Live from SAPinsider 2023: Finance, Day 1

Technology and organizational change

The 2023 SAPinsider Vegas event had a great keynote kickoff today, starting with what Chobani’s Parag Agrawal said: “Technology is not a problem. Technology works—organizational change is the challenge.”

Agrawal was supported by SAP North America President Lloyd Adams in his presentation. With SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA and SAP Central Finance — all available for years to SAP customers, implemented for years, and successfully operated hundreds and thousands of times—the underlying and enabling technology has been put to the test and has turned out just fine.

So what drives the differences in outcome among the many implementations? The technology delivers the processes to be executed. The implementations drive the orchestration and execution by the people in the organization, and they differ from customer to customer.

Despite implementation methodology optimizations and automation capabilities for the migration, the human aspect makes the difference. How early you get your people involved, how well you let them know what the implementation is designed to achieve, and how much you let them test-drive their existing processes in the new world—all these are the difference between success and failure. It is well known, yet still too many organizations focus only on the technology aspects. Don’t!

Transformation and people

Another key takeaway today came from Jane Connell at Verizon: “Make sure transformation is happening with them (your people), not to them. And communicate, communicate, communicate.”

It is easy to forget the original project objectives once a project has started. Resources, deliverables, rollouts, and timelines need to be managed. In the end, you need your people in order to achieve a transformation with the new processes. The more they buy in, are included in design decisions, are trained before test execution, and optimally are handed operational accountability, the better the outcome, of course.

Learning and growing

We saw a great level of excitement among the conference attendees on this first day—to be here in person again, to network, to connect, and to interact in person. There is a clearly visible desire to learn more but to also talk about the latest and greatest in finance with partners, speakers, and peers from other organizations.

Nothing beats a personal conversation, and with an awesome agenda ahead for the next two days, there is plenty to learn and a lot to talk about. Business and finance transformation, intelligent automation, and S/4 deployment front and center—not only in the finance track but also in other tracks—should bring plenty of excitement.