thoughts from SAPPHIRENOW 2016

I had the pleasure again to visit SAPPHIRENOW again... not sure how many times I have been there yet, but the first one I attended was at the Embassy Suites in Orlando in 1992. 300 people were there... a stark contrast to the roughly 30,000 this year.

There was the usual show floor with all the partner exhibits, lots of presentations, all the ASUG seminars and keynotes from Bill McDermott and Steve Wozniak. But my personal highlight - as it is every year - was Hasso Plattner. He still has is, so I think, the driving force behind SAP and to a very large degree it is his genius that makes the SAP story an absolute awesome success.

HANA is his latest achievement and with it he is probably breaking any barrier there is. HANA has been around for a while but his speech made me finally understand what the possibilities are. They are enormous and I see an incredible amount of excitement for it. In a few years everybody will be running on HANA - first as a database for the suite of software available today, then on the new suite S/4 HANA.

It looks like a bright future for business software and there will be incredibly sophisticated apps and features running businesses more effectively and fast... if ! and that is still the crux of the matter: you fix the process first and use the tool as it was intended. Planners still have to understand how to move through the planning horizons and when to use rate based planning or takt-based scheduling... It won`t help you to move your production scheduling to S/4 HANA if you run your lines by access database clculations today or your buyers replenish with spreadsheet lists.

Fix and clean up your old ERP first and then use the cut-over transaction Hasso presented in his speech. It´s a fantastic way to go to HANA if you´re ready for it.

Hasso is ready and covered all the bases... did you?