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barbara_lapp
Discoverer

Meet our Team


TechEd Las Vegas is SAP’s premier technology education event in North America where SAP’s customers, partners, prospects, educators, developers and innovators get together for hands-on workshops, executive keynotes, lectures, code and demo jams, networking sessions and more.

This year Rahel Hertczeg, Michael Palmer, Barbara Lapp, Sanit Jain, and Manoj Karjala Chandrasekar attended SAP TechEd to represent SAP’s Business Innovation and Information Technology team to showcase how co-innovation and internal implementation of SAP solutions contribute to SAP’s success by being their own first and best reference customer. Quoting the experience in their own words, “Don't ask us what happened in Vegas (joking) actually we would love to share our TechEd experience. TechEd 2015 Las Vegas was suffused with incessant brainstorming, customer illustrations, partner engagement, super-inspiring interactions with top-level executives, astounding keynotes, a plethora of learning opportunities, team building and so much more. We are so proud and thankful for the opportunity to showcase the hard work many of our colleagues contributed towards making SAP run simple, sell smarter, and run better in this digital economy.


(Pictured here left to right is Manoj, Barb, Michael, Rahel and Sanit)


These internal IT experts covered topics such as SAP Cloud for Customer, SAP hybris Marketing, S/4HANA Finance and multiple Mobile Applications. They were on hand for questions and product demos from the BI&IT pod in the Service and Support area of the TechEd showfloor, and were also speakers for several networking sessions.

Customer Engagement and Commerce (CEC)

Barbara Lapp’s networking session focused on the internal co-innovation and implementation of SAP’s Customer Engagement and Commerce (CEC) Solutions. In her session, Barb gave an overview of how SAP is using and adopting SAP hybris Marketing and SAP Cloud for Customer. She discussed how SAP internally runs through the entire software lifecycle, deployment and support process just like every other customer, making SAP a best reference to customers. At the conclusion of the session, Barb provided the current and future roadmap of SAP’s internal implementation of the CEC solutions as well as key business benefits achieved to date.

After an overview of the internal business critical systems, Barb talked about the evolution from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to Customer Engagement and discussed how SAP is transforming, based on the CEC solution portfolio, to the Omni-Channel Customer Engagement approach. Barb described how this transformation is helping SAP’s marketers and sales representatives to develop a deeper understanding of customer behavior, intent and expectations. SAP hybris Marketing, running on SAP Hana, is helping aggregate data from various inbound channels to a ‘single source of truth’ used to drive omni-channel engagement. SAP’s marketers and sales representatives are able to gain real-time insight into the context of each customer, and can leverage the insight to deliver highly individualized customer experiences across the various channels.


Along with SAP hybris Marketing, Barb explained how SAP is using SAP Cloud for Customer to empower their salespeople to harness their collective intelligence and to seamlessly move forward in the sales cycle. With SAP Cloud for Customer, SAP’s sales representatives have access to simple automation tools that enable mobility, social collaboration and social selling, deep customer insight and predictive analytics, relevant recommendations throughout the buying cycle, and visibility needed across the sales cycle to support sales revenue opportunities.

Some of the internal key business benefits achieved with SAP hybris Marketing:

Campaign Efficiency – accelerated campaign-to-market

Lead Volume Increase – improvements in automated routing

Drastic increase of response handling velocity

Marketing agility – real-time processing for updated contact scores and segmentations

Creating new customer insights with big data analytics and scoring

As well as some internal Key Business Benefits Achieved with SAP


Some of the internal key business benefits achieved with SAP Cloud for Customer:

Operational Efficiency - real time mobile access and less clicks and time spend on Opportunity Management (HANA deployed)

Shorter Sales Cycles – Collaboration and Visual Access to Close Plans

Advanced Insight Reporting and Analytics (persona-based)

End-to-end process and data integration into existing business critical back office functions

If you will be attending SAP TechEd Barcelona, please join Barb’s colleague Andre Spura on Tuesday, November 10th for his Networking Session EXP27342 Customer Engagement and Commerce, from 14:30 to 15:00 in Lounge 2, Showfloor.

Enterprise Mobility

Sanit Jain’s networking session focused on how Business Innovation and Information Technology (BI&IT) mobilizes a workforce of over 75,000 colleagues globally and how BI&IT is a role model for other organizations focused on making information available to their customers anytime – anywhere. Sanit continued to discuss the consumerization of IT in the enterprise space, and how Enterprise Mobility at BI&IT has embraced this by building a scalable ecosystem with delightful apps that provide real time information to the users anytime and on any device with almost no training required.

Sanit also shared the sheer volume of devices (around 70,000) SAP’s workforce has across multiple different platforms such as iOS, Android and Windows 8 (Microsoft), and various apps including native mobile apps and Fiori apps, many of which have been developed in-house utilizing the latest SAP Products such as the SAP HANA Cloud Platform and Fiori.


Apart from this, Sanit presented the Enterprise Mobility roadmap starting in 2010 with a massive challenge of mobilizing SAP’s global workforce. Starting with 70 native mobile apps majority of which were iOS apps, quickly scaling up with 73,500 managed devices and around 70,000 mobile documents users that provided access to files anytime – anywhere. Along the way, Sanit added that they leveraged the cloud being the first and best reference customers of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, and implemented some standard Fiori apps and also many custom Fiori apps that were built completely in-house. Concluding this part of the session, Sanit added that by the end of 2015, all mobile devices would be enrolled in the SAP Mobile Secure Cloud which will be a single platform to provision and install internal apps.


Moving forward, Sanit also laid out the end to end mobile process from an end user perspective that starts with device enrollment in the cloud and Single Sign On setup that happens automatically. The SAP Mobile Secure cloud acts as a single source of app downloads with centralized documentation and rollout communication of new apps. Support is the next piece in the process that enables community driven app support and also innovative frameworks such as App Crash Log Framework allowing users to send crash reports instantly. At the very end of the spectrum but still very important is the App usage tracking that helps understand the usage patterns, adoption and other metrics that enable measurement of the User Experience, and feeds into further development for improvements.

At the conclusion of Sanit’s session he provided a few interactive demos of some of BI&IT’s most popular apps that leverage the latest and greatest capabilities of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform such as SAP Sign Up that helps setup event registrations and interest groups and a few apps that empower our Sales force with the right tools when they face the Customers.

A few innovative frameworks developed in-house were also showcased using live demos. Some of them included:


Mobile Usage Framework

The framework that is shown below is a real time world map of the apps that are being used internally at that very instant.

According to Sanit, the mobile usage framework doesn’t just provide the world map but also key insight into app usage, adoption, and other metrics that are used to measure the User Experience, and make improvements accordingly.

Feedback Shake

Sanit mentioned that the Feedback Shake was one of the top innovative frameworks that were developed in house. This framework can be easily integrated in any app, and allows users to shake their phones to provide feedback instantly. The framework instantly attaches logs and screenshots for the development team to detect issues, evaluate feedback and take appropriate action very quickly.


If you will be attending SAP TechEd Barcelona, please join Sanit’s colleague Simon Hofmann on Wednesday, November 11th for Networking Session EXP27453 Develop SAP Fiori Apps and Back-End Mobile Applications with SAP HANA Cloud Platform, from 11:30 to 12:00 in Lounge 2, Showfloor.

S/4HANA Finance

Manoj Karjala Chandrasekar’s sessions and demos gave insight into why a flexible core with SAP S/4HANA is the Next-Generation Business Suite to achieve digital transformation and how SAP Business Innovation & IT team implemented S/4HANA Finance in a co-innovation model at SAP being a frontrunner in demonstrating the value added to organizations and lines of Business.

Networking Sessions:

Manoj shared his knowledge of SAP’s vision and ERP journey to S/4HANA On Premise and then Cloud edition and delineated the internal roadmap of SAP S/4HANA Finance implementation as SAP’s first and best reference customer. Attendees of the session were able to learn that with the adoption of S/4HANA and SAP Simple Finance (now known as SAP S/4HANA Finance), SAP was amongst the first companies to benefit from SAP’s simplified data model running about 74,000 business users on S/4HANA.
Yes! He did tell it like it is!


Journey & Roadmap

The key focus of Manoj’s sessions was to provide insight into the SAP S/4HANA Finance Project set up and cut over & data migration. After providing an overview of these topics, Manoj explained the concept of universal journal entry (data from different tables combined into one table ACDOCA) creating one single source of truth for all FI & CO processes running in a global single instance mission critical ERP system.

Additionally, he briefed attendees on advantages like minimized reconciliation effort, implementation of new document types & new number ranges for controlling postings, logic behind extension ledgers quoting example of M&A scenarios where management correction postings are a regular occurrence and implications on business processes especially master data management.

During the networking session on Data Migration, Manoj catered to inquisitive partners/customers with details on early adoption project highlights of S/4HANA Finance 1503 at SAP. Specific topics discussed in this session were project management, data volume management, custom code analysis, performance testing & tuning, disaster recovery/high availability approach, cut over management and post go-live support & safeguarding. The session was concluded with highlight on project take-away and main technical & business values.

Manoj closed his sessions with a demonstration of the navigation & customizing options on Fiori Launchpad and showed some S/4HANA Finance Fiori apps like Financial statement, Future receivables, and also Enterprise Search.

If you will be attending SAP TechEd Barcelona, please join Manoj’s colleagues Peter Boegler and Kornelia Maier and for lectures and expert networking sessions TEC204, EXP27341, EXP27343.

Events @ TechEd Barcelona: