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​Some of you may recall Chris Oughton’s review of this year’s SAUG Sydney Summit and the key takeaways. This month we attended the Melbourne conference and loved meeting new faces in the SAP world and reconnecting with old Spellerites!

Luke Day and Keely Shay both attended their first SAUG and embraced the free flowing conversation with the attendees. Many of our past and present contracts were excited to meet the new additions to the growing Speller family.

Keely was excited to attend a couple of the summit sessions; her favourite was hosted by IBM and SAP. “It was fantastic to see customers & vendors sharing the stage to talk about their experiences, the good bad and really ugly. The road map for SAP and more importantly S/4HANA sound very exciting to see and hear more about how people transition across by 2025.”

Luke also joined in on a few sessions. He gained the most insight from the Customer Panel hosted by SAP mentor Chris Payne. “I was surprised to see three SAP customers sitting together on stage and having an open and honest discussion about their SAP journey and path forward. What the SAUG means (SAP Australia USER Group), it’s about the users sharing their experience, both good and bad to assist their peers in not experiencing the same pain and ultimately driving the evolution of SAP projects in Australia.”

This year’s SAUG was S/4HANA and the Cloud. Specifically how they related to a few keys areas:

Customer & User Experience

Following the SAP innovation story line and the recent purchase of market leading Qualtrics, there was a lot of discussion around quantifying peoples experience to drive more tangible benefits in business cases when discussing IT business cases. These types of tools will assist in this journey and SAP is investing heavily.

Analytics & Visualisation

Data, Data, Data. Where is it and how do we get our hands on it instantaneously, anywhere? Where does it get stored? More importantly, how do we display this data to make it more useful, accessible and valuable? Enter SAP Cloud Analytics and display suites. It is increasing speed top access data in most cases and making this vital information available to relevant areas of your business in a more timely and relevant manner and environment.

Off-Shore VS On-Shore

Whether its hosting, support, or technical skills, the discussion around off shoring activities to achieve business efficiencies and cost savings is ever prevalent. With many businesses being cross boarder this is a key decision for a number of reasons and a lot needs to be considered. There was a lot of sharing around the different approaches and even some challenges faced and overcome.

The team always enjoys the SAUG Summit environment and thrive off its energy, so we all wanted to say a big thank you to the SAUG team for their hard work in bringing us together to share our war stories, and successes.

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