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​Last week myself and a team from Speller attended the huge SAUG Summit event in Sydney. We celebrated the 20 year anniversary with a Mexican fiesta, what seemed to be the biggest attendance to date and over 70 breakout sessions over 2 full days!

There was a big focus on user experience, change management and less customization of products, here are some key takeaways from the event;

S4/HANA

As expected S4/HANA was a hot topic, with multiple speakers discussing their journey as some of the first companies in Australia to go-live with S4/HANA.

For the speakers, Change Management from an organisational point of view seemed to be a struggle and going forward they will look at Change Management as a crucial component of an implementation, with the ‘people’ aspect being considered more than ever. Business Process will also be key to any good S4 implementation. It will be more about running efficient processes than high customisation.

Change

With all the transformation happening around Australia, one major takeaway from the SAUG was the importance of Change, and are companies doing it right? Are companies embracing Change and viewing it as a positive thing? It certainly was a question we heard buzzing around the conference over two days.

For example, here at Speller, we find the companies that bring in a Change Lead/team from the very start of the project, or at the same time as a Project Director, often are the projects that are deemed the most successful and have fewer problems or surprises throughout the implementation.

We find companies love to promote within – if you are in a company where an ERP implementation is about to take place, put your hand up, join the change team, or be a change champion!

The Cloud

The topic of the Cloud brought some interesting sessions, ranging from building mobile applications for the SAP Platform and planning your Cloud journey with practical steps.

We have definitely seen an increase in roles needing SuccessFactors, ARIBA, FieldGlass. We suggest trying to find projects that are using and implementing these, speak so Speller about where and how!

In short, the overall theme seemed to be around the human element of projects. How are clients implementing Change? Are Change teams being brought on from day one of a project or halfway through the transformation? What technologies and skill sets are being utilised more and how are clients mapping out their transformation journey?

It was also great to see so many new attendees from organisations who are about to go through a massive SAP journey from all across Australia.

From our perspective it was one of the most successful SAUG’s to date, we found more and more clients coming to our stand and enquiring about how to engage our services which was great to see. In addition, we were able to network with candidates we have worked with previously and catch up on their career progression and also meet the new SAP talent and introduce them to Speller International.