Themes of Transformation Permeate SAP Customers and Ecosystem Partners

⇨ Transformation remains the focal point for organizations seeking to redefine technology and operational roadmaps.

⇨ Ecobat, an organization whose mission it is to dispose of batteries with little to no impact on the environment, embraced SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition to consolidate a disparate global landscape and embrace best practice-based processes.

⇨ Ecosystem partners such as YASH Technologies, SUSE, and Red Hat are at the center of customer journeys like Ecobat’s and will continue to play pivotal roles moving forward.

SAP customer and partner technology leaders convened at SAPinsider 2023 to discuss their transformation experiences and perspectives. This discussion built upon themes of digital transformation discussed in Lloyd Adam’s event kickoff keynote earlier in the week.

SAPinsider Chief Research Officer Riz Ahmed facilitated a panel discussion to further explore transformation topics. Panelists included:

• Jamie Lee, CIO, Ecobat
• Sunil Eda, SAP Business Leader, YASH Technologies
• Jeff Loomis, Vice President Enterprise Sales, SUSE
• Wolfgang Bausch, Global Head of SAP Business, Red Hat

Ecobat Embraces Digital Transformation with an Eye on Sustainability

Ecobat, the world leader in lead production, is also the leader in metallurgic repurposing and sustainability. Remarkably, the global firm also stands at the forefront of battery recycling by recovering and repurposing 99% of the metal volume lead production produces. The complexity of this level of this production-sustainability balance cannot be underestimated; neither can the systems required for managing all aspects of the Ecobat business.

In a digital transformation and simplification journey co-defined with SAP partner YASH Technologies, Ecobat embarked upon a multi-year endeavor to consolidate and transform its enterprise landscape. Concurrently, Ecobat sought to ensure its ability to maintain core organizational objectives around sustainability. Deemed Project Essential, this transformation was indeed essential.

Ecobat embraced RISE with SAP to future-proof its business and consolidate a disparate landscape spanning 25 global partner locations. YASH Technologies was selected to transform Ecobat from an existing state that included significant manual processes and disparate end-customer experiences. Defining and executing upon a multi-year roadmap and globally-disbursed resource teams that aligned with Ecobat locations were critical to selection of YASH Technologies. Similarly, SAP S/4HANA transformation experience and ability to enable non-disruptive go-lives were central to partner selection.

In a yeoman’s effort, the project team consolidated legacy systems to a single SAP S/4HANA instance that embraced industry and business best practices. Ecobat completed its last global go-live in early 2023 despite challenges of beginning a global project during the COVID-19 pandemic. In line with sustainability objectives, Ecobat retired an on-premise data center upon final go-live.

SUSE and Red Hat: A HANA Operating System Partner Journey

SUSE was the first operating system partner for SAP HANA when HANA was introduced as an in-memory database and enterprise data warehouse in 2010. In turn, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) was at the forefront of early SAP HANA customer journeys. SLES saw SAP HANA use cases expand from in-memory analytics, to sidecar EDW, to SAP Business Warehouse (BW) on HANA, to SAP Suite on HANA, and beyond.

There was a clear need for operating system partner expansion as SAP HANA adoption proliferated the customer-base. In turn, SAP selected Red Hat stepped to help scale and meet demand. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) joined SLES as an SAP HANA operating system partner in the 2010s and has since become integral to ongoing product scalability. Red Hat recently deepened its SAP partnership as the preferred operating system for net new RISE with SAP solution deployments, as discussed by Robert Holland, Vice President and Research Director, SAPinsider.