahead” in less than four months. Having been an existing customer for more than six years, UGL looked again to BPSE Consulting to conduct the transition to the new contract in SAP ECC 6.0. BPSE Consulting collaborated with SAP solutions integration partner and customer service and asset management expert, BluLeader, to further extend its delivery of services.

BPSE Consulting and BluLeader provided UGL Unipart with unmatched enterprise asset management and rail logistics expertise. Together, they would deliver an SAP Plant Maintenance and Repair and Customer Service solution that enabled UGL Unipart to commence operations on day one, with improved cost capture capabilities.

“It was important that UGL Unipart have an accurate picture of expenses at a much higher level of detail than in the past,” explained Marco Formaggio, managing director for BluLeader. “Not only was it a technical SAP challenge, but there was also a business impact that changed the way UGL Unipart functioned and captured data.”

“Together we found the most appropriate way of executing within a tight timeline and documenting the process and approvals to satisfy corporate governance.”

Kevin McCarthy, general manager, passenger projects and tenders, UGL Limited

UGL Unipart’s SAP transition As BPSE Consulting and BluLeader began to peel back the paint, they found that the transition was highly involved.

In addition to utilising SAP Solution Manager to capture all requirements, design, confi guration and testing, the most pressing priorities included:  Moving existing functionality into the new compan;  Implementing new billing processes and the rules that applied to the new rail fl eet maintenance contract;  Establishing inventory management at the RailCorp depots; and  Integrating SAP into a third party advanced planning system.

The new environment would incorporate the following ECC 6.0 modules:  Plant Maintenance and Repair (EAM);  Customer Service (CS) with contract billing, fi xed price billing and enhanced resource-related billing;  Warehouse Management (ERP/WM);  Purchasing (Procurement);  Logistics (ERP) with complex stock planning and materials requirements planning; and  Finance and Controlling (Financials).

In addition, a number of new contract requirements were required to be met, including shifting fi xed prices, implementing fl eet confi guration management and interfacing with RailCorp’s legacy system. As a joint venture, UGL Unipart was also responsible for managing the supply chain. Accurate and expedient stock management had become a core focus area. These and many other technical and business requirements had to be supported by the new SAP system.

“BPSE Consulting had to consider integrating the RailCorp depots into the solution without introducing overhead,” explained Alandre van Vuuren, managing director for BPSE Consulting. “To ensure that requirements were met, the consulting teams worked very closely with key business stakeholders.”

With an SAP project of this magnitude, an extremely tight budget and timeline posed great challenges. UGL Unipart’s new SAP environment had to be fully functional by 1 July 2012, leaving BPSE Consulting and BluLeader

with less than four months to assess, integrate, develop, test, migrate and go live.

BPSE Consulting’s rail industry expertise, and proven track record of outstanding service and familiarity with UGL’s systems, strengthened the collaborative effort with BluLeader. Together, the teams quickly mobilised to help UGL defi ne business requirements and get things rolling.

Both veteran, technologically savvy consultancies, BPSE Consulting and BluLeader quickly integrated business knowledge and processes. Utilising highly skilled staff allowed for a smaller implementation team that reduced resource costs. A unique, agile approach reduced timelines and enabled a six-month project to be effi ciently and effectively compressed into four months.

UGL Unipart leaves the station for go live BPSE Consulting and BluLeader collaborated to deliver UGL Unipart’s SAP ECC 6.0 system on time and with minimal disruption. This enabled UGL Unipart to commence operations for RailCorp without service interruption, a successful milestone that trickled throughout NSW’s passenger railways.

Kevin McCarthy, general manager, passenger projects and tenders, UGL Limited, says, “Given the extremely tight time frames required by our RailCorp customer in the management of a transition, project success was always going to be dictated by the skills of the individual members of the team that were engaged to lead and assist this project, and the ability of the individuals to work as one integrated team. BluLeader and BPSE Consulting brought the perfect mix of these capabilities into the joint venture transition.

“Together we found the most appropriate way of executing within a tight timeline and documenting the process and approvals to satisfy corporate governance.

This challenged the organisations to respond to the call for action.

“As business operations leader for maintenance solutions in earlier implementations of SAP within UGL and as project leader in this joint venture transition, I truly understand the benefits that both BluLeader and BPSE Consulting have brought to the implementations and adaptions of SAP into our asset management solutions.”

www.insidesap.com.au 33

BUSINESS SUITE ON HANA TECHNOLOGY

Dawn of a new era It’s the launch many customers have been waiting for – SAP Business Suite powered by the HANA in-memory platform. Released globally in January this year, the new powerhouse solution has arrived in ANZ, bringing a host of new possibilities to SAP customers. Eleanor Reader reports.

Originally launched in December 2010, the SAP HANA inmemory platform has been hyped around the world as “gamechanging” database technology, primarily used to support SAP’s Business Warehouse (BW) analytics solution and some other specific applications.

But until now, SAP’s flagship Business Suite has not received the benefit of this technology. That all changed in January, with the release of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. It’s a development that SAP Australia and New Zealand managing director and CEO, Andrew Barkla, has heralded as the “most significant solution announcement we’ve brought to the market in the last 20 years”.

This new option for SAP Business Suite customers enables its business applications to capture and analyse transactional data in real-time on a single in-memory platform.

Dr Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology and Innovation, says the launch marks a major milestone in founder and chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board, Dr Hasso Plattner’s vision that SAP HANA would be at the heart of the company’s intellectual renewal.

“We can now eliminate the traditional trade-offs between cost and performance and reinvent real-time business while dramatically simplifying our customers’ landscapes, together with a strong open ecosystem of partners. And SAP Business Suite continues to fully support and optimise for all major databases in the industry, further demonstrating our commitment to openness and innovation without disruption.”

With the challenges and changes caused by the convergence of tech trends such as mobility, cloud, big data, analytics and social, the launch of Business Suite on HANA comes at an exciting time in the industry.

“As we move to mobile, cloud and look for insights in big data, a new platform is required to really take advantage of that,” Barkla says.

Over 100 global clients have signed on to the ramp-up program and are in the early adoption phase, which is taking elements of their application sets such as ERP or CRM, and moving them into the Business Suite on HANA platform.

Inside the box In the past, enterprise business applications have needed two platforms to run analysis of data. This means that organisations have had to take their transactional data – such as sales orders, customer service information and HR data – and physically move it into another database, which typically has been performed overnight.

Business Suite on HANA eliminates the need for this by

34 Inside SAP magazine

bringing together the world of transactional data and analytical data on the same platform.

By utilising the secondary analytical database, businesses are able to interactively engage with data in real-time, giving customers the ability to manage all mission-critical business processes, such as planning, execution, reporting and analysis using the same relevant live data.

The SAP HANA dashboard uses an analytical ‘cockpit’ that draws reports from the live transactions underneath, providing an open environment allowing operational analytics and reporting on live data.

A ‘non-disruptive’, fast implementation enabled by new rapiddeployment solutions is the major selling point for SAP when it comes to Business Suite on HANA. SAP has been promoting its latest rapid deployment offerings – SAP CRM for Analytics, SAP ERP for Finance and Controlling, SAP ERP for Manufacturing and SAP ERP for Trading – as they are specifically aimed at enterprises considering the adoption of SAP HANA. To encourage partners to migrate Business Suite onto HANA, SAP has developed a customised ‘Scenario Recommendations Report’, that will match customer’s business processes to 23 scenarios that have been optimised for Suite on HANA. Twenty of these reports have already been run in Australia, an SAP spokesperson said – which indicates quite an appetite for adoption.

Business Suite on HANA in ANZ Since the launch of Business Suite on HANA three months ago, the wheels have been in motion to roll out the solution globally – most recently becoming available to new and existing customers in Australia and New Zealand on 19 March 2013.

Twenty-two partners in ANZ have signed up and are currently going through the early adopter program, which focuses on training and rapid deployment solutions.

According to Barkla, a number of the Australian early adopters are in government, although they can’t be named.

SAP also says 50 per cent of the top 20 businesses listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), which include “major retailers, banks and other significant companies”, are running at least one installation of Business Suite.

“We are well down the track with an expectation that we will see a very significant adoption of those customers of Suite on HANA,” Barkla says.

SAP solutions provider NTT DATA Business Solutions is one Australian partner who has made a public investment in Business Suite powered by HANA.Among the other companies

on the bandwagon are Accenture and IBM globally, who are well on the way to supporting SAP and its customers with this new solution, Barkla adds.

Driving transformation According to SAP, SAP Business Suite powered by HANA is not just about providing a faster version of a solution they already have – but will provide transformational benefits for businesses.

‘Smarter, simpler and faster’ is the tagline attached to the new solution – however according to SAP ANZ customer relationship executive, Michael Harman, speed is great, but it’s not the sole focus of the solution.

“What we’re looking for is to bring innovation to customers.

SAP Business Suite on HANA allows you to do complex things very quickly, so what does that extra time actually bring you?,” he says.

“We think there is a snowballing effect that will take place as people transform what it is they can do,” says Barkla.

“You’ll have some innovators who are small companies taking advantage of it, but certainly big companies will demand that their ecosystem changes to fulfil their transformation.”

Among the benefits of Business Suite on HANA touted by SAP are a reduction in the total cost of ownership and realtime speed benefits that allow customers to move to redefining products and categories and therefore grow revenues. “[Businesses can benefit from] business models that are able to be driven through having new insights, a predictive view of what’s around the corner and how the business needs to respond to that,” says Barkla.

But why use an in-memory database, when a lot of the

capabilities are available through BW? Harman says the benefit is that insights can be actioned in real-time.

“BW is still good, and it’s now quite a mature product.

It can do other things like taking external data in and run benchmarking and extra KPIs,” he says. “What we’re looking at here is the SAP HANA analytical foundation.”

The future of Business Suite on HANA Barkla says SAP has been working with customers for the last couple of years on shifting the mindset on SAP implementations to looking for a higher return and higher business value in sixmonth increments.

“I haven’t sat across from one senior executive in the last seven months who would accept the two- or three-year major transformation project, unless it delivered business return in six-month cycles along the way,” he says.

“The partners are having to adjust to that model. They have no choice because customers are demanding that that’s the way it gets done.”

While strategically SAP is moving towards making its solutions available in the cloud, Business Suite on HANA has not yet been made available via this model, due to the high level of testing that would be required to ensure the solution is robust enough for customers, according to an SAP spokesperson.

“In the initial phases of any release, we run it in the environment with which we’re familiar. I believe Suite on HANA in the cloud will happen, it’s just not happening at the moment. We don’t want to bring too many variables into the equation.”

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

www.insidesap.com.au 35

SME TECHNOLOGY

Counting the cost of implementing SAP Business One For SMEs, there are many variables to consider when evaluating the costs involved in implementing SAP Business One. Dennis Marketos discuses some of the main factors involved.

How much does SAP Business One cost to implement?

Obviously, one has to take into consideration factors such as hardware, operating system, support and software licence pricing.

SAP Business One offers businesses and users a choice of Professional, Limited CRM, Limited Financial, Limited Logistics, and SAP Business One Starter Package users. SPricing will depend on the number of users and the type of licenses that your business requires, and also if your solution is on-premise or on-demand. Different license types have access to different functionality sets within SAP Business One to increase control of your operations.

SAP Business One requires a server, operating system and database. When purchasing SAP Business One you should ensure that your server and client machines meet the minimum required specifications. Minimum hardware requirements for SAP Business One can only be determined by first asking several questions – such as number of users, whether remote access is required, potential growth plans, whether complementary or integrated solutions are being used and what volumes of data will be processed.

The cost of implementing SAP Business One is dependent on many variables. Consulting days to implement SAP Business One can range from a few days for small, ‘vanilla’ implementations, to 100 days or more for large implementations with complex requirements.

You can assess the complexity, and the implementation costs, for your business by considering: 1. How many branches will be implemented: Is the implementation for a single branch or head office, or are there multiple branches or companies that need SAP Business One implementations? Will you require inter-company/branch and data consolidation?

2. Geographics: Is the SAP Business One implementation going to cover multiple cities or expand into neighbouring countries? If so, there are likely to be different set-ups and configuration requirements based on the different legal and fiscal requirements for each country.

3. Data conversion: Unless your business is a start-up, it is highly likely you will want to convert data from your legacy system. From a pricing/implementation point of view, you should consider whether you will be able to extract, clean and validate the data sets internally or whether the consultant will

36 Inside SAP magazine

be required to assist with this process. Another question is whether there is a requirement to export historical data and whether it needs to be imported in summary or detail format.

4. Reporting: The number and complexity of reports to be written to your specific requirements will have an impact on the days (and therefore price) required to implement SAP Business One. You should seriously consider keeping custom reports to a minimum if you want to reduce implementation time.

5. Training: How many people need to be trained as users? Will training be on-site or off-site, and will site-specific user notes be required? Many companies adopt a ‘train the trainer’ approach, where the SAP Business One partner is responsible for training super users of the customer, who then pass down their knowledge and train other users in the team. This approach helps reduce implementation pricing for remote and distributed sites by reducing the amount of training days required.

6. Business processes: This sounds obvious but is sometimes overlooked. If your business processes are industry-specific and your requirements extend beyond the standard functionality or configurability, then extra consultancy, customisation or development will be required. The suggestion is always to try and keep the initial implementation as simple as possible and add functionality as your business develops.

7. User skill set: The skill level of users is a factor determining how long it will take to implement SAP Business One in your business and how long it will take for your SAP Business One users to efficiently adopt the solution.

8. Project and change management: Sound project management, change management and a proven project management methodology is the basis of all successful ERP implementations. It is important to make sure you have a project manager dedicated to your project, preferably with proven experience in successful implementations.

As a general rule, you can estimate your implementation costs to be between 80 per cent and 140 per cent of your software costs. Bear in mind that if you add users or change the project scope during the implementation process, you should budget for a commensurate increase in implementation costs.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Dennis Marketos is managing director at Bluekey Software Solutions – Africa’s most awarded SAP Business One partner and SAP PartnerEdge Gold partner. www.bluekey.co.za.

HR/PAYROLL TECHNOLOGY

Is your business prepared for the Super Guarantee changes?

More than 50 per cent of the Australian population, or 11.5 million people, will be affected by the first change to the Superannuation Guarantee rate since 1992, with the rate set to climb incrementally from the current 9 per cent to 12 per cent by 2019.

These changes to the Superannuation Guarantee Charge (SGC), will impact all Australian employers and their employees so while this article is focuses on SAP, it is applicable to all payroll systems.

This article is intended to give employers an overview of the key areas to consider for review. Employers and support staff are encouraged to consult their teams who oversee these changes for specific advice on the full impact to their business.

Effectively, the increase splits the workforce into two: the majority of employees are classified as base plus SGC rate, while the rest are on a total remuneration package (TRP).

The base plus SGC group’s superannuation is calculated against their base salary, while the TRP group’s SGC and base must form part of and cannot exceed their total package (see table below).

Some employers may have annual performance and salary reviews come into effect on 1 July, or will take this opportunity to review all TRP and increase them to take into account the new SGC. Another important change which takes place from 1 July is the requirement for employers to contribute superannuation for employees aged 70 or over. This has been optional previously, so employers should be proactive and review

Table: Comparison of base + SGC and TRP before and after 1 July 2013 Base + SGC

Total Remuneration Package (TRP)

Total Remuneration Package

$0.00

$10,900.00

Base

$10,000.00

$10,000.00

SGC rate (prior 1 July 2013)

9.00%

9.00%

Superannuation

$900.00

$900.00

Total Remuneration Package

$0.00

$10,900.00

Base

$10,000.00

$9,977.12

SGC rate (post 1 July 2013)

9.25%

9.25%

Superannuation

$925.00

$922.88

these employees’ superannuation details now and make the necessary changes.

How will these changes impact your payroll system and what should you do?

The impact on each organisation’s SAP system will depend upon configuration and master data.  SAP will (prior to the 1 July 2013) provide legal change packages/service packs that will change the configuration for the SGC to 9.25 per cent from 1 July 2013.  Assuming that the TRP employees will retain their current package, they need to be identified and their base salaries recalculated.  With this information the basic pay record needs to be created using this information and incorporating the new rate from 1 July 2013.  If these employees have any other payments that form part of the TRP, these need to be adjusted in line with the total package.  SAP will provide an update for the standard configuration of the superannuation and if your ERP system is using this configuration, then payroll will read this without altering the employees’ superannuation details, provided the indirect valuation link between the employee’s superannuation data and the configuration has not been broken. If it has, or you are not using the standard configuration, a new superannuation record will need to be created from 1 July 2013.  Calculation of the new SGC is dependent upon when the payment is being made to the employee. For example, if the June period is being calculated and paid on 1 July, the new SGC must be applied.  As 1 July looms closer and you have an implementation or upgrade project running or about to start, you must ensure you incorporate this into your project plan and testing strategy.

Peter Stulcbauer is an experienced payroll consultant who has been assisting clients in SAP for over 15 years, specialising in all aspects of configuration on Payroll, Time Management and HR modules. His company, Martarna, provides freelance services at client sites around Australia. He can be contacted at peter@martarna.com.au or by phone on Perth: 08 9467 4997 / Brisbane: 07 3503 6733 / Sydney: 02 8022 8411 / Melbourne: 03 9948 4033.

www.insidesap.com.au 37

ANALYTICS TECHNOLOGY

Taking analytics to the world Kurt Bilafer, regional vice president, analytics for SAP APJ, spoke to Freya Purnell recently about the challenges SAP is facing as it drives adoption of analytics with customers across the region. never question the data, and it’s localised. That’s what analytics needs to do. It needs to be context sensitive, so it knows what’s important to me, I can look at it, make a decision and move on to the next thing.

Freya Purnell: What do you think are the biggest issues around analytics for customers at the moment?

Kurt Bilafer: Historically most of the analytic products, projects, solutions and implementations were all driven by IT, they were technically led, so I think the business became really dissatisfied.

They may have met requirements at some point in time, but those business requirements have changed. So there is a divide – there really are two camps of business and IT. So the question is how do you bring those together? It is the basics – things like communication and sharing, which for whatever reason I think all of us got away from.

One of the big things we are doing to help bridge that gap is pushing people to the SAP Community Network. For analytics, there is a whole BOBJ dedicated section on SCN, which is a best-kept secret. In APJ, we have 600,000 registered people using SCN, and the goal by the end of the year is to take that number to 1.2 billion. The whole intent there is that the business can see what other people are delivering. Rather than just going for the upgrade, we need to say, ‘if we could start over, what would we do?’, because that’s the opportunity we have here. The business needs to find out what other businesses are doing.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the CIO from Procter and Gamble basically said the way we invent software is wrong. So he wants to get together with companies like FedEx, who are all trying to solve the supply chain problem, and say ‘forget about everything in the back-end, let’s start with the consumer experience and work our way back’. That’s the challenge for analytics – it isn’t about just automating a spreadsheet and putting it in a dashboard, it’s looking at the business problem.

I liken analytics to the Google search box. I can ask any question – movie times, sport scores – and I get an answer. You

38 Inside SAP magazine

FP: Presumably there would be some fairly major organisational barriers to simply throwing out existing investments and starting again – how do you overcome that?

KB: Part of it is leadership. Because we’re siloed, if we ask IT to start over, we just look at that as cost; we don’t say, ‘how does that impact the business in a positive measure?’.

That’s a leadership challenge, but I also think it goes back to communication.

Specifically with SAP, one of the things that we have done is we created a program called Analytics Plus, which allows you to trade in all your BOBJ licences for new BOBJ licences.

But I think the bigger issue is there is no confidence in the ability of business and IT to work together, which is why you see business go off and do it on their own. That just isn’t going to work – and that’s a leadership issue.

FP: Given we now have different analytical tools and challenges, do organisations need to draw on different skillsets to be able to capitalise on opportunities?

KB: If you look at the Office of Finance and the CFO, I think that went through a transformation during the economic crisis where their departments got slashed and they still had to keep the lights on, but they also had to find ways to help the company grow and improve margins. They went through a transformation from being bean counters to strategic partners, and I think IT has to do the same thing.

It is no longer just about going in and doing coding and database optimisation. There is a lot of value IT can add, and I think a lot of IT folks want to do that, but they were relegated just like financial folks were. So there is opportunity, but that does start there with the community, and it starts with finding your voice and pursuing your passion.

That’s one of the things I love about the SAP Mentors – they follow their passion, and they help SAP develop new projects.

More importantly, they help their customers or the company they work for find new innovative approaches to business.

There’s no reason why we couldn’t have hundreds of thousands of those guys.

One of the big things that we are starting to see more is cross-

functional teams, and I don’t mean one person from IT and one person from the business, but bringing together multiple stakeholders from the organisation, and that’s one of the things that Design Thinking does – it brings business and IT together and locks everybody in a room.

FP: Do you think it’s clear to customers now what the SAP offer is in the analytics area?

KB: No, because I think SAP primarily has messaged back to our own install base, and that means to the IT folks. So I do think IT has a good understanding, but I think IT is overwhelmed with lots of different things, including information, and therefore if there is not a burning need at the time, it’s hard to get them to invest and understand.

[The level of innovation] creates a lot of great conversations, but unfortunately we haven’t done a great job of embracing and enabling the ecosystem to help us with those conversations. If you go back to SAP, for the first 35 years it’s all been about ERP and tuning the transactions in the system of record. SAP tried to control and own as much as possible – whether it was training, educating or services or support. Then in 2008 we started making acquisitions for an ‘out’ strategy – getting data out of SAP into the hands of consumers, and so all those companies involved were best of breed companies that were successful not with SAP customers.

If I look at BusinessObjects, it was only 15 to 20 per cent of customers that also ran SAP. What happened initially for every acquisition, we lost those people, we lost their brand, we lost the focus, the customers thought we abandoned them. So I spend a lot of my time just trying to reach those customers, give them a voice and show them what we have delivered.

The other thing is SAP has been a premium price provider, and so we need to prove the value of that investment. Five years ago we started to realise that we needed an ecosystem, not just to do implementations, but to help us innovate and stretch and take the technology into new areas. So the problem with that is that change caused us to change a lot of our DNA. APJ is certainly very much an ecosystem friendly region, but we are still rolling out enablement in very traditional ways. It isn’t on demand, it isn’t free and open. Our first approach to [a new type of enablement] is a HANA academy, and we do now have a predictive tactical academy. So I think we are getting there but we need to do that with everything – it’s a transformation.

As we innovate the technology, we are innovating these things – these audacious goals of a billion users are forcing us to reexamine how we do everything as an organisation.

Unfortunately change is hard – we are a company like any other company, and it is a painful process. If you take the last four or five years, it has been a sea change. Now the question is how do we help our customers embrace that change that quickly and how do we make the opportunity everybody’s opportunity.

FP: What type of innovation should we expect to see from SAP in the analytics area?

KB: We recently announced Predictive Analytics, which sits on top of HANA and allows you to do some great advanced analytical offerings. We also recently launched Visual

Intelligence, which allows you to manually manipulate the data and push it out through the BusinessObjects platform. You will see a lot more real-time applications designed from the bottomup to leverage in-memory technology for a very specific purpose – things like fraud analytics and credit e-management.

As you start looking at moving analytics more towards the business, giving them a tool is not what they want. Just like we do on our phones, they want to have an app, hit a button and move. That’s what we have got to start delivering, and so you will see the first wave of those coming out.

Suite on HANA will be big and important for customers and for the company, because that will enable us to do all sorts of analytics while the transaction happens. We talk about the speed, of something that used to take four hours taking five seconds to check. What’s really important is that while I am processing the order, I can do the analysis, and say, does it comply with my discounting, is this a fraudulent customer or order, all in realtime, so if there is an action that needs to occur, I can do that.

At the end of the day, so much of what we have around us is becoming commoditised. For banks and all these companies that offer similar choices, analytics is going to be how they are going to differentiate themselves through their customer experience. Analytics, to me, is providing the information when I need it in those critical moments of engagement. It could be that it’s updated every single second, or it could be that I asked a question and I need a response now.

FP: What differences do you see across the region in terms of analytics adoption?

KB: I think if you look at Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Japan, they are the maturing markets, with lots of global companies or at the very least multinationals. They have amassed massive data sets, so the way they are using that information is advanced.

In the emerging economies, they are trying to figure out how do they bank, how do they get wireless to different locations, and often, they are buying ERP for the first time. Along with that journey of modernisation, they are also rolling out analytics, and often it is really rear-view mirror analytics, like recording what we are selling and who we are selling to, because they’ve never had that information before.

The other thing that is really different, is that if you look at China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, the numbers of the population are so hard to get your head around. Some of these companies have 150,000 employees, so when you start doing payroll for that many people, how much money do you save by going to an ERP system and automating a process that we take for granted because we have had it forever? Or what difference does it make to cashflow, not having to write cheques and have money sitting in accounts waiting for those cheques to cash?

All those things are transformational to these organisations. We have these misconceptions that they are tiny companies, but some of them are massive organisations because labour costs are relatively inexpensive. But they are all realising that they’re competing globally. So that’s really going to change the game in these emerging markets, as it’s going to force all of them to run even faster.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

www.insidesap.com.au 39

Mobility Technology

Will SAP ride the wave of enterprise mobility?

Donrich W. Jordaan analyses SAP’s approach to the enterprise mobility market to find out whether it has the fundamentals to support its ambitions in this area.

SAP has adopted a strategy of aggressively moving into enterprise mobility, or the use of mobile devices for enterprise purposes – a market that SAP estimates at $7.7 billion. Similar to the Internet-wave in the ‘90s, SAP views mobility as the new wave in information technology. ‘Mobile is the new desktop’, is SAP’s new mantra. SAP’s strategy to ride the mobile wave has two core ingredients: first, a mobility platform to be used to develop and implement mobile applications that can seamlessly communicate with SAP back-end software; and secondly, a critical mass of apps that run on this platform.

SAP found a quick solution for the first ingredient: the centerpiece of the platform, the Sybase The cost of mobilising Unwired Platform, with SAP entered the SAP stable Say your enterprise runs with SAP’s 2010 SAP. You are considering acquisition of Sybase. implementing an SAP mobile The second ingredient app that will allow your 200 is proving more elusive, employees to arrange their with only about 150 apps leave from their own mobile currently in SAP’s mobile devices. The app costs $40 app marketplace, named per user, once-off. What will the ‘SAP Store’. your total licensing costs be SAP has recognised to kick-start mobility in your that in order to build enterprise? a critical mass of apps, Option 1: Full mobile license You will have to pay SAP it needs to build an $264,000 once-off for use extensive network of of its mobile platform (200 mobile development employees @ $1320 per user partners. By 2015, SAP license), followed by a 22 per intends that its partner cent annual maintenance fee; network would be and pay the mobile developer contributing more than $8000 once-off for the use of 80 per cent of all SAP the app (200 employees @ mobile apps. Sanjay $40 per user license).

Poonen, head of SAP’s Total initial outlay: $272,000.

Mobile Division, states: Option 2: Runtime mobile “When you think of the license way in which the web You will pay the mobile developed in the 1990s, developer $8000 once-off for it was closely tied to the use of the app, and pay developers. ‘Developers, SAP $800 (10 per cent of the developers, developers!’ cost of the mobile app).

It’s the same for Total initial outlay: $8800. mobility.”

40 Inside SAP magazine

Accordingly, in July 2012, SAP launched a mobile development partner program that offers development licenses for its mobile platform at a relatively low cost, free online training in the mobile platform, and (compulsory) publication of apps on the SAP Store (for a 15 per cent sales commission to SAP). Although the establishment of this partner program is a step in the right direction for SAP, I am of opinion that it is insufficient to produce the vibrant developer community that SAP knows it needs to build. My premise is that in order for SAP to build such a vibrant developer community, the SAP mobile development industry must offer sustainable profitability – it must be structurally attractive. In this article, I analyse this nascent industry using Porter’s Five Forces model, and argue that there are currently pertinent structural weaknesses that may delay or even derail SAP’s ambitions to capture the enterprise mobility market.

Structural analysis

The power of suppliers SAP boasts an enormous global ‘ecosystem’ of companies and individuals that implement, support, and do custom development using SAP software. The ecosystem therefore has a symbiotic relationship with SAP: while the ecosystem relies on SAP as the sole supplier of the core technology, SAP benefits from the value added by its ecosystem to its end-products. This will even more so be the case with mobility, as SAP plans to rely on its ecosystem to develop the vast majority of the apps that its customers will use. The question is, however, how much of the value that is created in the SAP mobile app development industry is claimed by SAP as the sole supplier?

To answer this question, the division of revenue from SAP mobility needs to be analysed. When an enterprise decides to mobilise with SAP, it has to obtain three levels of licenses: yy SAP back-end. If the company is a SAP customer, this will already be in place. yy SAP mobile platform. Before an existing SAP customer can implement an SAP mobile app, the customer first needs to obtain a license for the SAP mobile platform, priced in the order of $1320 per user. Compare this with the average cost of an app on the SAP Store, which is currently about $100 per user. As an alternative to the full user license for the SAP mobile platform, SAP has recently announced a runtime license for its mobile platform, which will be priced at 10 per cent of the cost of each mobile app used by the SAP customer. yy SAP mobile apps. The licensing cost of apps are at the

discretion of the app developer; the licensing transaction is also directly between the app developer as licensor and the SAP customer as licensee.

SAP’s use of its mobile platform as an additional licensing layer is not only making mobilisation unnecessarily complex for SAP customers, but also consuming a substantial portion of these customers’ mobility budgets, hence decreasing the funds available for mobile app developers (see box, previous page).

Remember that SAP mobile app development partners are already paying 15 per cent of their revenue to SAP – whether the revenue was generated via the SAP Store or not – in pursuance of their partner agreements with SAP. As sole supplier to the SAP mobile development industry, SAP is therefore appropriating at least 25 per cent of the value created by the industry.

The power of buyers.

The buyers – the 175,000 enterprises that run SAP – are unlikely to wield significant power vis-à-vis producers in the SAP mobile development industry, as the typical elements of buyer-power, namely a small number of buyers purchasing large volumes of standardised, non-differentiated products, are not applicable.

Moreover, buyers are used to paying a premium for SAP-related products and services.

Given the existing distribution channels in the SAP ecosystem that are based on personal relationships between buyers’ executives and SAP’s or its partners’ account managers, the relevance of the SAP Store from a sales perspective is likely to be mostly limited to being a comprehensive reference site for buyers, rather than as an independent sales channel in the same fashion as the consumer mobile app marketplaces. Typical buyer considerations related to the purchase of an enterprise app, such as implementation, training, maintenance, support, and customisation, render even more unlikely the typical consumer mobile app marketplace scenario of just clicking the download button.

Rivalry among existing competitors A particularity of the SAP mobile development industry – in contrast with the mobile development industries that developed around consumer mobile app marketplaces such as iOS and Android – is that SAP is not only the sole supplier to the industry, but also the dominant competitor: SAP itself is currently producing almost 60 per cent of the apps on its Store. How does SAP shape the industry structure in its role as dominant competitor?

Like a Columbus who has just discovered a new world, SAP views the enterprise mobility market as vast virgin territory – SAP often states that there is almost limitless scope of valueadding mobile use cases for businesses. This state of affairs would, in principle, allow rivalry between developers to focus on developing new, clearly differentiated products, rather than degenerating into price competition. However, extreme price competition is the order of the day: almost half – 45 per cent to be exact – of the apps on the SAP Store are completely free of charge. SAP itself started this app-on-the-house trend that has subsequently – as a matter of exigency – been emulated by SAP’s mobile development partners. This trend is especially prominent among developers who have recently debuted on the SAP Store with their first apps.

But is a high number of free apps not the norm on mobile app marketplaces? Again, a simple comparison between the SAP Store and the consumer mobile app marketplaces is misleading: free apps on consumer mobile app marketplaces can generate revenue through advertising and in-app purchases, while these revenue models have doubtful applicability in the enterprise mobility context (see box, right). Moreover, users stop using the average consumer mobile app literally First get the customer within days or weeks, hooked, and then cash in? with the drop-off in Imagine the following the usage of free apps message popping up on your being especially steep. mobile device, just as you need to approve an important In contrast, one would purchase using your new free hope that the lifecycle of purchase approval app: an enterprise app would extend into months ‘You have reached your or years. I accordingly monthly limit of free purchase suggest that the app-onorder approvals. To approve the-house trend in the more purchase orders, kindly SAP Store is not only purchase a transaction bundle casting a cloud over the at $99 for 100 purchase order SAP mobile development approvals, valid for 30 days.’ industry’s prospect of Are in-app purchases an sustainable profitability, appropriate revenue model but also sending for enterprise apps? SAP counterproductive signals makes provision for in-app about the value and purchases, but none of the expected lifecycle of SAP current 150 apps on the SAP mobile apps.

Store use this functionality.

www.insidesap.com.au 41

Threat of entry Reducing barriers to entry to the SAP mobile development industry, as SAP is doing with its mobile development partner program, can be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, reducing barriers to entry can be a successful strategy to rapidly increase the number of developers in the industry; on the other hand, if entry remains too easy for too long, the industry’s prospects of sustainable profitability would be weakened, causing the industry to become increasingly unattractive to enter or remain in. In the case of SAP’s mobile development partner program, the reduction of barriers to entry is limited in scope, leaving the following significant barriers to entry to the SAP mobile development industry – in contrast with the consumer mobile app development industry – intact: yy Scarce skillset. The innovation value chain starts with an idea.

In order to think up a new idea for a mobile app that can add value to SAP customers, one needs a good understanding not only of SAP’s mobile app development software and its technical capabilities, but even more so of the SAP back-end, and the business processes and day-to-day business needs of SAP customers. Absent these scarce skills, and the innovation value chain lacks its very first element. yy Infrastructure. The actual mobile product development requires more than the SAP mobile app development platform – it also requires a functional development environment that includes the SAP back-end. This would require either access to a variety of skilled resources to set it up, or paying a hefty fee to a SAP service provider. As such, this infrastructure requirement will certainly serve as a barrier to entry.

These barriers to entry again emphasises the limited scope for comparison between the SAP Store and the consumer mobile app marketplaces: while the typical college IT graduate would be able to swell the ranks of the Android or iOS developer communities, this would not be the case with SAP mobility – despite free development licenses for SAP’s mobile platform and free online training in its use. It is pure fantasy to think that SAP mobility will ever have anything near the large developer communities that grew around the consumer mobile app marketplaces. For the most part, SAP’s mobile development partner program is only making it easier for enterprises with existing SAP back-end expertise and infrastructure to diversify into SAP mobile development.

From an industry-structure perspective, this is a positive conclusion: while SAP has cleared the path (mainly) for enterprises who are already in the SAP ecosystem to diversify into mobility, the threat of large-scale entry into the SAP mobile development industry remains insignificant.

The threat of substitutes In use cases where mobility per se is not essential to the function of the app, traditional desktop applications pose a substitution

42 Inside SAP magazine

threat. However, given that mobile devices are becoming functional extensions of ourselves – always at hand and easy to use – mobile apps should increasingly gain the upper hand. Keep in mind that mobile devices are not limited to smartphones with their relative small screens and relative weak processing power, but also include tablets that can in some cases match or surpass the desktop standard. Mobile apps can accordingly range from the simplest one-click productivity app to complex dashboards and analytical apps.

Conclusion In order for SAP to ride the wave of enterprise mobility, it needs a critical mass of apps that run on its mobile platform, which in turn requires a vibrant developer community. This much SAP has clearly recognised. However, as I state in the introduction, in order for SAP to build a vibrant mobile developer community, the SAP mobile development industry must be structurally strong. In the analysis above, I have highlighted certain structural weaknesses in this industry, which centre on SAP’s role as sole supplier and dominant competitor: in its role as sole supplier, SAP demands a significant slice of the value that the industry creates; in its role as dominant competitor, SAP drives prices down to zero. The strategic damage done by SAP’s zeropricing is accentuated by the fact that SAP back-end software is well known to be expensive, with the rationale that SAP differentiates itself on quality. What is the signal sent to the potential buyers about the value of SAP mobile apps?

Seductive as emulation of successful consumer mobile app marketplaces such as the Apple iStore and the Android Store may seem, cognizance must be taken of the pertinent differences between the consumer and SAP mobile development industries, rendering such emulation beset with strategic landmines.

The weaknesses in the SAP mobile development industry is of SAP’s own making, and also within SAP’s power to remedy. The remedial action is clear – invert the current pricing model: Put a price tag on all free apps. SAP itself should take the lead to turn the app-on-the-house trend around, and clearly signal to buyers that SAP mobile apps add real business value. The consumer mobile app marketplace psychology of free or quasifree apps should be removed from SAP’s strategic thinking.

Make the SAP mobile platform free. SAP should perceive its mobile platform as a purely strategic, non-revenue instrument: It makes more strategic sense for SAP to focus on ensuring the sustainable profitability of the SAP mobile development industry – and hence ensuring that its backend software will remain relevant in the mobile age – than to insist on direct revenue from its mobile platform.

These remedial actions may be bold, but will significantly strengthen the SAP mobile development industry structure, and accordingly provide the required solid foundation for SAP’s mobility ambitions.

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Donrich W Jordaan, PhD is managing director of Ploion Innovations Ltd, in Dublin, Ireland, and Research Associate at the Intellectual Property Law Research Unit, University of Cape Town. He can be contacted at donrich@ ploioninnovations.com.

SOCIAL COLLABORATION

Next-generation networking Leading organisations are embracing social as a means of networking and collaborating more effectively, and it’s coming to an SAP landscape near you, as Lynton Howes writes.

‘The death of email.’

That’s the provocative title of a recent article which caught my attention, the main premise of which was, of course, that the continued uptake of social communication tools in our personal lives is seeing a fairly rapid end to email, and this will be mirrored in corporations. Now, before getting too excited about the demise of this ubiquitous but much maligned tool, remember that we have been here before.

Remember Google Wave, which promised to reinvent electronic communication, yet was quietly euthanised by Google in early 2012? Remember the French CEO who issued a ban on email in 2011?

This time it’s different – there is something to potentially take its place. Enterprise social networking (ESN) is here, now, and over the course of the next five years, it’s going to revolutionise the way we work.

The social boom ESN is going to be huge. According to Deloitte analysis1, more than 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies will partially or fully implement an enterprise social network by the end of 2013, a 70 per cent increase on 2011. Gartner predicts that by 2016, 50 per cent of large organisations will have internal social networks. 2 Little wonder then that SAP, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce and Microsoft are investing billions of dollars to make sure that they get a decent slice of what is going to be a very large pie.

Essentially, ESN is driven by a desire to make workers as communicative, engaged and connected as they are in their personal lives.

So is it just Facebook for business? For some of the software available, you could say yes, and all of them have a lot in common with the social behemoth. They are almost universally designed to be highly intuitive, encourage networking, and have feeds and groups, messaging and notifications. However, the more mature ESN products have a focus on file sharing and collaboration rather than games and photo tagging; getting stuff done, rather than just updating people. We are now seeing streamlined integration with other software, such as learning management systems and Sharepoint, and feeds from the organisation’s ERP or CRM system, meaning that you can not only follow people, you can also follow analytics and sales opportunities, for example.

And it means that email, which has essentially remained unchanged since the fi rst networked message was sent in 1971, can fi nally be ditched. Sure, email is great for oneon-one, formal correspondence. For collaboration, though,

instant messaging and wikis, which allow for real-time communication and centralised information sharing, are far superior. Furthermore, one of the benefits of ESN is its ability to unlock the rich veins of information normally locked in email inboxes, making relevant content accessible and searchable for the entire company.

All for as little as $3 per user per month. 3

A lot has happened in six years The global ESN market was led by IBM’s Connections for the three years to 2011, though the situation has been changing rapidly, as a raft of mergers and acquisitions have taken place and other large vendors have made significant releases.

Yammer, a fast-growing networking and micro-blogging platform launched in late 2008, has claimed that 85 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use the product. Local customers include Deloitte Australia, NAB, VicRoads and Westfield.

The developers made use of the application programming interfaces (or API) from SAP to offer their customers a direct feed from SAP ERP and CRM, without asking for (or requiring) permission.4 An Open Graph link (yes, the Facebook API protocol!) allows the user to click on the update notification in Yammer, which will then display the relevant SAP screen in a separate tab. Yammer was bought

by Microsoft in June 2012 and it should be integrated with Sharepoint 2013 and Office 365, with single sign-on, by mid2013.

Jive has been a serious player for a number of years (and even powers the online SAP Community Network), Salesforce’s Chatter was launched to the public in mid-2010, Oracle launched its own Social Network in late 2011, and LinkedIn has announced5 that it is working on its own version of ESN. It’s fast becoming a crowded space.

Enter SAP’s Jam. Launched in October 2012, it’s a new product yet comes with the pedigree of SuccessFactors Jam and SAP’s previous ESN software, Streamwork, heralding a serious move by SAP into the enterprise social space. SAP started with the principle that social should be “something that shows up when you need it, enabling and enhancing something you are already doing”. What SAP did was form a co-innovation council of 20 customers from different industries and worked through ‘day in the life of’ scenarios for many different roles. This feedback was used to embed social into business applications where it delivers results, such as CRM, fi nance applications, learning and talent management.

www.insidesap.com.au 43

SOCIAL COLLABORATION

SAP claims that its approach will solve the two key problems currently facing ESN, namely: • Vague return on investment figures, inhibiting sponsorship at the executive level, and generating scepticism; and • Lack of business context, leading to low adoption.

The majority of organisations are fi nding that only 10-20 per cent of their eligible workforce are actively using the networks 6.

In addition, SAP has added a series of more structured collaborative tools, such as dynamic meeting agendas, pro/ con tables (to rate feedback from others) and a decision sign-off tool. And the video capture tool means that anyone can capture and share video from a smartphone, webcam or screen recording and share it in seconds – perfect for informal learning.

Benefits for SAP projects We see tremendous potential to take communication and engagement to the next level for SAP projects using ESN software, in particular: • Knowledge sharing. Imagine being able to cultivate effective Super User Groups from project inception through to the business as usual (BAU) environment, to create solutions, share best practices and embed process changes through continuing group sharing, as well as project updates without ‘yet another email’; the information you need when you need it.

• Engagement. Deloitte reports a turnover rate for active ESN users one-tenth of those who don’t use it, which they attribute to employees feeling more engaged and recognised for their work. Apply that to involving your project team or business users in the process change and solution design throughout the project, and you have a winning formula.

• Onboarding. SAP project environments are pressurecookers at the best of times, meaning the onboarding process is often suboptimal. ESN turbo-charges onboarding – new team members can be provisioned with the groups, connections, conversations and fi les they need to get cracking on day one.

• Learning. Materials can be easily reviewed, kept up to date, and shared. Trainees can be connected with key course information and the instructor before, during and after face-to-face sessions, from any device. Groups are perfect for asking questions or sharing expertise with others.

The challenges of social ESN comes with challenges, and of course, the software must be viewed as a tool rather than a panacea. In particular, employees cannot be made to use social; they must opt in, and the benefits will only be achieved if uptake is high enough. Traditionally, tech rollouts, such as SAP, followed a ‘push’ approach – workers were trained on the product and then simply expected to use

44 Inside SAP magazine

it. Social requires a ‘pull’ approach, which is best supplemented by an effective change management program, characterised by visible sponsor-level support, explaining the ‘why?’ and articulating the ‘what’s in it for me?’.

Security and control is a standard concern as soon as the term social is used, however these tools are internallycontrolled, and compliance and governance features typically come standard. In reality, the risks are similar to that of email usage, which are mitigated with policies and common sense.

More threatening for some organisations is the fl attening of the organisational hierarchy that results when shop-floor staff can view and participate in a discussion initiated by the CEO.

Social is now ESN software truly heralds the next phase of the knowledge evolution for the workplace. The early versions mimicked Facebook and permitted networking, microblogging and not much else; now they are integrated with SAP, Sharepoint and can largely replace email. What’s the next phase going to bring? One thing is certain – it’s going to seriously shake up the way we work, and has enormous potential to help our workplaces to become more collaborative, engaging, creative and productive. What’s not to ‘like’ about that?

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Lynton Howes is a director of Adapt2 Consulting (http:// adapt2consulting.com.au). Together with his business partner, Marié Lambrechts, they have nearly 25 years’ of experience delivering successful change, training and communications solutions for SAP clients across a diverse range of industries.

References 1. http://deloitte.wsj.com/cio/2013/02/21/enterprise-socialnetworks-another-tool-not-a-panacea/ 2. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2319215 3. https://www.yammer.com/about/pricing/ 4. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/yammerintergrates-into-sap-software/ 5. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57571235-93/ linkedins-next-target-yammer-salesforce-chatter/ 6. http://www.zdnet.com/enterprises-grapple-with-socialengagement-7000005263/

Careers ON THE MOVE

On the Move Here we bring you our regular round-up of who is going where in the industry. If you have changed jobs recently or hired some new staff, email us at editor@insidesap.com.au. By Eleanor Reader.

Michael Kovacevic and Gladys Akle, SAP Australian User Group The SAP Australian User Group has welcomed Michael Kovacevic as its new communities and content manager and Gladys Akle as its new office manager.

Kovacevic’s role will see him managing the Special Interest Group (SIGs) relationships and continuing to grow the network.

He is also the main point of contact for the content and speakers for SAUG’s four annual conferences.

“I am excited about working for such a passionate and dedicated group of professionals,” Kovacevic said.

“I especially look forward to increasing the value that all members have from participating in the Special Interest Groups and communities and developing valuable user experience based case studies and content.”

Prior to gaining this position at SAUG, Kovacevic worked on customer reference and customer advocacy programs for SAS Institute Asia Pacific and has recently completed a contract role with Criterion Conferences.

Akle will be responsible for the SAUG’s financial, membership and website operations.

She recently returned to Australia after working for three years in Dubai for the Infosalon Group as general and office manager.

Inside SAP online For all the latest news in SAP, check out www.insidesap.com.au

Mark Bosman and Keith Johnson, TAMS With over 14 years’ SAP experience in Australia, the United Kingdom and South America, Mark Bosman (pictured right) has been chosen to lead the new business unit at TAMS Consulting – SAP Real Estate.

The business unit is an expansion on the company’s current asset lifecycle management solution offers and will help organisations gain a greater insight into their real estate portfolio.

“I’m very excited about becoming a member of the TAMS team. TAMS’ outstanding reputation in the market to deliver successful projects and advise their clients to find the right business solution is second to none. I’m thrilled to be given the opportunity to take it to the next level and to extend our reputation into other solution areas as well,” Bosman said.

He has worked for clients involved in the utility industry, property development, financial services, professional services, hi-tech and the public sector in various roles, including as functional consultant, team lead, project manager and solution architect.

TAMS CEO, Lyndy Wallis, said Bosman’s appointment is key to the company’s solutions strategy.

“His extensive knowledge and experience in SAP Real Estate as well as the construction industry are a perfect fit to enhance our ability to achieve our vision of being the leading SAP consulting partner specialising in asset lifecycle management,” she said.

Joining Bosman, Lyndy Wallis and Keith Wallis on the TAMS management team is Keith Johnson, who has been appointed head of TAMS Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Business Unit.

Johnson’s role will see him developing standard processes and repeatable solutions as well as providing best practice solutions.

“With his practical experience, knowledge and passion for EAM we feel he will further develop our expanding EAM line of business and provide the specialist support SAP EAM customers need,” says Wallis.

Johnson has taken experience from his 22-year career in naval engineering and successfully translated it into the commercial EAM sector.

He specialises in the management of industrial maintenance, enterprise asset management system design, implementation and turnaround projects, reliability management and, marine engineering defence and public security.

www.insidesap.com.au 45

Careers ON THE MOVE

Samantha Bogeart, Michael Storey and Stephen Collins, Plaut IT Australia Plaut IT Australia is continuing to invest in its supply chain management team with the appointment of Samantha Bogeart as its new supply chain manager, based in Sydney.

Bogaert was most recently IT group supply chain solution delivery lead for Coca-Cola Amatil, and has held a number of key leadership roles in Australia and overseas, with well-known brands such as Nestle in Switzerland, Dairy Farmers, Astra Zeneca UK, Guinness, PepsiCo in London, Finn Forestry in the UK and CSR. “Samantha has over 15 years’ experience in the manufacturing industry, specifically in supply chain management, and we are excited about the prospect of working with her in 2013 and beyond,” said Sebastian Moore, CEO of Plaut IT Australia.

“Sam will lead a number of new initiatives and capabilities to market and provide strategic advice to our customers seeking thought leadership in the supply chain management area. Her appointment underpins our commitment to building and consolidating our business in the manufacturing sector in Australia.”

Michael Storey has also been welcomed into the Plaut IT Australia team as the new senior account executive for Victoria.

Storey, who has previously held senior roles within Microsoft, ASG and SAP, joined Plaut from Wipro, where he

worked as the account director for utilities and managed clients such as SP-Ausnet, United Energy, Santos, QGC, Jemena and Multi-net Gas. He will be responsible for Plaut’s existing Victorian client network, with particular focus on the manufacturing and utility sectors within the region.

Moore said this appointment underpins the company’s commitment to building and consolidating its business in Victoria in 2013.

“Michael has over 20 years’ experience in the IT industry across Asia Pacific and we are delighted to welcome him to our team,” he said.

The most recent addition to the Plaut team, as of March 2013, is Stephen Collins, who joins as southern delivery manager responsible for Victoria and South Australia.

Collins will drive customer delivery, quality and be responsible for the measurement and ongoing focus on customer satisfaction across the two states, drawing on his expertise in practice and project management.

Moore says the appointment supports Plaut’s commitment to caring for its customers and ensuring that they deliver on business outcomes “With over 16 years’ experience in SAP CRM, logistics, practice and project management, Stephen brings a depth of understanding and expertise to the Plaut IT Australia team,” he said.

“With our increased focus on manufacturing and supply chain management in 2013, we are employing the best people in the industry to accelerate our growth objectives” Collins has extensive SAP consulting experience across a broad range of industries and has worked in various roles in global and blue chip organisations such as Lease Plan, Unisys, IBM, Officeworks, and Mitsubishi.

Suprakash Chaudhuri, SAP India & Subcontinent

the best performing businesses.

Suprakash Chaudhuri has been named managing director of SAP India & Subcontinent.

Chaudhuri will be responsible for all market-facing activities, customer operations and sales, consulting, partner ecosystem expansion, and marketing.

“The SAP leadership team expressed great appreciation for the business and market leadership Suprakash provided as the acting MD for SAP India since Q3 2012,” said Steve Watts, president, SAP Asia-Pacific Japan.

“India with over 4900 customers has become one of

MD, will continue to drive

46 Inside SAP magazine

Suprakash, in his new role as SAP’s strategic innovation roadmap and shape and sustain our industry leadership position in India.”

Chaudhuri takes up the permanent position after acting in the role since mid-2012, following the resignation of previous MD Peter Gartenberg.

Careers ON THE MOVE

David Gannon, Harms Consulting Harms Consulting Australia has merged its Real Estate and consulting business units into a single SAP Consulting Services Unit headed by the newly-appointed David Gannon.

One of Gannon’s first goals as part of the Harms team is to finalise its Australian Real Estate solution “which will enable us to rapidly deliver to our clients a cost-effective solution”.

In addition, Harms is looking to establish a Real Estate Focus Group to further enhance its Real Estate offering into other areas, including construction and asset management.

“We are looking for interested customers and industry players to work with us to further enhance our Australian Real Estate solution,” Gannon said.

“We want to expand the solution into new SAP product areas, such as the new SAP Commercial Project Management offering, which will deliver a more integrated solution into

the construction space and we are looking for partners to work with us in developing this solution.”

Gannon has more that 17 years’ SAP experience working on both the client and consulting aspects, across all SAP components delivered throughout Australia, Asia, Europe and North America.

“Harms and our clients are fortunate to have the benefit of David’s extensive international experience. He is meticulous about everything he undertakes and as a result, delivers effective and innovative solutions,” said Harms managing director, Detlev Harms.

Chris Long, Acuity Search Acuity Search has appointed Chris Long as its SAP recruitment principal.

Long brings over 12 years of SAP recruitment experience to the role after working his way up to managing SAP practices across the UK, BeNeLux, Germany, EMEA, North America and most recently APU, covering both contract and permanent sectors of the SAP ecosystem.

Having recruited SAP professionals in more than 30 countries, Long combines true global reach with a local

presence and knowledge.

Acuity Search director Alex Gomez said, “Chris’s reputation is built on open and honest communication, delivery of the best possible recruitment service and a true desire to build lasting relationships with both clients and candidates.”

Knowledge is having the right answer…

Issue 20 | Summer 2012

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Intelligence is asking the right question…

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NEW BOOKS Managing Custom Code in SAP

By Tony de Thomasis and Alisdair Templeton Published: 2012 Publisher: Galileo Press Format: Print, eBook Custom code is a vital component of any successful SAP implementation. But it must be managed, or it becomes an obstacle to future enhancement and innovation. Take the proactive approach to taming your custom code with this book: always be in control, make changes when and where they are needed, don’t get slowed down by bad code, and always be ready for the next upgrade.  Use SAP Solution Manager to monitor the amount and efficiency of custom code in your system  Learn how to take advantage of tools such as CCLM, SCOV, SAP Clone Finder, the Custom Development Management Cockpit, and more  Explore custom code best practices and reporting techniques w: www.sap-press.com/products/ManagingCustom-Code-in-SAP.html

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SAP ABAP Advanced Cookbook

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Published: December 2012 Publisher: Packt Publishing Format: Print, eBook

Explore how SAP BPC 10.0 can impact your organisation. This updated and expanded edition gives you a comprehensive overview of the SAP BPC features, functions, and best practices. Referencing a detailed case study, fi nd out how to use SAP BPC for NetWeaver for budget planning, forecasting, and consolidation – the building blocks of a complete planning and consolidation solution. Learn what to expect from a BPC application – and how to get it using SAP BPC 10.0.

SAP ABAP Advanced Cookbook is a simple, easy to understand ‘cookbook’ fi lled with illustrations, diagrams, tips, clear stepby-step instructions and real time examples that cover the newest topics of Adobe Interactive Forms. It allows readers to experience the latest advancements in FloorPlan Manager design and improve performance with the usage of transaction SAT and secondary internal table indexes. By optimising program code and fi nding datasource of fields using SQL Trace, developers can also explore the world of Simple Transformations that solves problems with ease. Using this book, developers will not only be able to create and consume Web Services, but also master the creation of common Design Patterns using ABAP Objects and the advanced features of Web Dynpro programming.

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48 Inside SAP magazine

SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook

SAP on the Cloud

By Missbach, M., Stelzel, J., Gardiner, C., Anderson, G., & Tempes, M.

By David Lai and Xavier Hacking Published: May 2011 Publisher: Packt Publishing Format: Print, eBook

Xcelsius 2008 was recently included in SAP’s BusinessObjects 4.0 family, rebranding Xcelsius Enterprise as SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0. With features like flexible design and what-if scenarios, the powerful dashboarding software allows enterprises to make business decisions at a glance, and this book allows you to go far beyond the basics of these techniques.

This cookbook full of practical and applicable recipes will enable you to use the full latest capabilities of dashboard design to visually transform your business data. A wide range of recipes will equip you with the knowledge and confidence to perform tasks like configuring charts, creating drill- downs, making component colors dynamic, using alerts in maps, building pop-up screens, setting up what-if scenarios, and many more.

Published: January 24, 2013 Publisher: Springer Format: Print, eBook This book provides an introduction to the various facets of building and operating an SAP infrastructure exploiting cloud technologies.

It describes and discusses the latest developments and challenges and suitable solutions, and also outlines future trends where possible. To ensure that this book is also useful to readers who do not consider themselves experts in this area, this book explains in detail the backgrounds of the various solutions. Also, practiceoriented case studies are provided throughout the book in order to make the reader aware of essential but perhaps less obvious points. w: www.springer.com/ business+%26+management/ business+information+systems/book/978-3-64231210-6

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EVENTS

What’s On Each edition of Inside SAP includes a diary of upcoming events for the SAP community around Australia and internationally. To have your event listed, email editor@insidesap.com.au.

SAP Predictive Analysis Technical Academy 4 April 2013 Melbourne SAP Predictive Analysis Technical Academy will bring together SAP partners who invested in HANA in 2012 to teach how they can increase the value they’ve already delivered and gain the insights to further their ‘trusted advisor’ states with customers. w: www.predictiveanalytics. sapeliteevents.com/registration-apj. html BI 4.0 Elite Enablement 15-19 April 2013, Sydney 8-12 April 2013, Singapore This exclusive session covers a wide range of topics and offers different tracks for customers and partners – for both SAP and non-SAP application back-ends. As an advanced class, it will offer deep dives into confi guration, troubleshooting, best practices, and tips and tricks, with the aim of making an SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 project go-live as smooth as possible. w: www.bi4.elite-enablement.com/ registration.html

tips and techniques from leading experts, designed to help sharpen your skills and accelerate our career growth. w: www.masteringsap.com/ financialsau SAPPHIRE NOW + ASUG Annual

your most pressing business or technical challenges. Includes presentations and sessions from international and local companies, roundtable discussions and special sessions. w: www.masteringsap.com/ analyticsau

Conference 14-16 May 2013

Mastering Supply Chain Management

Orange County Convention Centre,

with SAP

Florida SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference bring together unparalleled insights and opportunities from the world’s premier business technology conferences in one place. From customer-driven education and best practices to visionary technology and business strategies, the conferences offer a unique platform for attendees to see their business from all angles providing invaluable knowledge sharing and networking opportunities for SAP customers, partners, business team members and industry experts. w: www.sapandsaug.com

September 2013

SuccessConnect Sydney 22-24 May, 2013

Melbourne Specially designed to enable supply chain excellence, this event is where organisations using SAP for Supply Chain Management come together in the same place at the same time for three days. Using a uniquely crafted research methodology and expertly guided by a Conference Advisory Team, the agenda has been developed to provide you answers to current challenges and the inspiration to embrace future opportunities through presentations and sessions in six tracks over three days. w: www.masteringsap.com/scmau SAP Insider BI 2013 2-5 September 2013

Hilton Hotel Brisbane Each year, the SAUG Plenary in Brisbane covers pertinent local topics including innovative customer experiences and the latest SAP updates. Hear about new concepts and exchange ideas with 200+ delegates and sponsors. As users of SAP technology, the daily challenges you face are an opportunity to learn and grow. This event is a great way to discuss how you face up to them. w: www.saug.com.au/events/ category/qld

Hilton Sydney With the gathering of customers, partners and employees coming together to learn, collaborate and celebrate our collective accomplishments, SuccessConnect will be our largest customer event of the year. SuccessFactors global customers represent companies of all sizes and industries from all over. You are the thought leaders among your industry peers. Gone are the days of waiting for innovation. As of right now, you define innovation and it starts by making connections in the cloud. w: www.successfactors.com/en_us/ successconnect/sydney/about.html

Mastering SAP Financials

Mastering Analytics with SAP and SAP

The Venetian, Palazzo Congress Center,

13-15 May 2013

BusinessObjects BI

Novotel Sydney Manly Pacific, Australia If you want to discover new and different ways to use SAP for financial reporting, planning, compliance and governance to get business results then this is the event for you. Return to the offi ce with new knowledge, enhanced skills and a renewed sense of confi dence in your abilities and your organisation’s technology direction. You’ll hear essential

5-7 August 2013

Las Vegas The SAP TechEd conference empowers and connects you and your team with the essential training and community support needed to gain instant value from your IT investment in SAP. Develop practical skills through hands-on workshops and demo enhanced lectures focused on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform and SAP

SAUG 41st Plenary 7 May 2013

50 Inside SAP magazine

Crown Promenade, Melbourne This program has been specifi cally designed to enable organisational performance and decision making. Where business and IT people from organisations using SAP and SAP BusinessObjects BI for Business Intelligence come together in the same place for three days. Someone in this community has the answer to

Singapore Don’t miss BI 2013, one of the most important event of the year for professionals that use and support SAP solutions for reporting, business intelligence, and data management. The schedule includes in-depth sessions, networking events, and demos showcasing the latest updates and best practices for SAP business intelligence solutions. w: www.financials2013.com/singapore SAP TechEd Las Vegas 2013 21-25 October 2013

BusinessObjects solutions. w: www.sapteched.com

PARTNER DIRECTORY Acuity Search Acuity Search is one of Australia’s leading SAP specialist recruitment firms. All of the consultants at Acuity Search have over 10 years of exclusive SAP domain recruitment experience and have a real passion for their work, this depth of experience is something that is unique in the Australian market. We have huge networks of pre-qualified SAP consultants across the Australian region and throughout the globe.

BPSE Consulting BPSE Consulting consists of a team of people who are all passionate about improving our customers' experiences with their SAP ® solutions. We provide SAP solution design and implementation services and have developed intelligent solutions to address key issues all customers are facing with their SAP solutions.

Esker Australia Esker is a recognised leader in document process automation solutions for SAP. On premise software solutions and SaaS solutions include: sales orders processing; accounts payable; e-Invoicing; e-Procurement; and enterprise faxing and mail services. Customers achieve significant operational efficiencies, cost savings and measurable ROI in less than three months. Since 1997, over 1,700 companies in ANZ have trusted solutions from Esker Australia.

IQX IQX provides SAP customers with packaged and bespoke business solutions delivering enhanced business insight, collaboration and productivity benefi ts by leveraging Microsoft Technologies. We improve the user experience across all core functional areas of SAP for all user types. IQX solutions include Excel add-ins, SharePoint Web Parts, SharePoint Forms, K2 & Nintex solutions and native mobile apps for SAP. See, Share and Do more in SAP via IQX.

ReadSoft ReadSoft is a world leading supplier of Document Process Automation solutions, specialising in Accounts Payable Automation for SAP. Their AP automation solution seamlessly integrates with SAP and has been selected by an impressive range of multinationals seeking to improve control, efficiency and overall performance, along with an attractive ROI. We invite you to contact us for a free consultative workshop and to “squeeze more from SAP”.

SUSE Established in 1992, SUSE is the original provider of the enterprise Linux distribution and the most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing. With a portfolio centered around SUSE Linux Enterprise, we power thousands of organizations around the world across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Now operating as an independent business unit of The Attachmate Group, SUSE continues its unwavering focus on the benefi ts of open source and the needs of its commercial partners and customers.

Systems and People Systems and People specialises in providing SAP resourcing solutions for SAP-run organisations across Australia. We offer a complete SAP resourcing service encompassing SAP Recruitment, SAP Consulting and Contractor Management. Systems and People can help you to unlock the true value of your SAP investment with the right SAP people, build your internal SAP expertise with experienced contract and permanent SAP resources and reduce overhead with a contractor management solution for your contingent workforce.

To get the best in the business working for you – call Systems and People.

UTS If you’re serious about developing your expertise in SAP ERP, UTS Business School is your only choice. Taught by pioneers of SAP-blended business education, your options range from our full flagship program, the Master of Accounting Information Systems, to Certificate 1 short courses.

Winshuttle Winshuttle provides software products that improve how business users work with SAP. For customers who struggle with rigid, expensive and inefficient processes that limit their ability to adapt to changing business conditions, Winshuttle has the solution.

Winshuttle supports customers worldwide from offices in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and India.

www.insidesap.com.au 51

Delivery focus Acuity Search comprises Alex Gomez, Sam Vargas (Directors) and Chris Long (SAP Recruitment Principle). All three of us have experience recruiting SAP professionals dating back to 2000/2001. This depth of SAP recruitment experience is second to none in the Australian market. As SAP is the only focus of our business, this allows us to keep up to date with market trends and identify candidates in niche areas ahead of hiring curves. This can be invaluable to clients who need new and emerging SAP skills for project work with immediate effect. We understand the tight timeframes that are associated with hiring programmes and the adverse effect of not attracting the right resource to a project at the right stage of proceedings.

We have the capacity to provide both contract and permanent resources covering the entire SAP spectrum, ranging from senior SAP leadership and management right through to SAP graduates. We can provide ad-hoc resources at short notice or build entire project teams from the ground up.

ROI

Our competitive advantage

Due to our transparent view of the SAP market we are able to consult on what the value of a particular SAP resource may be at any one time. Rates/salaries tend to fluctuate greatly in the SAP market based on demand and shortage of skills.

We have a clean database of over 9000 seasoned SAP & BI professionals and Linkedin networks that enable us to reach out to over 30 million people globally.

Because we are considered experts in our field many of the candidates that we deal with are happy for us to consult on what their current value is at any particular time. This allows us to ensure that rates/ salaries are not inflated due to over confidence. It is also our aim to purely deal with the very best proven SAP consultants working on the best projects in Australia. These are consultants who have the focus, drive, articulation and professionalism to ensure that projects do not drift and that re-work is kept at zero.

If the SAP consultant you require exists, we are confident we will find them. We save time and effort by doing confidential background checks up front for candidates that we have not engaged with previously.

This ensures that only quality, reliable resources are presented to our clients.

We are passionate about our field and take real accountability for the work that is entrusted to us by our clients. We will provide you with an ethical, upfront approach to your recruitment and we will always strive to achieve positive outcomes for all parties involved in the recruitment process.

To speak with an SAP recruitment expert today, please call www.acuitysearch.com.au

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02 8011 4220

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