Day 1: Day 1 Jump Start to SAP for Utilities
Day 2: Day 2 SAP for Utilities North America
This blog will cover days 3 and 4. Day 4 was workshop day. This event had over 826 attendees, 174 companies and 13 countries represented.
It's been a few days since the SAP for Utilities North America event ended, and I am still absorbing everything I learned and most importantly, the people I met. Before this conference I watched graham.robinson video about how it was more important to network than attend sessions. I tried to keep that in mind because in the past I always attended events for the education side.
First I want to thank the ASUG Volunteer track chairs and the Eventful group. I keep hoping to adopt Eventful's best practices of always making the attendees and speakers feel special, always actively engaging and asking how the event is going. Kudos and thank you to both groups.
The start of Day 3 ASUG CEO Geoff Scott spoke and said that ASUG is a "member-driven user group", and ASUG is about networking, education and influence. Also on stage were the ASUG Utilities SIG volunteers including Sue Daulton and Shachella James. SAP said that ASUG was the "fabric of the community".
The keynote was Doug Whittle, who discussed change management. He talked about why projects fail; 11% are due to lack of leadership commitment. 21% of projects fail due to cultural barriers, 23% are due to obstruction of middle managers and 37% fail to achieve employees commitment. He also talked about how important it was to keep employees happy as it costs from $3,500 to $80K when employees leave. He also said he worries more about employees who "quit" emotionally but stay in the job anyway, as it costs even more to the company. He talked about Jim Collins' saying it is important to get the "wrong people off the bus".
Also a key slide from Doug Whittle's presentation is shown below:
Source: Geoff Scott.
On the show floor, I learned there is an ESRI-SAP User group - see http://www.esri.com/industries/apps/sap/usergroup/index.cfm . GIS and SAP integration held high interest at this conference. Pacific Gas & Electric said they needed to integrate GIS and SAP for "better data integrity".
At the end of day 3, we turned in our evaluations and received a USB containing the presentations and pictures. I created an Animoto of these pictures here. Also see below - full attribution goes to the Eventful photographer for taking these pictures:
The final day was workshop day. I didn't take any pictures. I took the BI4.1 BW on HANA workshop and the day flew by. Here is a subset of my notes:
- Exercises based on NetWeaver demo model, so you can reuse back at your office
- Agile – for the business user; self-service, do not need IT
- If starting a new project, start with #SAPDesignStudio or Lumira over BusinessObjects Explorer or Dashboards
- The query does not go away with BW
- Web Intelligence thick client offline – good for sales team
- Do not need to build 1 query per report
- Connect to the queries or the cube?
Care to learn more? I recommend registering for ASUG SAP TechEd Pre-conference HANDS-ON: SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1, SAP BW and SAP BW on SAP HANA – All in One Day, October 20th at SAP TechEd
Also check the SAP4UTL tag board:
https://tagboard.com/SAP4UTL/search
Next year's SAP for Utilities North America event will be at Huntington Beach, California, September 13-15 - so save the date.
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