Inside SAP Winter 2012

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Issue 18 | Winter 2012

HEAD IN THE CLOUDSLars Dalgaard leads the way as

SAP gets clear on cloud

THE fUTUrE fOr SHArED SErvICESIs two-tier ERP the answer?

Case studiesBUSINESS ByDESIGN at QVS GloBal

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www.insidesap.com.au 3

CONTENTS

4 Editor’s note

5 Quarterly news roundup

News in Focus

8 SAP continues acquisition spree

Interview

10 Gaining clarity on cloud: Tom Kindermans

24 Enterprise Support focuses on healthcare post-acquisition

Column

12 Consumerisation of IT: Forcing the evolution of the CIO’s role

Profile13 Encouraging women in IT: Tammy Ven Dange

Industry sector features

16 Public sector: The future for shared services

24 Utilities: Getting smart

28 Retail and consumer products: Consumers in control

Case studies

19 SA Health: Inside emergency departments

32 SME Focus: QVS takes the plunge with Business ByDesign

Technology

34 Roambi: BI on the go

35 Mobility: The case for enterprise apps

Careers

37 Are you getting what you pay for?

38 Girls embrace Young ICT Explorers

40 On the Move

Events

30 SAPPHIRE Now 2012: the round-up

44 SAP Forum Australia and SAUG Summit 2012

45 Event calendar

46 Partner directory

10

30

19

32

24

38

4 Inside SAP magazine

EDITOR

From the EditorIt seems to be all about the cloud at the moment for SAP. Following the acquisition of SuccessFactors earlier this year, SAP outlined its cloud strategy and revealed that the influence of Lars Dalgaard and his team will stretch far beyond the HCM suite, with a 5000-strong cloud business unit now in place at SAP. Speaking on the possibilities offered by cloud, Dalgaard was the newest addition to the keynote line-up at SAPPHIRE NOW, alongside Bill McDermott, Jim Hagemann Snabe, Hasso Plattner, and Vishal Sikka. SuccessFactors held one of its annual SuccessConnect events in Sydney in May, and SAP APJ senior vice president, business solutions, Tom Kindermans was in town to present at the event. He spoke to us about the new cloud strategy and what it means for the ecosystem.

One of the industry sectors expected to benefit from this more clearly defined cloud strategy is the public sector. Our feature on page 16 discusses why shared services is so on the nose in the public sector, and how a two-tier ERP model utilising cloud solutions may become a more attractive option for public sector agencies trying to manage constant machinery of government changes. With citizens demanding more than ever before from their governments, our case study of SA Health’s new public emergency department dashboards also shows how analytics can be deployed to improve public service access and outcomes.

HANA was again a hot topic at SAPPHIRE NOW, and in this edition, we look at its potential to provide organisations in the utilities and the retail and FMCG sectors with competitive edge, as well as the other trends currently affecting these industries.

Looking long-term, one of the greatest challenges facing the IT sector – particularly around SAP – is recruitment and retention of skilled staff. Statistics show that the number of students studying IT at university continues to fall. We profile Tammy ven Dange, who is working to encourage more women to choose ICT careers, and she shares her thoughts on what the IT sector can do to recruit more women in the future. Meanwhile, there are encouraging signs from the 2012 Young ICT Explorers competition, run by SAP, that both more school students and particularly, a larger number of girls, are keen to get involved in the ICT space – see the story on page 38.

I hope you enjoy this edition.

Managing Editor Freya Purnellt. (02) 9929 5465m. 0412 602 [email protected]

Journalist/Editorial Assistant Anne Widjajat. (02) 9929 [email protected] Kirsten Wadet. (02) 9929 [email protected]

Creative Director Justin Knightst. (02) 9929 5465m. 0425 292 [email protected]

Advertising SalesLaura Blackwellt. 02 9029 6028m. 0411 [email protected]

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© 2012 FlapJack Media Pty Ltd. Inside SAP is published four times a year by FlapJack Media Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publishers. FlapJack Media Pty Ltd makes no representation or warranties with respect to this magazine or its contents including, without limitation, material communicated by third parties. FlapJack Media Pty Ltd does not warrant that the information available in this magazine is accurate, complete or current. Opinions expressed are those of the respective authors and not necessarily of the publisher. Neither FlapJack Media Pty Ltd nor any persons involved in the preparation of this publication will be liable for any loss or damage as a result of use of or reliance upon advice, representation, statement, opinion or conclusion expressed in Inside SAP magazine.

Freya Purnell Managing Editor, Inside SAP



Making news this quarterFrom SAP

SAP was also named a market share leader in the financial performance, strategy management (FPSM) and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) applications market by IDC, with combined 2011 revenues of US$778.4 million and 26.1 per cent market share. IDC said that SAP’s marketing, expansion in product functionality and the extension of FPSM into cross-functional GRC were key drivers of its growth. IDC also said SAP innovations in enterprise mobility and in-memory technology have been extended to the FPSM market, with the SAP HANA platform positioned as a key growth accelerator.

Gartner has positioned SAP in the leaders quadrant of the ‘Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms’. The positioning is determined by the evaluation of the SAP mobile platform, including Sybase Unwired Platform, SAP Afaria mobile device management solution and Sybase 365. “Increasingly enterprises look for a single MADP that can address most, if not all, of their future projects across all scenarios,” said Gartner.

SAP AG continued its growth momentum in 2012, posting a record first quarter in the Asia Pacific and Japan region. However, sales execution issues hindered the company’s performance in North America. The preliminary first quarter results showed non-IFRS software and software-related service revenue had increased 12 per cent to a2.63 billion, and non-IFRS operating profit was up 7 per cent to a834 million. Shortly after the close of the quarter, SAP North America president Robert Corteau resigned, after just 15 months in the position.

SAP AG announced its innovation road map and revealed a new take on SAP’s database and mobile offerings, including plans for Sybase products and SAP HANA by 2015. Among the announcements were plans to launch a US$155 million venture fund for start-ups to build on the new real-time platform, as well as a US$337 million ‘SAP HANA Adoption Program’ to drive customer adoption of the platform. The roadmap also outlined plans for Sybase data management offerings and SAP solutions for enterprise information management (EIM). SAP also announced its plans to ramp up its mobility strategy, through the acquisition of Syclo, a leading provider of enterprise mobile applications and technologies, and new agreements with Adobe, Appcelerator and Sencha to support open a mobile apps development framework.

SAP AG turned 40, celebrating its birth as a five-man operation and its current success as one of the world’s largest independent software providers. Highlights of the celebration included a gala charity concert at the National Theater in Mannheim, Germany, a special exhibition and web magazine launch, and the most recent, the launch of a global social innovation competition on 18 June. The competition will award entrepreneurs with innovative social ideas and solutions ready to be launched.

SuccessFactors, an SAP company, announced it will open a new data centre in Sydney, which will be its first in Australia. SuccessFactors vice president, Asia Pacific, Murray Sargant, said it demonstrates the company’s commitment to the region, and supports the rapidly growing hosting demands of the Australian government and local business customers. The company also unveiled Professional Edition, a new BizX suite for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in Australia, designed to help business owners maximise the personnel side of their business – hiring the right people, developing employee skills and undertaking performance reviews.

Sybase Australia signed a partnership agreement with Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand for enterprise managed mobility solutions. Fujitsu will host mobile solutions powered by Sybase Managed Mobility technologies and offer them on a software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service basis to customers in the Australian and New Zealand marketplace. The partnership will also enable Fujitsu to integrate productivity apps from SAP – available on the Apple App store and the Android marketplace – with SAP Business Suite software.

Newsroundup


Partner news

New Mentors named

Project newsSAP announced plans to work with Citi and The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) to co-innovate a cloud-based services platform that integrates banks with their corporate customers. This new solution aims to overcome the isolation of each bank’s IT architecture model. SAP, Citi and RBS will aim to reduce the cost of corporate banking by creating links between banks’ transaction systems and businesses’ ERP and treasury systems. This will help streamline financial transactions, such as payments, while enabling new, on-demand banking services to be delivered via the cloud.

New Zealand electricity company, Top Energy, has become the latest in the sector to choose SAP, selecting SAP Business All-in-One to manage its businesses processes. Top Energy will replace their Microsoft Navision software with the SAP solution, which will help the company manage their finance, logistics, enterprise asset management and project management processes. Leading NZ SAP provider Soltius will act as implementation partner on the project.

SAP AG announced a new partnership with Global Speech Networks (GSN), a cloud contact centre provider in Australia and New Zealand, providing on-demand, cloud hosted contact centre solutions. Under the partnership, GSN will now offer SAP Business Communications Management (SAP BCM) in the cloud to ANZ companies.

Australasian-owned IT services company Datacom has acquired Enterprise Support Asia Pacific, supplier of SAP Human Capital Management implementation and support services. According to Datacom, this acquisition provides an extension to its existing capabilities in application support and payroll/HR.

Global SAP Business One partner Sapphire Systems has expanded its presence to Australia, setting up an office in Sydney. Sapphire managing director Ian Caswell said the company was continually looking for ways to better support its customers by setting up in new countries and time zones.

Logistics system supplier Dematic ANZ and SAP Warehouse Management (WM) integration specialist ICON Integration have launched an enhanced integrated voice technology solution for SAP WM to improve picking processes for manufacturers. Voice solutions have traditionally been delivered with middleware, but Icon Integration and Dematic have successfully set up a demo system to create the first directly connected voice technology solution.

Accenture is expanding its global network of innovation centres for SAP solutions with the opening of new facilities in Beijing, Tokyo and Singapore. The aim of the centres is to combine Accenture’s functional industry expertise with customer offerings from SAP’s latest technologies, including the SAP HANA platform and mobility and cloud solutions.

Newsroundup

In light of the growing popularity of the SAP HANA platform, Deloitte has recently launched its new Analytics Center of Excellence in support of clients the in-memory platform. Based in Hyderabad, India, the Center will help Deloitte deliver the latest and most-up-to-date strategies for supporting the deployment of SAP HANA to clients around the world.

The new intake of SAP Mentors for Spring 2012 have been announced, with two Australians – Joshua Fletcher and Sascha Wenninger – making the list. Fletcher is currently employed as the national SAP BI practice manager for ASG

Group, with over 10 years’ experience in BI applications. Wenninger is currently employed as a SAP integration architect, and was recently titled SCN Member of the month.

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Industry trends

The social networking experience has evolved to become an integral component of business culture and workplace strategies, according to a recent IDC report on the adoption of social business tools in Australian organisations. However, the report warned that businesses adopting social business tools must develop a “holistic road map focusing on people, culture and business outcomes”. The report suggests aligning social business initiatives with overarching business strategy is the best way to validate the implementation of social tools.

To truly engage the next generation of workers, organisations must offer applications that are at least as compelling as those they use in their personal lives, said SuccessFactors vice president, Asia Pacific, Murray Sargant, opening the SuccessConnect event in Sydney. “If you want to engage that workforce, they have to want to use all the applications that we have to give them, and they don’t differentiate. So when they come to work, let’s put some products in front of them that absolutely look like the systems that they use when they’re outside of work.”

One in five Australian and New Zealand executives are willing to ignore IT department policies and consume unapproved apps in the cloud, according to an IDC report, ‘Testing ANZ Employee Willingness to Bypass IT on the Way to the Cloud’. Workers aged between 31-35 and 41-45 were the most likely to ignore IT policies around using public cloud services.

CIOs in Australia and New Zealand consider governance, compliance, regulation and security as the biggest barriers to IT, above lack of IT budget and resources, according to the Gartner Executive Programs 2012 CIO Agenda survey. The report also found that the top three technology priorities for local CIOs are mobile technologies, analytics and business intelligence, and cloud computing, while the top three business priorities are attracting and retaining new customers, increasing enterprise growth and reducing enterprise costs.


SAP acquired Syclo in April this year, as a growth opportunity to enhance its mobile solutions by utilising Syclo’s building and selling expertise across a variety of industries.

Syclo is an established SAP partner, with more than 600 customers in 39 countries and multiple industries, including utilities, oil and gas, life sciences and manufacturing. According to SAP, Syclo’s expertise and technology offers a mature set of applications that will complement SAP’s offering in key mobile areas such as enterprise asset management (EAM), field services, inventory management and approvals/workflow.

The acquisition will also enable the acceleration of the adoption and deployment of new mobile asset management and field service solutions on SAP’s Sybase Unwired Platform.

Sanjay Poonen, president, global solutions, SAP, said the Syclo acquisition “adds momentum to our already powerful mobile portfolio, advancing our vision and leadership while accelerating our mobile apps”.

“Syclo brings both domain-savvy expertise and industry-leading solutions, as recognised by customers and analysts,” he said. “This will drive innovation and mobility in the workplace.”

A little over two months after the acquisition of Syclo, SAP acquired Ariba, an international cloud-based business commerce network, for US$4.3 billion. The Ariba board of directors unanimously approved the transaction, which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2012. Ariba’s established buyer-seller network and connection to more than 730,000 suppliers were some of the drawcards for SAP.

The acquisition marks the expansion of SAP’s cloud strategy into the B2B trading market.

SAP co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe said the Ariba acquisition would enable SAP to innovate and take advantage of shifts in the way people interact currently being driven by cloud technology.

“Cloud-based collaboration is redefining business network innovation, and we are catching this wave in the early stage of its evolution. The addition of Ariba will create the business network of the future, deliver immediate value to our customers and provide another solid engine for driving SAP’s growth in the cloud.”

Rodney Gedda, senior analyst, Telsyte, said these two acquisitions highlight SAP’s recognition of the increasing mobile trend.

“As the world becomes more mobile, SAP will continue

to invest in mobile applications and mobile-enabling technologies. So even though it has an established base of enterprise ERP customers, it knows it needs to enable its core software offerings to a larger, more mobile customer base,” he said.

Gedda said both acquisitions enable SAP to broaden their business software portfolio.

“The acquisitions makes sense as much as any other acquisition by a tier-1 software company. They are always looking to expand their suite of offerings through a combination of development and acquisitions.”

The underlying benefit of these additions to the SAP family, Gedda said, is that they complement the company’s current portfolio and offer new opportunities.

“SAP already has products and services in these areas, but as with any acquisition by a large vendor, there will be areas of crossover where there is an opportunity to broaden, or enhance, existing offerings.”

However, success now depends on how well the companies can be integrated into its established product lines, and their expertise and assets utilised.

In considering future acquisitions, Gedda adds, “what SAP wants to avoid is buying companies it thinks are good for its overall business but end up being shelved or poorly integrated into its mainstream products”.


News iN focus

SAP continues acquisition spree

ACQuISITIonS

In the last few months, SAP has expanded its portfolio of business software with mobility and cloud assets, through the acquisitions of global companies Ariba and Syclo. Kirsten Wade reports.

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interview

FP: Why has the acquisition of SuccessFactors been so important for SAP?

TK: It’s fascinating times for cloud, and with one of the biggest gurus in cloud taking over control of the SAP cloud business, our strategy is evolving; it’s more precise, it’s more articulated.

As we announced at SAPPHIRE, first of all cloud will focus on the four areas of the business that matter most for our customers – employees, customers, suppliers and financials. All cloud products we launch will belong to one of these four categories.

Second, all these elements can be bought independently of each other. So it won’t be like in the ERP world anymore, where you have to start with financials and then you can build on top of that. The four areas are loosely coupled with the other components, which means that if you implement more than one component together, it has advantages but it’s definitely not essential.

The third element is that we will provide standard integration of the on-demand components within our Business Suite, with fixed cost, fixed functionality, fixed integration scenario, fixed time to value.

The fourth component is that we provide a platform to our customers and to the independent software vendor (ISV) community, NetWeaver Cloud, to build functionality applications. We are still in the phase of controlled availability for the moment for that, though later this summer it will get to general availability. That’s the story we have for large enterprises.

We also have an appealing story for the small and midsize enterprises and that’s based on Business ByDesign and Business One in the cloud. We believe there is a market out there for smaller companies who do not have an IT department and who decide to push a maximum number of applications to cloud.

FP: For large enterprises, what opportunities will having easier access to these on-demand components bring?

TK: We believe that the IT architecture of most of our customers will be a hybrid architecture, with some of the core processes continuing to run on-premise and with some line of business applications running in the cloud, using the same master data and seamlessly integrated. Because when we look at the core processes of the company like financials, logistics, and so on, companies do want to have a minimum of risk. In the lines of business, they are much more innovative. As long as the time to value is short, they are ready to take many more risks.

FP: Do you think the role of the ecosystem will change with this type of strategy?

TK: It will definitely attract a number of ISVs who will develop on top of our cloud platform. That’s actually a really big play because the adoption of our platform will mainly come through the third party companies developing on our platform. That’s a strategy which we push in all areas of the business. You might have heard the announcement at SAPPHIRE that the development licences for HANA and mobility will be delivered for free; we are still figuring out what we do here with cloud, but attracting as many developers to our platforms is definitely a part of the role we believe the ecosystem needs to play.

FP: What does the new cloud business unit mean for SuccessFactors as an entity?

TK: Entity is the right word. We will create this separate business unit which will be the SuccessFactors employees plus the SAP employees who worked in our on-demand products. We will develop a maximum of synergies and what is absolutely certain is that the activities of this unit will not be limited to HCM. We have several cloud products, and some of them are based on a different platform. The priority will be to build the same user experience and a single sign-on, without, in the first phase, changing all the platforms. It might be that some of the different components will run on different platforms, but for the users, the customers, it will be seen as one consistent user interface with a single sign-on to all of these different applications.

FP: From customer feedback, are you hearing that the user interface is one of the appealing aspects of SuccessFactors solutions?

TK: Definitely. One of the pain points in our portfolio is the user interface. For on-premise solutions, a clear evolution will

Gaining clarity on cloudTom Kindermans, senior vice president, business solutions, SAP APJ was in Sydney for SuccessConnect 2012, and he spoke to Freya Purnell about the company’s newly defined cloud strategy, and how cloud will make organisations more agile.

tom kindermans

be that the user interface will change dramatically, and we will definitely learn from the best practice of SuccessFactors there. What you will see is that we will offer choice in user interface for professional users and casual users. People who use SAP every day like our user interface because it’s fast and they know their way around. We are criticised by the casual users, and for them we will come up with a totally different user experience.

FP: You are presenting on agility at SuccessConnect. What do you see as the key components for creating agile organisations?

TK: A very important component when we talk about agility is time to value. In the past, we had these projects where whole armies of consultants marched into customers, and stayed there for as many years as possible. Those times are over. Time to value becomes a very important component. Companies are even ready to compromise on functionality as long as the time to value becomes shorter. Companies have evolved from ‘I need to have it 100 per cent the way I want it’, to ’90 per cent is OK as long as I have it fast’. That’s where the success of cloud kicks in.

FP: Will the way consultancies work on deploying SAP solutions change in response to this too?

TK: For sure. There is no fear that consultants will be without any work because there is still a shortage of SAP consultants in the world. How we can extend the consultant community is still

a clear priority for us. So it’s not that all these people will all of a sudden be unemployed. But the role of the consultants will change, and the ratio of software to services for these projects will change. Where we have projects with a ratio of 1:3, 1:5, 1:10 at the moment, we believe in the future it will be 1:1, software to services.

FP: If companies are pursuing agility, choosing the right path is important. With so many new solutions and options as part of the SAP portfolio now, how can they cut through the confusion and make the right choices?

TK: It’s part of our strategy to offer choice to the customer. In contrary to other companies, we do not believe in a lock-in strategy. We believe that choosing a vendor which is open and where you have all this choice is clearly an advantage for our customers. You call it confusion, we call it freedom. It is important to set the right priorities where you will spend your money first.

FP: What is your ultimate goal with cloud?

TK: Through the acquisition of SuccessFactors, we have 15.6 million users, which is the most users of any cloud company in the world. So we are market leader from a user point of view, but our goal is to be the number one cloud provider in revenue terms in 2015.


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column

By Peter Wilson

The proliferation of technological devices over the past decade has made what was once an arcane skillset – high-level computer literacy – into a job requirement. And that has resulted in some interesting changes to the job description of today’s IT specialists.

Through a type of electronic natural selection, the boxy desktops and blocky cell phones of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s gave way to today’s sleek smartphones, tablets and ultrabooks. It is a buyer’s market now for those looking to get a mobile device, with more computing power than last decade’s high-performance desktop. And with countless brands, models and carriers to choose from, choice has become the enemy of the CIO.

Their ubiquity has led to a flood of personal gadgets into the business world; the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement is real, as are the demands of employees who want an integration of their work and home lives on their individual iPhones and Androids. This ‘consumerisation of IT’ has resulted in a more technologically-minded population, and consequently is triggering sweeping changes to the IT landscape, including its organisational functions and employee job descriptions.

The new generation entering the workforce, regardless of their specialisation, is equipped with a working knowledge of how to operate and occasionally troubleshoot an array of devices. Accompanying this boost in IT self-sufficiency is a decline in the need for separate IT departments and managers to conduct day-to-day system maintenance and problem-solving. More niche IT positions, from your network architects to your advanced security pros, are still in high demand, but the shoes to fill are shrinking for basic supervisors.

IT departments are now at a crossroads, as they face a significant loss of control due to modern tech trends. Their best (and necessary) answer is to adapt and evolve to meet the new demands BYOD brings. Some IT professionals think that means going back to the books – building up their device and operating system-specific knowledge in order to be equipped to combat anything and everything. I would advocate that it means the IT department must evolve the way it manages its resources – that it turns to outsourcing or self-service models to handle the challenges that BYOD brings so it can focus on strategy.

The biggest obstacle that IT as an industry needs to overcome, however, is advancing its place in the basic strategic vision of the company. IT certainly can’t stay

strategic while managing the daily issues involved with BYOD. From entry-level techs to upper-level execs, IT needs to discover how it becomes not just a facilitator of business dealing, but an area of the business that creates value and helps generate return on investment. Such a massive gearshift has to start at the top. It is up to CIOs to adopt a proactive stance in order to navigate their IT departments where they need to go.

At the topmost levels, CIOs should prioritise strategic tasks over the tactical. The ultimate CIO goal should be to earn an equal say at the C-level table, to become an integral aspect of all overall business functions, not merely the technical ones.

A simple but effective example of this is ‘big data’. How are you approaching this issue? Many CEOs are asking for ways to manage exponential growth of the company’s structured and unstructured data. A merely tactical CIO will come up with a viable way to manage that data. A strategic CIO will devise a structure that not only manages the data, but moulds it into valuable business intelligence.

Again, IT does not have to be separate from the sales team or the marketing department, the quality assurance groups, or the operational management – collaboration is key. CIOs can forge this integration by aligning their IT team’s goals with broader company initiatives, and volunteering to fill in necessary gaps in the overall business plan. CIOs have to keep themselves in the know regarding other departments’ programs, and ask questions such as: “How can IT fit into this? Where can we help? How can we make this more efficient?”

Similarly, CIOs can start pioneering IT change by building relationships. Whether they are cross-department or cross-level, IT will benefit from intra-company exposure. Increased interaction with clients and customers beyond your internal sphere is another important step to making what some believe to be an obscure function more transparent. Finally, a touch of flexibility and creativity from CIOs, and encouraged throughout the IT ranks, will make departments more dynamic, productive and relevant to an organisation’s future.

Ultimately, there is little IT departments can do to halt or prevent certain phenomena. With strong leadership and a fresh outlook, however, they can not only prepare for whatever comes next, but determine it completely.


Peter Wilson is Datacom’s managing director of systems for Australia and Asia. His vision ensures every Datacom location is equipped with the world-class knowledge and capabilities necessary to help enterprises transform their IT department.

Consumerisation of IT: Forcing the evolution of the CIO’s role

CIO trends


profile

Recently honoured with the Leoni Warne Women in ICT Award, Tammy Ven Dange is committed to encouraging other women to enter and remain in the IT industry. She spoke to Freya Purnell about her experiences with SAP and why we need to start educating students earlier about the opportunities a career in IT can bring.

Tammy ven Dange

Encouraging women in IT

When it comes to attracting the next generation, IT has an image problem, according to Tammy Ven Dange, ACT regional manager for Plaut IT Australia.

It’s a view borne out by the statistics, which show that the number of students taking ICT at university has more than halved in the last decade.

As president of Women in Information and Communication, a volunteer organisation based in Canberra which champions women in ICT, Ven Dange spends time talking to young people, particularly girls, about considering a career in IT.

What they want is two-fold: they want a meaningful career, and they want to make money. But they are under the impression that IT won’t necessarily provide either.

“They are surprised when I explain to them what the IT system does in a situation like the Queensland floods where Centrelink sends these massive vans and trucks there so they can give people money on the spot. They didn’t recognise that the emergency evacuation systems in place for bushfires in Victoria are done by IT,” Ven Dange says.

“When you start to go through the different scenarios and how IT helps people, especially in government, they can see it’s important.”

The opportunity to choose the type of lifestyle they want – and make the level of income they desire – is also attractive.

“As soon as you tell them that a graduate from IT makes more than a fully qualified nurse, their eyes suddenly start to open up. When you say you could do it from anywhere, their eyes widen further. When you say you could work six months of the year, and probably vacation the other six if that’s how you want to set up your lifestyle, then you’ve really got their attention.”

The winding roadVen Dange’s own career is a great example of how IT can take you anywhere. She began her career as a procurement officer for the US Air Force, before joining the Peace Corps, volunteering in Africa.

“I was helping the governor of one of the islands in Cape Verde with their IT training, as well as bringing in more tourist, development and investment dollars,” Ven Dange says.

Her first exposure to SAP was working for NASA, on what was then one of the first US government implementations. It was a two-year finance and procurement project, made more challenging by public scrutiny and a difficult time for the organisation.

“At the time, we had the space shuttle disaster, we had 9/11, we had the famous Sniper Attack, and we had a snowstorm that basically locked my team into the building for a couple of days. All that happened during this project, and we still hit our schedule,” she says.

Ven Denge then moved with her husband from Washington DC to Los Angeles, where she ran her own online marketing company for several years, before moving to Australia six years ago. She worked with Capgemini in an account management role for the public sector, and then returned to an SAP-focused role when she joined Plaut last year.

Having come from a broader IT background, Ven Dange believes SAP is not as complicated as people believe.

“From working in other IT areas where you are building custom-made solutions, I think the system itself actually simpler than people realise, and we make it complex because the business process and people side of things is complex,” she says.


Ven Dange also clearly has an appreciation for the importance of corporate services in the bigger picture.

“It’s one of the places which a lot of people take for granted, and it’s the first thing to be cut. However, it’s also the one thing that makes everything else more efficient. So the ongoing investment in SAP to me is what every organisation needs to help it run better.”

Supporting other womenThis year, Ven Dange was presented with the Leoni Warne Women in ICT Award by the AAIS, ACS and ACPHIS. Named in honour of Dr Leoni Warne, who was passionate about the information systems discipline and the promotion of the role of women in IT, this award recognises the contribution of women in the ICT industry and is awarded on merit, based on a 360-degree review by peers, advisors and people in the community.

On the award, ACS manager Adrian Armitage says, “The Award is a very personal award and is not given lightly. Tammy’s contribution to women in IT and the IT industry overall has been outstanding – she exemplifies who we seek to recognise and we congratulate her on the award.”

Ven Dange has been involved with Women in Information and Communication for four years, spending the last two years as president. The aim of the organisation is to provide networking opportunities for women in Canberra, to champion women in IT and to encourage young women to consider careers in IT.

One of the challenges with increasing the proportion of women in IT is actually retention.

“We found through our research that they might go through an IT program at school, but we lose a lot of women when they start to hit the middle management level. They drop out for various reasons – lots of times because of family and other commitments, but they don’t go back into it,” Ven Dange says. “We also find we have a lot of women like myself that came in from other backgrounds and just land in IT. Those are the women we are trying to really support.”

Particularly in the face of skills shortage, the question of how to keep those women engaged in the IT sector should be a critical one, particular as male-female imbalances can become self-perpetuating.

“You go to some of these departments, and if you are the only woman in the room, there’s a good reason why women aren’t attracted to that. When you walk into an environment where you are obviously different to

everybody else – regardless if it’s sex-based or minority-based or anything else – it’s uncomfortable,” Ven Dange says.

“So we are trying to provide women with a network that they may not get in the organisations they are working in so they can have a peer group that they can relate to.”

As for how we can increase the number of girls choosing IT, resolving some of those image problems, and starting earlier to try to recruit them, could be the way forward.

“Movies like The Social Network don’t help. The only women you see in there are basically eye candy. That’s not actually helpful in dispelling IT stereotypes,” she says.

Chatting with high school students who were chosen as science and technology leaders recently, Ven Dange found that by Year 10, many had already chosen a particular field of science to pursue, and IT was not on their radar.

“We are starting too late – we need to start speaking with girls when they are younger. Let’s give them an alternative, something that they probably haven’t considered.”

Public sector under pressureHaving worked with the public sector for most of her career, Ven Dange says that further budget cuts are tightening the screws even more for government agencies which are already squeezed. Outsourcing – in many circles still a “dirty word” – is starting to be considered more seriously, but it requires agencies to mature beyond simply managing hundreds of contractors on a project.

“It takes a very mature organisation to be able to say, ‘I want you to achieve this by this date, and I am not going to tell you how to do it. I am just going to measure you along the way to see how you are going.’ That’s hard to do, but I am starting to see that,” Ven Dange says, adding that there are signs organisations are becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of skilled SAP resources in tight labour markets such as Canberra.

In other trends, Ven Dange is observing much more interest in non-core SAP solutions such as CRM, GRC and BPC, and mobility solutions.

“CIOs are tired of being stuck to their desktop. They want to be able to sign off on timesheets on their phones. It’s the same with any kind of workflow and dashboards – they want to have that information available to them immediately. Mobility is certainly coming up, but I think everybody has a different view on how to get there.”


profileTammy ven Dange

We found through our research that they might go through an IT program at school, but we lose a lot

of women when they start to hit the middle management level.

SUMMIT2012


industry sector

Governments at all levels have turned to shared services as a way to achieve operational efficiencies and improved service levels against a backdrop of having to do more with less. But after a series of well-publicised disasters, these arrangements have fallen out of favour, with the Queensland and Western Australian state governments recently moving to dismantle their shared service operations.

“Certainly at the state government level, shared services is perceived as a disaster. It’s not because the concept of shared services doesn’t have merit, but the implementations were just much harder than people thought,” says Steve Hodgkinson, research director, public sector technology, Ovum. In theory, they can work, but in practice, they seldom do.”

Given that private sector organisations can make shared services operations work well, what has gone so wrong in the public sector?

Scott Baguley, industry principal – public sector and healthcare, SAP ANZ, says, “Our view, and I think it’s shared by most governments in Australia, is that the scale of those operations has been too big and too generic. They have tried to force all government departments into one way of operating.“

David Dowling, managing principal of Dowling Consulting, agrees that some of the problems have arisen from the heterogeneity of the services being brought together under the same banner.

“Payroll or HR is just so vastly different in terms of award structures in health, education and the rest of government, and trying to have one platform to service all of that means you’re

forever changing it through new releases, and you can’t create innovation,” Dowling says.

The electoral cycle of government presents a challenge for getting sufficient value from a shared services arrangement, as does the fact that many government agencies operate in a decentralised and autonomous way.

“Shared services really face a headwind all the time because the agencies would prefer to remain autonomous; it’s always done against the agencies’ preferences,” Hodgkinson says. “The other big complication in shared service and the public sector is usually that they are under-invested. They are implemented in a naïve way from the assumption that the shared services strategy will save money and there isn’t enough investment put into transformation.”

A critical flaw in shared services strategies is that historically they have not been implemented using a multi-tenant architecture. This was at the heart of the failure of the Western Australian Government IT shared service, according to Hodgkinson.

“The Oracle system which was being implemented there was a single tenant system. Each agency had their own instance of Oracle, and they were trying to merge all of them into one big shared service,” he says. “Because the application is only architected to be multi-tenant, and they only architected to efficiently serve the needs of a diverse set of customers out of one instance of software, it just turned into a spaghetti bowl of complexities which didn’t meet anyone’s needs in the end. You see a similar pattern in other shared services.”

The future for shared serviceWith shared service now largely regarded as a disaster by governments, how can the cloud help the public sector move forward? Freya Purnell reports.

Public sector

Factors for shared service successRather than trying to create whole-of-government shared service operations, public sector agencies are increasingly moving towards grouping logical clusters of agencies with similar footprints. BusinessLink, the shared service operation within the NSW Government which provides corporate services primarily to the Department of Family and Community Services and some complementary programs, has been regarded as a success, with other government agencies expected to follow in its footsteps.

“It’s really about the smaller clusters of agencies who can achieve economies through shared service, but it’s not been about forcing square pegs into round holes or forcing them to comply to exactly the same service delivery model,” Baguley says.

However even creating shared services for similar agencies in justice or education, for example, can present difficulties, as their supply chains and activities can be quite different.

“What they try to find are very basic processes that they can actually share, such as purchasing and payroll, to the extent that it can be normalised. Areas such as HR are generally more difficult, because within the clusters, the hiring, firing and career paths are all different,” says Dowling.

The Federal Government has not pursued shared services in the name of cost-cutting to the same degree state governments have, but there is an emerging trend towards shared services for

medium-sized agencies coming to the end of current outsourcing agreements and contracts, according to Hodgkinson.

A long track record of “undeniable success” delivering shared service through Centrelink also gives the government confidence to push for a broadening of its operation to other agencies such as the Child Support Agency and Medicare.

“What’s different in the Federal Government’s approach is that it is already has an existing large critical mass,” Hodgkinson says. “Making a shared service available to different agencies will create its own issues, but they are fundamentally starting from a different place, whereas most state governments are starting from having a large number of fragmented bits and pieces which they bulldoze into one place.”

into the cloud With cloud solutions becoming more ubiquitous, a better model to provide shared services efficiencies may be a hybrid on-premise/cloud model.

While Hodgkinson believes agencies still need to get their head around how they might manage such a model, “the reality going forward is going to be a hybrid mix of substantially legacy in-house traditional-style applications with more of the new applications which are very dynamic and suit changing requirements”.

Dowling suggests this model may enable agencies to better

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industry sectorPublic sector

manage machinery of government changes, if it is structured in the right way. For example, rather than trying to run a payroll across a whole organisation, the same type of employees across multiple agencies could be grouped together into a payroll – for example, the public service executive tier, or SAP functional experts.

“That’s much easier to do in a cloud, because it is multi-tenanted – it doesn’t care whether we have one employee in one organisation, mixed with 2000 employees in another organisation using the same platform,” Dowling says. “It gives you the flexibility to carve out pieces of government that are common and pool them into a cloud-based solution. You can have people onboarding to a smaller subset of payrolls, which is using standard off-the-shelf software.”

Hodgkinson agrees that the multi-tenant architecture offers critical advantages.

“Solutions are explicitly architected on the assumption that the needs of a diverse set of different customers can be served out of one highly efficient, scalable, configurable body of software,” he says. “If government shared services had Software-as-a-Service applications 10 years ago, they would probably have been successful. Because they would have just had one set of software, and they could continue to do things differently within the configuration parameters of software.”

Baguley says SAP is now getting explicit requests from governments for cloud solutions, with three benefits in mind: they can pay for the solutions out of operational rather than capital budgets; another organisation owns and delivers the back-end infrastructure; and the solutions offer preconfigured business processes. Importantly, the implementation can be much shorter and simpler, involving mainly data migration and change management.

“It can effectively provide a ‘why not’ process to the implementation, rather than starting with a blank sheet of paper,” says Baguley. “And that can really help removing the risk of too much time being taken and trying to achieve consensus when multiple departments use the shared services solution.”

The acquisition of SuccessFactors and its BizX suite, already popular among government, is also giving SAP a huge opportunity for expansion into the public sector, combined with a cloud strategy that could provide solutions through private clouds.

“Larger departments with highly sensitive data such as Health or Child Protection may not be allowed to put their data into a public cloud, so we have a solution for that as well,” Baguley

says. Although governments will have to continue with their fixed

investments in various software platforms, particularly for mission-critical applications that they feel cannot be put into the cloud, there will be a whole new range of cloud applications on offer, according to Hodgkinson. And having spoken to agencies already using Software-as-a-Service, he says the feedback is good.

“The unequivocal evidence is that this is better, faster, cheaper and less risky. So even though agencies tend to feel like cloud services are risky, the reality is that their current way of doing things is the biggest risk of all,” Hodgkinson says.

Handling securityWhile security concerns are often cited as a key reason why governments can’t use cloud services, Dowling thinks this should not be a barrier.

“This is where government really needs to get its act in gear. It’s got the scale and power to do anything it wants to in terms of information and data security. The fundamental issue is data stewardship and where that data is actually stored,” he says.

“The government has suggested that you can only have it in their own data centre in their own premises, so those conditions need to be changed or relaxed. Software and hardware have come a long way in the last four or five years. I think the government needs to work with the private sector, so there can be government sanctioned or endorsed providers.”

changing of the guardDelivering a hybrid IT infrastructure incorporating cloud solutions to better meet the needs of public sector agencies into the future will require CIOs to take a different approach to governance.

“I think there is a big change coming up, where there is an ‘old guard’ of CIOs in government that to some degree have lost the plot in terms of what their jobs are all about,” Hodgkinson says. “They perceive their jobs as being about sustaining and protecting the body of IT applications and infrastructure which they inherited. They are not necessarily seeing themselves as responsible for transforming public services, and making them more efficient and serving citizens more effectively.”

He believes risk aversion and “minimising screw-ups” has pervaded the whole IT discussion in government. But by removing some of the risks around implementation and time to value, a cloud-based hybrid strategy could allow CIOs to focus more on innovation and achieving rapid benefits.

Hodgkinson says among the agencies who have already started down the cloud path, they’re not as fixated on trying to overgovern something that could be doomed for disaster.

“They get everyone working from a more practical perspective about how to actually use these solutions to drive transformation, rather than how they can avoid being blamed for the next big IT screw-up.”



case study

BackgroundSouth Australia (SA) Health is responsible for the provision of public health care to more than 1.5 million residents. In metropolitan Adelaide, SA Health has in excess of 2000 public hospital beds under management. At any time, 250 to 300 patients are being treated in emergency departments, and 10,000 patients are on the elective surgery waiting list.

SA Health had previously developed two operational workflow systems to help manage patient flow more effectively.

The EBMS (Electronic Bed Management System) and OPA (Operational Patient Activity) systems managed data relating to inpatient and emergency department activity. The EBMS and OPA aggregated patient data on a bi-hourly and nightly basis respectively. The idea was to provide clinical staff with better visibility and allow management to track hospital performance against key performance indicators.

Despite being designed with the best intentions, the project did not live up to expectations. The two systems were too siloed and hospital staff found it difficult to consult the reports.

According to Eleanor Royle, project manager, Department of Health, South Australia, the technology

proved to be a limiting factor. “It was too hard to get through to the data. The reports

were complicated, and the hospital staff, working under great pressure, didn’t trust the information and would still pick up the phone.”

Neither system had reached the maturity of being able to be used for more in-depth analysis by the department, meaning that monthly data collections were still being used as the main source for this analysis.

The department was seeking to replace these systems to provide clinical staff and hospital management with better visibility of bed availability, patient flow and waiting times in its emergency departments.

The solutionThe department chose a combination of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise and Sybase IQ to create a powerful analytic connection between its data source and SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solution.

In urgent need of a reliable database/data warehouse combination to power workflow management in their organisation, SA Health was considering Microsoft SQL or Sybase. Both database technologies were in use in the department at the time.

Inside emergency departmentsA Sybase and SAP BusinessObjects project has given South Australia Health greater visibility of bed availability, patient flow and waiting times in hospital emergency departments. By Freya Purnell.

SA heAlTh


“The Operational Business Intelligence system gives our hospitals unprecedented visibility of bed availability,

patient flow and waiting times, in near real-time. Staff feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Eleanor Royle, project manager, Department of Health, South Australia

case studySA heAlTh

“We selected Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise as our major source of data and Sybase IQ to power our data warehouse. The aggregation and processing of data is very important for clinical systems, and Sybase’s ability to analyse very large sets of data in real time was one of the main reasons for our decision,” Royle says.

The data warehouse is where transactional OACIS (Open Architecture Clinical Information System) data is being gathered and organised so that it can be easily analysed, extracted, synthesised, and otherwise used for the purposes of further understanding the data and decision-making process.

SA Health also uses Sybase Replication Server to source data from OACIS. PowerDesigner, Sybase’s modelling and metadata management solution, is frequently being deployed to manage the migration between applications and database and synchronise data before applications go live.

For the crucial Business Intelligence application, the link that enables users to access the information, SA Health supplemented SAP’s WebIntelligence with SAP’s Xcelsius product. Xcelsius provides frontline staff and management with easy-to-understand dashboards and performance reports, and was also chosen for its ability to refresh data from the source without user intervention. Together, the Sybase and SAP technologies, along with data integration from Informatica, form the Operational Business Intelligence (OBI) system.

The most challenging part of the project, according to Royle, was the process analysis, “getting agreement between the hospitals about a common business flow and getting the data to conform to that agreed flow”.

The system was designed to be easy to use and intuitive so that very little training of staff would be required.

“The training that is involved is to understand what the data is telling users, and we’ve achieved that by publishing comprehensive user guides that are accessible from the same place in the system,” Royle says, adding that when users were surveyed, they indicated they didn’t need training to use the system.

Having an easily understood system has helped with its adoption amongst staff.

“It is something that has just gradually grown from day

one and there has been a continued increases [in usage]. If you make something that is useful to people in their daily role, then people will use it.”

BenefitsConnecting eight emergency departments, 12 metropolitan public hospitals, 17 regional hospitals and SA Ambulance Services, the Operational Business Intelligence (OBI) system is accessed by a large number of users across Health as well as the general public.

While patients presenting to emergency departments are SA Health’s top priority when it comes to bed availability, they don’t exist in isolation from the rest of the hospital. To provide optimal care for emergency patients in the emergency departments, it is vital to transfer patients to other wards as quickly as possible once emergency treatment has been performed. Hospitals in Adelaide also tend to work together as networks, with hospitals in the south, centre and north of the city transferring patients to other emergency departments and wards in their area.

With data on bed capacities, patient flow and waiting times centralised in the system, using Sybase IQ’s column-based architecture, information can be loaded so quickly into BusinessObjects that critical data is being displayed in near real-time in the wards and emergency departments. It reduces the lag in access to performance metrics from weeks to minutes.

Ambulances also have access to the same system, and can use it to inform decisions of where to take patients on the basis of current capacity.

“The OBI system gives our hospitals unprecedented visibility of bed availability, patient flow and waiting times, in near real-time,” Royle says. “Staff feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, they find the system really useful.”

Importantly, the information is now available from a single source and is tailored to the way that hospitals are actually run. OBI enables SA Health not only to manage patient flow significantly better in its hospital network but the system’s reporting properties allows the department to track and validate performance improvement against key performance indicators, such as the four-hour rule.

Introduced in 2009, the rule seeks to overhaul emergency

departments so that no patient spends more than four hours being treated.

Instead of having to wait three weeks for a summary of monthly performance metrics, details can now be accessed almost instantaneously, allowing SA Health and hospital management to be more proactive and plan ahead to avoid bottlenecks.

Encouraged by the initial success of OBI, SA Health is planning to extend the system to 17 of South Australia’s country hospitals.

Making information publicSA Health has now made the information sourced from OBI available to the public. An external site provides information on bed capacities and waiting times for emergency departments and elective surgery procedures, updated every 30 minutes.

“This is about making data transparent, which leads to a better understanding of how the service is operating,” Royle says.

According to Royle, this would be the most comprehensive health care information site available to the public on the internet in Australia.

“We want to educate the public on how emergency departments operate. For example, emergency departments tend to be very busy with long waiting times on Monday afternoons, but near empty on Wednesday mornings. By taking peak times into consideration, patients with non-life threatening health issues can drastically reduce their wait by coming to the hospital at an appropriate time,” Royle says.

“GPs can also use this information to make decisions about where to send their patients, if they have to advise them to visit an emergency department.”


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interview

Melbourne-based Enterprise Support provides SAP HCM consulting, hosting, support and maintenance to large public and private entities, with special expertise in the healthcare market.

The company was acquired in April this year by Datacom, an Australasian IT services provider with around 4000 staff and turnover of $650 million. It has three main areas of business – a large development organisation, an IT systems business with eight data centres in the region, and a business process outsourcing operation, which provides payroll and other services for government and private sector organisations.

McWilliams says the new relationship with Enterprise Support, which will continue to operate as a business unit within Datacom, enhances its SAP capabilities across all three areas of the business.

“We see the possibility of taking SAP into New Zealand to complement our existing product offerings over the year, and grow the Enterprise Support business into other geographies.”

Enterprise Support has had a number of recent project wins, including partnering with HCL Axon for the 190,000 person payroll component of the Woolworths SAP implementation, and a brand-new implementation of SAP HCM and Payroll for Dulux, as part of its demerger from Orica Group.

“We have taken their platform, rebuilt it in a standard SAP ECC 6 environment, and implemented a lot of smarts around in place of self-service, training and performance management scenarios,” Wilson says.

Focus on healthcareWith a strong track record in healthcare, an understanding of its complex staffing and award structures and considerable IP in the specialised IT frameworks it has developed, Enterprise Support will continue to focus on this sector.

With public sector organisations facing increasing challenges around continuing to deliver more and better services with diminishing resources, there will be more focus on learning and development, talent management, and performance management to retain and maximise the value of staff. In response, McWilliams says it will be important for the company to extend its services beyond payroll.

“Their key business decision-makers [in healthcare] are starting to look at functions which they may be able to purchase as a service, as opposed to providing internally themselves,” Wilson says. “That’s going to be an area which evolves very quickly, and we are certainly making sure that we have a service and product

portfolio that will meet that need going forward.”The tidal wave of interest in mobility also has the potential to

improve efficiency in the healthcare sector. “We are looking at SAP’s electronic medical record

functionality, and how we might link that to hospitals’ clinical solutions and be able to tie that into their mobility strategy, as well as how we can enable workforces through mobility applications,” Wilson says.

Human capital management in hospitals still largely paper-based, partly because many staff don’t have access to internal PCs or email, but with the explosion in smartphone usage, a different experience is possible.

“That’s why we’re keeping an eye on what’s going on with SuccessFactors, as their cloud-based solution starts morphing with the traditional back-end functionality of the SAP platform. We’ll be looking at how we as the service provider can leverage that for our clients,” McWilliams says.

Betting on HANAHaving watched SAP establish a well-defined strategy to replatform their technology on HANA, Enterprise Support decided to get on board. It has invested heavily in having staff trained on HANA for ERP and BI, and has working closely with SAP to gain acceptance on an ERP proof of concept on HANA. This is expected to not only offer customers of their internal payroll bureau with a faster, better and more reliable service, it has also given the team experience in how the platform can be offered in a cloud-based scenario to customers, providing processing efficiencies and simple scalability.

“I see HANA very much as an enabler of future service. A more efficient, more streamlined method of processing actually makes cloud-based services more realistic, and a lot more accessible to organisations,” Wilson says.

As in other sectors, the real-time availability of information and powerful reporting is very attractive to clients in healthcare, who might currently wait up to six weeks for insights.

“That’s a bit late if you are trying to work on efficiency per bed in a hospital, or the number of hours your casualty staff are doing in overtime,” McWilliams says.

Wilson adds: “There is definitely some positive feedback especially in relation to running the full ERP suite and BI on HANA, and what that actually does to processing performance and access to real-time information.”


Enterprise Support continues healthcare focus post-acquisition

ENtErprisE support

Following its recent acquisition, Freya purnell spoke to Enterprise Support CEO Scott Wilson and Datacom director Mark McWilliams about how they are planning to take the business forward and their plans for the public sector.


industry sector

In pockets around Australia, progress is being made towards installing smart grids equipped with smart meters or advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), as it is otherwise known.

The leader in this space is Victoria, with the government mandating that digital electricity meters, or ‘smart meters’ should be installed in all Victoria households and small business by the end of 2013. Representing the most significant investment in Victoria’s electricity network since the introduction of poles and wires, the program is expected to bring numerous benefits, such as better access to real-time electricity consumption information, remote meter reading, and faster connections and disconnections. While the project hit a snag earlier in the year due to concerns that the meters installed were unsafe after a series of problems reported by consumers, a government review found that the meters were safe and that the roll-out should continue.

Elsewhere, Australia’s first commercial-scale smart grid is being created under the auspices of the Smart Grid, Smart City project, which is part of the Australian Government’s National Energy Efficiency Initiative. A smart grid combines advanced communication, sensing and metering infrastructure with the existing electricity network, which could improve reliability of electricity services by identifying and resolving faults on the electricity grid, better managing voltage and identifying infrastructure that requires maintenance. They can also help consumers manage their individual electricity consumption and enable the use of energy-efficient ‘smart applicances’ that can be programmed to run on off-peak power.

Ausgrid is working with consortium partners IBM Australia, GE Energy Australia, Sydney Water, Hunter Water, and Newcastle City Council to deliver the project, which is primarily based in Newcastle.

Getting smartWith much of the attention in the utilities space focused on moving forward to smart grids, including smart metering, utilities companies – whether in the retail or distribution business – have some major data challenges ahead. Freya Purnell reports.

utilities

The project, which commenced in October 2010 and will run until September next year, aims to gather information about the costs and benefits of smart grids to help inform future decisions by government, electricity providers, technology suppliers and consumers across Australia. The Australian Government has committed up to $100 million for the project.

As part of this project, last year IBM successfully implemented a first-of-its-kind smart grid data management platform, designed and built with Ausgrid. This enabled more data to be relayed from the grid to the utility, creating a foundation for better monitoring and asset management for the distribution network, improving information on outages.

The platform involves rolling out 12,000 intelligent monitoring devices in distribution substations across the network, with the data collected centrally to provide a holistic view of parts of the electrical network across the company’s electricity grid.

David Jones, IBM’s smart grid program director, said at the time of the announcement in July last year, that information generated by smart grid technology will help Ausgrid optimise its planning functions, asset management and capital investments into the future.

Western Australia has also seen its fair share of ‘smart’ activity, including the Living Smart Household Program as part of the Perth Solar City initiative. Consortium partner Synergy has implemented smart meters as part of the program, which, building on success in the initial trial area, has now been extended to all residents in the Perth metropolitan region. Water Corporation has been undertaking a smart metering trial in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, due to be completed in June this year, with 13,500 residential and commercial water meters replaced and connected to the online network. Water Corporation estimated that by monitoring consumption on an hourly basis, leaks would be more readily identified, and water use in the region could be reduced by 12 per cent or more than one billion litres per year.

Managing big data volumesWith the move towards digitally controlled ‘smart’ operations, there is a clear need for supporting IT infrastructure. Perhaps more crucially for SAP, smart grids and smart metering also produce seriously big data – and that’s where technologies such as in-memory database SAP HANA come into play.

The smart metering process works by recording energy usage at certain intervals throughout the day, and communicating the data back to electricity distributors. This information is then used to generate network usage charges for each of the premises, with readings and charges passed on to retailers to charge customers.

Scott Hirst, utilities industry principal for SAP Australia, says as different technologies go through trials

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industry sectorutilities

and are proven in the utilities sector, clearing the way for more significant roll-outs, some common issues are coming to the surface.

“For instance, in Victoria, a lot of organisations now have very immediate priorities around trying to handle big data. That’s both retailers and the distribution companies looking at not only how do they cope with storing and managing the data, but also how do you analyse that and try to turn it into competitive advantage or something you can derive cost savings and efficiencies from,” Hirst says.

While he believes we are unlikely to see a smart meter roll-out as extensive as has been undertaken in Victoria elsewhere in Australia in the medium term, there is activity around smart grids is gathering steam, both in Australia and elsewhere in the world. Again, big data will result from having more intelligent components in the grid providing a real-time feedback loop.

“That’s where HANA can provide a really strong solution to support a whole range of scenarios such as network planning, network tariff modelling, and forecasting,” Hirst says. “What we are seeing is a lot of organisations starting to accumulate this data, and the next challenge for them is to drive value out of that data. The big difference between HANA and other solutions on the market is that it is inherently flexible to support emerging requirements over time.”

While utility companies can gain a lot of insights through simply collecting and analysing this data – for example, doing sophisticated analytics on networking planning and infrastructure, and how investments in new infrastructure can be best targeted over time – where HANA could add value is in allowing retailers to act on that information.

“For instance, in Victoria at the moment, there are very few customers actually being billed on the time of

the NZ energy market

A structural shake-out in the New Zealand utilities market is leading to greater demand for integrated solutions.

Government regulations dictate that companies cannot be involved in electricity generation, distribution and retail – though they can own two components of the three.

According to Nick Mulcahy, director – futures, for SAP partner Soltius New Zealand, this has resulted in companies diversifying into other areas such as rolling out broadband or network maintenance.

“That diversification is certainly something we’re seeing as a key reason to come back to market and see what solutions can support the different types of businesses that they’re developing and growing into,” Mulcahy says. “The reason SAP is winning is its ability to have a service industry and a manufacturing industry all sitting on the same platform and running out of the same company code, so that is certainly a strength for SAP.”

Over the last couple of years, Soltius has implemented SAP Business All-In-One for utility services contractor Connetics, electricity distributor WEL Networks, and most recently, electricity generator and distributor Top Energy.

Utilities are also increasingly looking to replace point solutions with an integrated system, according to Mulcahy. He says while both WEL and Top Energy originally came to market looking to replace a maintenance management system, the complexity and cost of integrating these solutions with their existing GIS, finance, and other systems resulted in them choosing a broader solution.

“They saw that the cost difference and lack of benefits around the fragmented business process, compared to a standard SAP best practices for utilities template that we have developed, wasn’t enough for them to go for a point solution, and they were better off spending the extra amount of money to get a full suite,” Mulcahy says, adding that other companies are also showing a similar preference.

In New Zealand, there is huge demand among utilities companies to mobilise their asset management systems, Mulcahy says, but smart metering is slower to gain traction.

“We certainly know of a couple of companies look at smart metering, but there’s no initiatives at the moment going on. We’re probably a little bit behind because our retail companies are still struggling to a large extent with the core systems component.”

Though Mulcahy initially thought the New Zealand market would be too small for HANA, as most companies are only medium-sized, he says he has been surprised by “how quickly the snowball has started growing”.

“A lot of the customers are talking about HANA, and we have a couple who are actively trying to engage SAP at the moment,” Mulcahy says.

He is also watching with interest the success of the rapid deployment solutions (RDS).

“I do think the RDS trend, as long as it doesn’t fall over and have a couple of really bad reference sites, will start speeding up time to market. We are using RDS for CRM for WEL Networks, and are also looking at RDS for mobility, so while I would say that deployment methodology is still relatively unproven, if it works, it’s going to be good news.”

use information. They are still getting billed in a very traditional way – their usage for a quarter,” Hirst says.

An emerging field is demand response – that is, managing consumption patterns. For distributors, helping customers avoid peak consumption times means they don’t have to build as big a network, while for retailers, it helps them avoid having to procure energy at spot prices in the market.

“It can also help to drive segmentation activities for the retailer so that they can target customers with the most appropriate energy products, or even target customers over time with offers or behavioural changes so that they can save money on their energy usage,” Hirst says.

In addition to the move towards smart technologies, significant structural changes in the electricity generation market is also creating impetus for technology spend.

“If there are initiatives that are bankable business cases, then there is a strong appetite for companies to go after those efficiency gains,” Hirst says.

While SAP was not able to reveal which Australian utilities customers are seriously considering deploying SAP HANA, companies such as AGL and CitiPower/Powercor have already completed proof of concept work.

“There is definitely activity underway. What we are also seeing is that HANA works very well in or enables very rapid concept activities, and we are seeing a lot of organisations experimenting using HANA – again helping to underpin some of those business cases to justify the investment going forward,” Hirst says.

Carbon tax driving investmentWith the formal introduction of the carbon tax, some of the traditional generators have been impacted and are suffering from capital constraints.

“What we are also seeing is that a lot of these organisations are now very conscious about coming up with an efficient and sustainable way to track their carbon emissions,” Hirst says. “So we are seeing a second wave of interest in activity in the carbon emission tracking and accounting space, and doing that as a part of business as usual, as opposed to simply a compliance activity.”

For this purpose, companies are typically favouring the SAP Environmental Compliance solution, which measures all types of emissions.

“We are seeing a lot of interest in that because it is very robust. You can handle all types of emissions, and it can integrate to your ERP suite,”Hirst says. “With the carbon tax now being formalised, a lot of organisations are sitting up and taking notice, and integrating this into their ERP solution has become a very important factor.”


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industry sectorretail and consumer products

Consumers in controlWith consumers demanding more than ever before, both retailers and manufacturers of consumer products are being squeezed. Emerging technology such as predictive analytics might help them get ahead of the game, but are the Australian and New Zealand markets lagging too far behind to take advantage of these opportunities? Freya purnell reports.

Over the last decade, there has been a dramatic power shift – first from manufacturers to retailers, and now to consumers.

“Where the last century was focused on telling customers what they should have, the 21st century customer is digitally armed and probably knows more about your product than you do,” says Merijn Helle, industry principal – consumer and trade, SAP Australia. “There is full price transparency, and they are also socially connected and make decisions based on that. Consumers are eight times more likely to believe a social media reference than they are a TV or radio ad. The choice is exploding for consumers and that’s what they demand.”

Though there has been much talk in the media about how difficult the retail environment is, Helle says that the consumer products sector is actually doing it very tough because retailers are placing enormous pressure on manufacturers.

“The pressure on the manufacturers is to stay ahead of the commodity curve, because retailers are introducing private label products,” Helle says, adding that both are in reactive mode to the demands of consumers.

consumer products manufacturingFor consumer products manufacturers, there is a heavy focus on optimising the supply chain and the direct to consumer channel, according to Helle.

Getting smarter with sales and operations planning is a key priority, and SAP has released its Sales and Operations Planning solution on HANA for this purpose.

“It’s focused on balancing the supply side – what resources do I have, what factory utilisation should I be aiming for, what inventory levels and service levels to customers – with the demand side, and making optimal decisions that improve profit. It may mean, in times like these, culling the range, it may mean that manufacturers move away from channels,” Helle says.

With consumers increasingly using social media to discuss brands and products, consumer products companies are also seeking to include social media sentiment in their forecasting, and another new solution, called SAP Demand Signal Management, will be released around the end of the year to utilise this information.

Though retailers are putting enormous pressure on

manufacturers, there is also a renewed focus on better collaboration.

“They are saying, let’s really collaborate closely on joint forecasts, so that we can reduce inventory across the network in both of our supply chains, reduce costs for everyone, and ultimately get the consumer a better deal,” Helle says.

For example, with retailing giant Woolworths currently implementing SAP, there are many opportunities for manufacturers to hook into the SAP process.

“Take, for example, being able to share sales information in real time so when a bottle of Coke or bread roll is sold, it immediately gets passed back to the manufacturer. That can help them improve their demand sensing, to be much closer to what the consumer is doing and be able to react in real time,” Helle says. “That’s the ultimate goal, because the retailers want to maintain those service levels with customers and reduce out of stocks, which accounts for around 4 per cent of lost sales every year.”

SAP solutions such as SAP Information Interchange (formerly Crossgate) and SAP Forecasting and Replenishment help to achieve this aim, allowing retailers to provide suppliers with a forecast of the order they will be placing into the future, giving manufacturers greater visibility of the demand pipeline.

CIBER director, Australia and New Zealand, Michael Niestroy says he is also seeing more collaboration between suppliers and manufacturers.

“In probably two-thirds of our customers now, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) has become a big topic again through proper hubs and master data synchronisation. But there are still a lot of efficiency gains that can be leveraged from a supply chain perspective between retailers and suppliers,” Niestroy says.

With consumer products manufacturers also looking at direct to consumer channels, such as online stores, wholesalers are feeling the pinch.

“The imperative for distributors is to add value to the end-to-end value chain. We are seeing them do that by providing not only the products but also the services into the smaller retail customers, and we are seeing a lot of momentum in that space as well, basically with our end-to-end ERP but also customer relationship management solutions,” Helle says.


retailing Among the key trends for the global retail industry in 2012, according to the Deloitte ‘Global Power of Retail 2012’ report, are multi-channel retailing, mobile shopping, and use of data analytics for personalisation.

Niestroy says that though retail CIOs and CEOs held back on IT spend in 2011, it has been a different story this year.

“All of a sudden the floodgates have opened in 2012. They are all investing like crazy,” he says.

Helle says retailers are now putting the customer at the core of everything they do.

“Enabled by the technology we provide, such as mobility and in-memory computing, there is a new era of targeted one-on-one marketing,” he says.

With many retailers having a presence across multiple channels, the Deloitte report says it will become more important than ever for retailer to truly understand how consumers are using and shopping across each of their channels. Once armed with this information, retailers can begin to go down the predictive analytics route.

Overseas, SAP has achieved good results from a pilot of ‘precision retailing’ with French supermarket operator Casino, which uses applications powered by HANA to deliver rich product information and special offers in real time to consumer devices, in line with their predicted buying behaviour. The group has seen double digit growth in conversion rates of promotions and offers, as well as a double digit lift in basket size. Casino has also been able to obtain a single inventory view using HANA, which helps to inform promotional decisions.

Later this year, SAP will release BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis based on HANA, which will allow for modelling of different store behaviours in clusters, to enable retailers to optimise their ranges and assortments.

“Those are enablers that would greatly increase sales and stock clearance in those stores,” Helle says.

Locally, Officeworks has deployed SAP Point of Sale Data Management, to aggregate customer data at a basket level from across its multiple channels.

“They have essentially got one single view of the customer which they can leverage to understand recency, frequency and monetary value of individual customers, measure the success of promotions, and get an understanding of the relationships between categories,” Helle says.

Niestroy believes the take-up of analytics among retailers hasn’t yet gathered steam because it is literally slow – the number of products, store and customer combinations creates massive data volumes, to the tune of multiple terabytes.

“Basket analysis and companion sales or association analysis – the likelihood of product A and product B being bought in one single transaction – is very, very tedious with the current technology,” Niestroy says. “That’s where HANA or BWA comes in. So you can run through a lot more information more quickly, but the technology also allows

retailers to think about things they couldn’t do before such as predictive analytics and some real-time scenarios like online shelf availability, for example,” Niestroy says.

Helle says SAP is seeing great momentum for HANA in the ANZ market, with the first customers on board or in proof of concept.

However, Niestroy says customers are still weighing up the respective benefits of HANA and BWA, with cost remaining a deciding factor in the equation.

“BWA has become a lot more attractive than HANA for a number of reasons, so our customers are actively evaluating BWA,” says Niestroy, adding that long-term, HANA will be a “no-brainer”, but it’s not there yet.

More broadly, Niestroy says many Australian and New Zealand retailers are still trying to get the basics right – including getting online channels in place. The last 12 months has seen movement in this direction, with four of CIBER’s customers establishing an online presence, often by using an off-the-shelf product linked with their POS system. One customer has gone the next step to implement SAP Loyalty Management to segment and target customers specifically.

“It’s basically the platform that allows you to go omnichannel, looking at mobile and social media, and then the next step after that is predictive analytics,” Niestroy says.

Social media usage by ANZ retailers is also still lagging behind the activities of US and European retailers.

“You have companies such as Harvey Norman, for example, who have employed a whole team to communicate and interact with their customers via Twitter and Facebook,” Niestroy says. “But a lot of retailers in this market still only have a presence on Facebook, and they don’t use in their day-to-day interaction with their customers – for example, through coupon offers or communication with customer service.”



Accelerating business through the cloud As the newest executive on the SAP block, many attendees were excited to hear what Lars Dalgaard, founder and CEO of SuccessFactors and member of the SAP Executive Board, had to say.

Not surprisingly, he discussed how businesses of all sizes and kinds can be accelerated through cloud technology.

For SuccessFactors, cloud technology occurs on a large scale. They have 3500 customers with a total of 15.6 million users, their largest cloud purchase was 2.2 million users and they have a global and transnational customer base covering almost 200 countries, 34 languages and 60 different industries.

Dalgaard said tools in the cloud can assist businesses to bridge the gap between strategy and execution. They enable faster communication of strategy changes, increased time spent on strategic priorities and increased project completion.

With SAP’s cloud strategy now centred around four key areas – customers, people, money and suppliers – SuccessFactors has been able to deliver on these in “digestible platforms”.

Also central to SuccessFactors’ success in accelerating business through cloud technology has been its scalability, security and reliability, according to Dalgaard.

“When it comes to reliability, security, and confidence in the cloud, SuccessFactors has always overinvested and made sure we’re absolutely the best when it comes to this,” he said.

events

It was a mega-event, with over 979 sessions, 757 speakers, and 256 exhibitors. From 14-16 May, 60,000 people gathered in Orlando, Florida, to hear the latest on SAP’s strategy and solutions. Kirsten Wade reports on the highlights.

Sapphire Now 2012

Key announcements

New solutions on SAP HANA platformA new series of real-time solutions built on the SAP HANA platform will enable customers to accelerate new business value through advanced reporting, analysis, and planning capabilities in the context of their business and industry.

“SAP’s innovation continues with the delivery of these new applications that are simple to use, easy to implement and are built on an open real-time platform,” said Dr Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology and Innovation.

The new solutions include SAP Sales and Operations Planning, SAP Cash Forecasting, SAP Planning and Consolidation, SAP Collections Insight, SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis, SAP Bank Analyzer rapid development solution for financial reporting with SAP HANA, SAP Deposits Management rapid deployment solution for transaction history analysis with SAP HANA and SAP Supplier InfoNet site.

Launch of new visualisation solution SAP has added to its analytics portfolio with a new visualisation tool designed to offer business users a new way to visualise, analyse and apply information.

SAP Visual Intelligence software is powered by the SAP HANA platform and is a desktop version of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer software. The software will enable users from all areas of company to explore, alter and share information.

“The category of visual data discovery has become a must-have component of the BI tool portfolio and SAP has upped its capabilities with its latest product,” said Cindi Howson, founder, BI Scorecard. “Ease of use, time to insight and business agility are key reasons for the rapid growth of visual data discovery that provides users with greater self service with minimal IT support.”

Innovations to SAP HANA platformSAP took the opportunity at SAPPHIRE NOW to announce innovations to the SAP HANA platform, including the release of Service Pack 4, new access to a development sandbox for SAP HANA in the cloud via Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the next step in a program encouraging startups to develop on SAP HANA.

Dr Vishal Sikka said SAP and in particular SAP HANA SP4 continues to “raise the bar on breakthrough performance and extensive scale”.


As boundaries blur It is ironic that what has become such a technology powerhouse spent the first five years computerless. That was the humble beginning of SAP in 1972, and SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe reflected on this journey in his keynote discussing the pace of change.

Considering where SAP might be in another 40 years, the future of technology is “almost impossible to imagine”. However, with demographics providing some insight into the changes we might expect, Hagemann Snabe said significant world and urban population growth, an ageing population and the end of the oil era, will all put “tremendous pressure on our resources”.

With this in mind, Hagemann Snabe made three bold predictions: within the next five years everything will be mobile, in the cloud and processed by in-memory computing.

He also spoke of the role of technology innovation in creating sustainable practices for the future, and said that SAP is focusing on achieving innovation moving forward, rather than on the the past and extending leadership.

“The choices we make today have a significant impact on the tomorrow we create,” Hagemann Snabe said.

The relevance of SAP HANA: the vision is here At the 2012 event, the talk of the town was again HANA, and Hasso Plattner, co-founder of SAP and chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board, discussed how the in-memory platform is in the process of becoming a unified function for all types of enterprise workloads.

Plattner explained that the online transactional

processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities can be used in two ways – in two separate systems or one system. For example, in SAP Business One, transaction systems run on HANA, while in Business ByDesign, it is the analytical components that operate on HANA.

“The objective is to be two to three times faster than any system now on a super-fast database in the transactional part and ten to a thousand times faster on the transactional reporting and the analytical part,” Plattner said.

He added that the in-memory platform is not just forming the basis for SAP solutions.

“HANA is on the way to become the foundation outside SAP for several companies currently working on putting their existing applications on HANA – large ones, mature companies, small companies.”

The newest service pack allows native text searching capabilities on structured and unstructured content, R interoperability with SAP HANA and interoperability of SAP HANA with open source Apache Hadoop.

“We are committed to an open real-time platform for developers and end-users and will continue to provide this non-disruptively to our partners and customers.”

More mobile apps to enhance connectionSAP announced the launch of a new series of mobile apps to increase efficiency and enhance productivity at work, home and leisure.

Sanjay Poonen, president, head of mobile division, SAP, said the new apps show SAP’s “commitment to deliver innovative, engaging mobile apps for millions of people”.

The new mobile apps include SAP Travel Expense Report, SAP Learning Assistant, SAP Customer Briefing and SAP EHS Safety issue. The mobile commerce portfolio from Sybase 365 forms a significant part of SAP’s mobile platform for powering business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) mobile apps and services, including Sybase 365 Mobile Banking, Sybase 365 Mobile Payments and Sybase 365 Mobile Money.

“SAP is leading the charge for businesses to run better with stunning, easy-to-use mobile apps that can manage and analyse today’s explosion of data – bringing business to people,” Poonen said.

SAP and Capgemini forge mobile solutions partnershipA partnership between SAP and Capgemini will see the co-development of a mobile sales execution solution and a joint go-to-market plan for the next five years.

The new mobile application solution is aimed at companies who sell products via mobile direct store delivery with additional requirements for accelerated customer relationship management, and will enable customers to reduce costs and improve customer experience.

“We are partnering with Capgemini because of their strong global footprint, deep expertise in implementation, hosting services, mobile capabilities and functional expertise in the market,” said Poonen.


SME focuScase study

QVS takes the plunge with Business ByDesignWanting to take their demand planning to a more sophisticated level, personal care accessories manufacturer QVS Global saw the opportunity to integrate their whole system infrastructure in a cloud-based delivery model. The company became one of the first in Australia to implement SAP Business ByDesign. Freya Purnell reports.

Background QVS Global is a supplier of personal care accessories to major retailers in the grocery and department store channels, offering distinctive ranges of cosmetic, nail, bath and hair accessories. It is a small business based in Australia, with links to manufacturing operations in China.

QVS was predominantly using spreadsheets to run its internal systems, but as the business grew, this was becoming more difficult to manage – the spreadsheets became quite large and complex, and trying to share the information between multiple staff members was tricky.

QVS Global director Michelle Knight says the company was originally looking at different options for a demand planning system, including custom development.

“But talking to CN Group about ByDesign, we progressed along that track to look more for a fully integrated system for demand planning, inventory management, and financials.”

As a relatively small team, QVS wanted a system that would provide a platform to grow the business without increasing their headcount.

Alanna Woodrow, lead solution advisor for the CN Group, says, “They were looking for a solution that would offer shared transparency and efficiency across their business operations, in a simple and intuitive fashion.”

It was also important that their new solution fit within their budget constraints, and was a cloud-based system.

“We are a small business and we travel a lot and work remotely, so a key component was that we had secure access to information wherever we were working, whether that was here or overseas,” Knight says.

QVS director Greg Coulter says that the cloud framework also appealed because the company has no in-house IT professionals.

“We simply don’t have the resources to manage an in-house system that may be server-based,” Coulter says.

Knight admits that as a smaller, very flexible business, they did think twice about choosing an SAP solution, as others had advised them that SAP’s systems might be too rigid and bureaucratic. However, they were convinced that Business ByDesign would suit their needs.

“We believe it offers more flexibility than a traditional SAP system because it is tailored to the small to medium business,” Knight says. “We were confident that it would meet, and probably over-deliver on, what we were looking for.”

Coulter adds, “The overriding positive for us with SAP is that it is such a dominant company in this field, and we knew that any difficulties would be overcome by the support network.”


ImplementationAs it was one of the first Business ByDesign implementations in Australia, SAP and CN Group, the first Australian partner on the solution, worked jointly on the project.

CN Group had solution advisors working on the project, and Woodrow says the company ensures that project teams always include a representative who has been through the pre-sales process with the customer, to ensure that their requirements are properly addressed throughout the project.

Business ByDesign is designed as a solution that can be rapidly implemented, and has a structured methodology built into the system called the ‘Go-Live Experience’.

“Each phase of the project is system-led, and there is a number of questions and activities you need to complete. So no time is lost going out and blueprinting; you are building the solution as you move along,” Woodrow says.

The QVS implementation was completed in less than four months, with the system going live in June. While the project took slightly longer than the average global implementation timeframe for Business ByDesign of 10 weeks, QVS had to undertake a significant amount of data cleansing, adding extra time to the process.

challengesKnight says that they found the remote implementation process challenging at times, with project team members based in Sydney, Melbourne and Shanghai, and a significant time commitment required to keep the project on track.

“I underestimated the time and effort that would be required for the implementation. It has been, at some periods, for weeks and weeks on end, all-consuming,” Knight says, adding that in hindsight they may have chosen a different time of year to do the implementation, rather than leading into their busiest period.

It is one of the common issues for smaller businesses – without a dedicated resource to focus on the project full-time, it must be juggled with the ‘business as usual’ work.

However, despite the challenges, Knight speaks highly of the quality of the project team.

“The calibre of the people working on the product is exceptional. Their knowledge is just great,” she says.

As a new solution for both CN Group and QVS Global, there has been a considerable amount of learning along

the way on both sides.“The challenge for any business going through a change

project like this is that you are moving from tools that you use every day to a new system,” Woodrow says. “For us, it was one of our first implementations of ByDesign, so we worked very closely with SAP.”

Business benefitsThe Business ByDesign solution is expected to deliver considerable benefits to the business, beyond simply improving their supply and demand forecasting.

The key benefit is improving the visibility of information across the business, through the integration of formerly separate systems.

“From the point where they do their supply and demand planning, through to order fulfilment and financials, are going to be completely integrated. So they will see their financial postings automatically without any double entry or extra custom integration effort,” Woodrow says.

“The solution will also improve the accuracy of information within our business, largely because of the process we have gone through to implement it,” Knight says. “At the moment, we are all working on different inventory and financial systems, and inherent with that is quite a big risk. So by having a fully integrated, visible system, it will take risk out of the business.”

Woodrow says having access to the “impressive” reporting and analytics in ByDesign will give QVS a new perspective.

“They have the ability now to look at all of their financials in real time. They can also see real-time visibility of business performance.”

Using a structured system like ByDesign is also expected to add new discipline to business processes.

“Because it’s fully integrated, you have to complete transactions in a very timely fashion for the system to work, whereas in our current models, we can leave things and try to catch up later, which can often lead to incorrect information being retained within the business,” Coulter says.

Finally, ByDesign provides QVS with the platform it needs for future growth.

“That was something we considered at the time we chose the solution. Quite honestly, even with our grand plans, I can’t see a situation arising where we would necessarily outgrow ByDesign,” Knight says.


The solution will also improve the accuracy of information within our business, largely because of the process we have gone through to implement it.

Michelle Knight, QVS Global


technology

Roambi was launched in 2009 by MeLLmo as a mobile solution that enables easy access, navigation and interaction to business information and reporting across devices. MeLLmo has a global customer base, with Roambi used by Fortune 1000 companies, universities, government agencies and small to medium-sized businesses, enabling users to exceed the limitations presented by other BI systems.

Roambi has established systems integrator partners around the world, including several regional SI partners in Australia: Billigence, Innogence and Intelligent Pathways.

As a platform-independent solution, Roambi works with a variety of sources, including SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, Microsoft Reporting and Analysis Services, as well as Excel, Google Docs, Salesforce and more.

Certified for integration with BusinssObjects, Roambi currently offers two applications: Roambi Analytics and Roambi Flow.

Roambi AnalyticsRoambi Analytics transforms business intelligence into immersive mobile analytics that can be accessed from any iPhone or iPad. The “quick, agile, interactive” process enables up-to-the minute information for business professionals on the go. Roambi Analytics is offered in three versions, each catering to different businesses based on their size and needs: Lite, Pro, and ES4.

Roambi Analytics Lite is designed for individuals, as a publishing tool that enables Microsoft Excel data to be easily converted into interactive charts and graphs, which are sent instantly to any iPad or iPhone. It is available free from the iPhone App Store.

Roambi Analytics Pro is a visualisation solution and secure hosted service, which converts business data into interactive visualisations that can be accessed on the go. Important company information and updates can be accessed securely, with data and files stored in the Amazon S3 cloud, access restricted by authentication credentials, transmission using SSL (HTTPS) and the use of iPhone and iPad security model with login details stored in the encrypted key chain.

Roambi Analytics ES4 is designed for enterprise and is comprised of three main parts: the Enterprise Server software, the Roambi Publisher, and the Roambi Visualiser

app. It aims to enable increased employee productivity and high levels of customer service for companies utilising mobile business intelligence. With award-winning views, the need for dashboard design is eliminated, and the intuitive interface doesn’t require any end user training.

Roambi Flow Roambi Flow is an iPad publishing platform, enabling information and multi-media content to be shared among a company, including to customers, in a unique magazine-style publication.

Publications can be created via built-in design templates or PDF import capabilities now allow the conversion of existing PDF files.

Another element of Roambi Flow is Roambi Present, which converts existing PowerPoint and Keynote presentations into interactive iPad applications. Fonts, images and formatting will migrate into Roambi Present, while Roambi Analytics Overlays and Hotspots add a further dimension to presentations, emphasising the main points.

In Australia, the solution is being deployed in government departments to provide executive and senior managers with access to live data analytics embedded in board papers and meeting notes, within a magazine-style environment.

Intelligent Pathways, a Brisbane-based software engineering business, became a reseller and systems integration specialist for Roambi in late 2011.

Kate Pemberton, marketing coordinator at Intelligent Pathways, says the partnership came about as a result of the complementary nature of their offerings.

“We leverage our systems integration and business analyst expertise to get the right data out of an organisation’s enterprise systems and into the Roambi platform,” Pemberton says, adding that the solution’s value is in making complicated enterprise data very visually appealing and available on mobile devices.

“The application ‘views’ are easily manipulated so you are able to tell the story behind the numbers to people at all levels of their organisation. Roambi offers a visually rich UI and a more intuitive product offering compared to competitors in the mobile business intelligence space.”

Roambi has a growing list of awards to its name, including winner of the 2011 Ventana Research Business Leadership Award with life technologies, finalist of the 2011 Adobe MAX Awards, winner of the iPhone Life Best App Award 2010, and winner of the Computerworld Best Practices in BI and Analytics Awards 2010. It has been also featured in over 40 ‘top business apps’ lists, including ComputerWorld UK 2012, Mashable 2011, CEOWORLD Magazine 2010, BusinessWeek 2009, and New York Times 2008.

BI on the go

Business intelligence

With workers demanding access to analytics on the go, mobile application provider Roambi has teamed up with several Australian partners to offer its mobile BI solutions to SAP customers and others. By Kirsten Wade.


technologymobility

By 2013, more than 1.19 billion workers – making up 34.9 per cent of the global workforce – will be using mobile technology by 2013, according to a recent study by IDC.

With another study by Symantec showing that 71 per cent of organisations are already implementing or are planning to implement enterprise applications, it seems that businesses are starting to realise the significant opportunities presented by enhancing their internal business processes with mobile applications. And SAP is clearly seeing the advantages too. With more than 80 sample applications already available in the SAP App store and a newly released partner development program, it would seem that SAP understands just how well enterprise mobility solutions complement their existing service offering.

So what benefits do enterprise apps bring to an organisation over their consumer app counterparts?

measurable, predictable RoiMany organisations across the globe have spent a fortune on consumer applications expecting them to go ‘viral’ only to find that they don’t. Even worse, there are examples of organisations which implement consumer apps for iPhone/iPad only to find that their products and services get boycotted by an angry Android community!

Enterprise applications provide a predictable, measurable return on investment (ROI) – and a guaranteed uptake when enforced as a working practice.

For example, say an organisation implements a timesheet

application for 30 remote workers who previously had to drive an average of an hour each week to enter their time in an office environment. At a salary of $50 per hour, the organisation is paying $1500 per week for timesheet completion. A $25,000 project to enable SAP-integrated mobile timesheets then pays for itself in less than six months.

Being able to assess and measure the ROI in this way results in the implementation of enterprise apps becoming a ‘safe bet’ solution.

Drive for innovationThe people that know how business processes can be best improved are often those undertaking them. Giving these people a voice to express openly how they feel and what they need is a great way to drive innovation within the enterprise – and mobile applications are a sure-fire way to get employees innovating.

One of the best triggers we have observed is to give employees a simple mobile application to assist with their daily tasks (such as timesheets) and then gather them together a month later to ask what they think about it – what they like, what they hate, and how else mobile applications could improve their jobs. The results are often quite surprising and different to what you might have predicted. Empowering people in their roles and providing recognition and reward for innovation is a great way to improve the business, and mobile applications often provide an exciting way in which to start.

As organisations continue to deliver mobile applications as a way of marketing to customers, they also need to consider how mobile solutions can improve their internal business processes. Danielle Cullen explores some of the reasons for implementing mobile applications within the enterprise.

The case for enterprise apps

improved business performanceEnterprise applications have a clear goal or purpose in their implementation. They may drive a business process to be faster or lower cost. They may ensure better data accuracy, in turn driving better reporting and decision-making. They may be implemented to improve the health and safety of employees.

Whatever the reason, enterprise applications encourage organisations to look at their business processes from the “outside in” and think about where business performance improvements can be made. In this way, a relatively quick and simple mobile application can sometimes have a surprisingly significant impact on the results of a business.

leverage existing it investmentsMobile enterprise applications are a great way to leverage existing IT investments. Having spent millions of dollars on implementing SAP and/or other systems, as well as continuing licence and maintenance costs, it makes good sense to develop mobile applications that interface with these systems to really maximise value – as well as improving business processes along the way.

We’ve started to see organisations making good use of this throughout Australia and New Zealand. Across the continent, there are already executives approving SAP workflow tasks on their smartphone, maintenance

engineers creating notifications and work orders on their tablet devices, and field workers logging incidents in real-time on rugged field devices.

The mobile revolution isn’t happening, it’s happened – and enterprise mobility is truly changing the way that the world does business. If they haven’t already done so, organisations need to start acting on this now or risk getting left behind.

Danielle Cullen is operations manager at Clarimont. Clarimont specialises in driving improved business performance through strategic cloud and mobile solutions.

technologymobility

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careers

Recently a blog post on the SAP Community Network (SCN) highlighting a distrubing example of a brazen attempt by a consulting company to mislead a customer, posted by Jarret Pazahanick, a SAP senior HCM consultant and SAP Mentor, received thousands of views and nearly 150 comments.

In response to the volume of discussion and the seriousness of the problem, John Moy, SAP user interaction and mobility architect at Australia Post and SAP Mentor, delved deeper into this issue in a video discussion with Pazahanick and fellow SAP mentor Jon Reed.

The subject of the post was an advertisement for a ‘Female Sap FICO Expert Consultant/Analyst Proxy’ required only for phone interviews. While this is an extreme example of a company deliberately seeking to deceive its customer about the experience of the resources it planned to employ on a project, it raises the issue of the more benign but widespread and perhaps, from a project perspective, no less risky practice of consultants and companies misrepresenting their experience to land particular positions or contracts.

Half-truths and embellishments“People are always encouraged, often by recruiters or their consulting companies, to embellish their resumes with skills relevant to the position they are applying for,” Moy says. “That’s OK, as long as it doesn’t slide into a world of fiction.”

It is when skills and experiences are stretched beyond truth that the problems start to occur. Others in the industry report a general misrepresentation of crucial facts by both consultants and consulting companies, and the furnishing of resumes, proposals and tender documents with ‘half-truths’. In this case, the onus is then on the customer to validate the information or ask for further detail.

With a tight market for SAP resources, the problems can be compounded by the involvement of competing recruiting agencies. As Moy says, “There’s a fine line for recruiters and system integrators between ‘doing the right thing’ by customers and meeting their own sales and revenue targets.”

“I personally think one fundamental flaw is a view that such services are a pure commodity with the only differentiator being price. When one takes that view, then there is no need to check the quality of the product,” he says. “But the experience of myself and many of my colleagues in the industry is that this assumption is flawed.”

The wave of new solutions in the SAP world can also give rise to consultants stretching the truth about their level of experience, by completing a training course or some ad-hoc research into the functionality of a new solution and then

claiming to be an expert. Recruiter Adrian Everett, director at Everjoy Consulting,

says Australia and New Zealand as late-adopting markets present unique issues for companies looking to hire new SAP-qualified staff.

“The relative unknown of latest release products or technologies creates an opportunity for exploitation, particularly if the product or technology is released in Australia or New Zealand later than other parts of the world,” he says.

Guaranteeing qualityWhile it is unlikely there will ever be a solution that 100 per cent guarantees the credibility of candidates applying for SAP-related positions, there are a few safeguards that can minimise the likelihood of employing a candidate who has misrepresented their skills or experience.

Everett says the interview process is key to assessing whether a candidate actually possesses the skills and experience they say they do.

“Gaps can be highlighted through a defined and carefully

The issue of consulting fraud is fuelling discussion among SAP professionals. Kirsten Wade reports.

Are you getting what you pay for?


careers

If participation in this year’s Young ICT Explorers competition is anything to go by, we may see more women in the field in the future.

The competition, now in its third year and launched for the first time in NSW and the ACT, is a community-based initiative developed by SAP’s Research team in Brisbane to encourage more school-age students to take an interest in information technology as a potential career.

It has grown from 20 schools last year to attract 78 schools from the ACT, NSW and Queensland in 2012, with a record number of all-girls schools signing up and strong female participation from girls in co-educational schools.

Tim Sleep, SAP’s NSW general manager, says, “We’re very encouraged by the fact that we’re at almost 50 per cent female participation, despite the fact there’s probably 12-15 per cent of females in the industry as a whole.”

Young ICT Explorers encourages students, competing in

Girls embracing Young ICT ExplorersThis year’s Young ICT Explorers competition, aimed at encouraging the next generation of ICT leaders, has attracted many more schools and a strong female contingent. As they start work on their projects, some of the students were lucky enough to get some advice from a cricket great.

planned mix of interviews across behavioural, technical and management-focused interviews,” he says.

Engaging an SAP expert in the interview process, undertaking emotional intelligence testing during the interview stage, completing thorough reference checks and including probationary periods as part of contract arrangements are further measures companies can take to reduce their risk.

Moy says accountability needs to start with the customers.

“If customers were to collectively ‘raise the bar’ in relation to their expectations for checking the quality of candidates, this would send a clear message to candidates, recruiters and system integrators.”

Pazahanick believes more direct involvement of SAP in the hiring process would benefit companies. “In a perfect world SAP would be more engaged or at a bare minimum provide a ‘best practice’ set of rules or checklist that customers could use, though ultimately the responsibility falls on the customer,” he says. “SAP has a vested interest from a perspective that poor consultants often are engaged in low quality or failed projects which hurt the SAP brand.”

Others believe that establishing a central repository of information about consultants who have consistently failed to deliver or who are known to be misrepresenting their expertise might be another way to tackle the problem.

Do your homework The advice from Moy, Everett and Pazahanick for companies wishing to ensure they are hiring quality resources who can do what they say they can all involve time and taking responsibility.

While recruiters must obviously take steps to provide customers with quality information, Everett believes the ultimate decision and responsibility for hiring a consultant must lie with the organisation who is response for the ongoing employment relationship.

“I always have a philosophy that you cannot spend too much time vetting candidates upfront,” Moy says. “Once you find the right consultant to work for you, they will make your job easier and the time spent finding them will be time well-invested.”

Pazahanick says, “Finding the right consultant is not rocket science, but it does involve some extra work for customers on the front end. Make no mistake, hiring the wrong consultant will ultimately cause a lot more work and trouble for organisations in the long run.”

And by drawing attention to the issue, he hopes the bar will be lifted, as deception will be more readily exposed. As Pazahanick says, “On a topic like this, the more people seeing it the better.”


Mark Taylor with students from Newington College


careers

teams across four age groupings from Years 4-12, to develop technology projects and share their creative ideas in a structured environment, supported by their schools. Each project is assessed on the criteria of creativity, uniqueness, quality, level of difficulty and project documentation. This allows students and teachers to work together and align potential entries with the school curriculum, enabling students to apply what they’ve learnt in the classroom.

Students then have the opportunity to present their projects to a judging panel of academics, industry partners and ICT professionals. The competition aims to encourage and inspire students to build their creative abilities, to innovate, communicate and collaborate with each other while working on their IT-related project.

“It’s a great way for students of all ages to be formally encouraged and recognised for doing these sorts of projects. It’s a wonderful way to show parents and teachers just what’s possible,” Sleep says.

SAP has partnered with the University of Queensland and the University of NSW, which provide the venues for the final judging event in each state, as well as judges.

Projects in previous years have included a solar system to recharge the iPad, an interactive website designed as a self-help tool for healthy eating and the prevention of diabetes, and an application to deliver school students

information about their timetable and assessment changes straight to their mobile device.

Sleep says the strong interest from schools in the competition reflects a growing emphasis within the school education sector on the importance of technology in the curriculum as a core skill for tomorrow’s workforce.

“The technology industry has long struggled to fill jobs due to the available pool of IT skilled talent not being able to keep up with market demand. Government has also recognised that if Australia is to become an Innovation Nation, we must invest in developing creativity and innovation in our students at school level,” Sleep says. “It’s also very encouraging that so many girls are participating in the competition. We hope that this will translate to more women participating in the technology

sector in future.”In early June, Australian cricket

legend Mark Taylor conducted a coaching session with some of the students taking part in the Young ICT Explorers competition. He gave them advice on teamwork and leadership.

“We touched on ideas about communication, and about not necessarily having to be the best. There’s always the feeling, and it happens in sport a lot, that the best player has to be the captain or the leader. But that’s not necessarily the case,” Taylor says. “The guy who should be the leader should be the one who’s the good organiser, the one who can communicate to the others about how they’re going to get a job done.”

In addition to the value of working through a process of coming up with an idea and then putting it into action, Taylor believes having technology skills will be another “string to the bow” for students.

“The good thing about these kids is they’ve got an understanding of how all this technology works, so they can grow with it. They can actually think about IT as a possible career because there’s no doubt there’s going to be a greater demand for people with that understanding.”

In 2013, there are plans to further expand the competition, rolling it out to Singapore.


Follow the Young ICT Explorers on Twitter: @youngICTExplorer

Mark Taylor gives students from Monte Sant’Angelo Mercy College leadership advice

Students from Macarthur Anglican School visit the SAP offices


Here we bring you our regular round-up of who is going where in the industry. If you have changed jobs recently or hired some new staff, email us at [email protected]. By Anne Widjaja.

On the Move

Hakan Saglam, AxientAxient has recently appointed Hakan Saglam as its solution consultant and delivery manager, to assist in the sales and delivery of StreamServe and SAP Document Presentment by OpenText.

Saglam joins Axient after 10 years of working as a consultant. Saglam also spent an additional six years in carrier billing, working with a number of integrated telecommunications solution organisations. Saglam has worked in a variety of roles which have developed his experience in pre-sales, software implementation, service delivery, process improvement, project management, wholesale billing and management of complex data network solutions.

Sanglam says he is delighted to join Axient, and looks forward to helping the company become the leader in the Asia-Pacific region in document output management, providing high quality services to the corporate and government markets.

Brought to you by the SAP people specialists

Sebastian Moore, Plaut Australia Plaut Australia has appointed Sebastian Moore as its chief executive officer, following the departure of Mark Alder.

Moore previously held senior positions with Cisco, RSA Security and Hewlett Packard before joining Plaut in 2010, as business manager for Plaut’s northern region market.

According to Plaut chairman, David Prior, Moore was the natural choice for the position as the “established successor” to Alder.

“Sebastian has consistently demonstrated a successful track record in strategic planning, solution sales and team leadership,” Prior said.

Moore is proud of Plaut’s “project win rate” and will continue to build upon the company’s strong branding in his new role. “I am looking forward to continuing to work with the Plaut team to drive continued success for our customers and staff,” he added.

Moore holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) degree, an MBA from Macquarie Graduate School of Management and is an Australian Institute of Company Directors graduate.

Mike Harvey and John Dwyer, Vesta PartnersMike Harvey and John Dwyer have recently joined the Australia Asia Pacific (AsiaPac) team for Vesta Partners, an SAP services and consulting company specialising in Enterprise Asset Management and SAP EAM technology. Harvey joins Vesta as the principal consultant and manager of the Western Australia division, and Dwyer will fill the role of principal consultant.

Harvey has over 25 years business experience across markets in Europe, the Middle East, North America and the Asia Pacific, and a range of industries, including oil and gas, mining, utilities, manufacturing and government. He has spent 18 years consulting internationally as a senior logistics consultant and has extensive experience implementing SAP ERP systems.

Dwyer has an established background in asset management, including experience in plant engineering and operation and maintenance in chemical, petrochemical and mineral processing plants. He also has extensive industry experience in areas such as natural resources, energy and mining, defence and telecommunications. Dwyer has developed a reputation as an expert in solution architecture, business process reengineering, integration management, detailed design, project management and support.

Peter Dunford, managing director, Vesta Australia AsiaPac said, “Both Mike and John are well-known and highly respected throughout the Australian and Asian EAM and SAP communities. They will add substantial value to the Vesta team and bring solid expertise to our clients.”

CareersON THE MOVE

Michael Harman, SAP ANZ Michael Harman has been appointed by SAP as the new head of Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS) for Australia and New Zealand. In this new position, Harman will be responsible for the go-to-market strategy and positioning of SAP’s portfolio of RDS, leveraging SAP’s partner network and SAP’s specialised sales team.

Previously Harman was the first point for contact for SAP’s commercial customers in his role as a customer relationship executive for SAP ANZ. Harman has also held roles in presales, presales management and field operations management for various companies, including JD Edward/Peoplesoft and Mincom.



Inside SAP onlineFor all the latest news in SAP,

check out www.insidesap.com.au

Stuart Dickinson, Oxygen Business SolutionsSAP partner Oxygen Business Solutions has appointed Stuart Dickinson to the role of chief executive.

Prior to this appointment, Dickinson held the title of general manager, consulting and solutions for Oxygen, with responsibility for overseeing Oxygen’s 150 SAP consultants based in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane. He has also held several other integral executive roles at Oxygen, since its inception in 2001.

“I am very proud to take over as Chief Executive of a company that is uniquely positioned in the market and has strong prospects for future growth,” Dickinson said. “I look forward to further extending the SAP solutions we offer and maintaining our reputation for achieving real business value for our clients.”

Dickinson has replaced Mike T. Smith, who spent a decade in the role as chief executive and decided to remain in New Zealand when the CEO position transferred to Australia.

“The time is right for the Chief Executive role to be based in Australia so the company can continue its strong regional growth,” said Smith. “I have decided for personal reasons not to relocate and am delighted that Stuart has accepted the role. He is a seasoned executive, knows both Oxygen and the SAP marketplace intimately, and is a natural fit to lead this next phase.”

Geraldine McBride, SAP North AmericaFormer SAP ANZ CEO and managing director Geraldine McBride has been appointed president of SAP North America. McBride will lead SAP’s business operations in the United States and Canada. She will be reporting to Robert Enslin, member of the SAP Global Managing Board and president of sales.

Prior to her appointment, McBride served as vice president of Dell Services for Asia Pacific and Japan, and previously held the role of vice president and global head of Dell’s applications and BPO services business.

McBride has come full circle with her career, having spent 15 years prior to joining Dell with SAP in senior executive and sales management roles. McBride was president and CEO of SAP Asia Pacific Japan and senior president and general manager in SAP North America. McBride was instrumental in regional projects such as SAP’s 2002 North America go-to-market model.

“Geraldine knows our customers, understands the importance of our partners and has the experience needed to lead SAP’s next chapter of growth in North America,” said Enslin. “We’re excited to have her back within the SAP family and look forward to her leadership and expertise in this key region.”

Garry Parks and Ben Cronin, Windsor Business SolutionsSpecialist asset management consultancy Windsor Business Solutions (WBS) has announced the appointment of two new executives, Garry Parks (pictured) and Ben Cronin. Following the acquisition of key projects across Australia and unprecedented growth in the organisation, WBS has made the move to expand its operations.

Garry Parks has joined WBS in the newly-established general manager role, with a keen focus on growing the operational capabilities to meet demand. With more than 10 years’ experience as a general manager, coupled with a strong background in developing and delivering operationally, Parks has the experience to lead the company over the coming years.

To assist WBS on its path for growth, Ben Cronin has been appointed as business development manager. He joins WBS with extensive technology specialist sales expertise coupled with excellent customer relations and commercial engagement skills, developed through his 15-year career.


Arianne Johnston, SAUGArianne Johnston has joined the SAP Australian User Group (SAUG) as events manager.

Johnston was previously events producer at NSW Business Chamber, an independent member-based company, and has held varied positions across events and marketing at Revlon, Telstra, Dermalogica and Zurich.

Johnston believes that her new appointment has come at an ideal time for the organisation.

“I’m very excited to be joining the SAP Australian User Group, just in time for the upcoming SAUG Summit 2012 + SAP Forum Australia.”


CareersON THE MOVE

Sarah Arnold, SAP AustraliaSAP Australia has recently appointed Sarah Arnold in the role of account director, NSW Government.

Arnold has been working in the SAP ecosystem for 15 years, most recently as the ERP practice lead of boutique business transformation consultancy, Articulate.

Commenting on her appointment, Arnold said, “It’s an exciting time to be joining SAP, particularly in NSW Government. The majority of the NSW Government clusters have well-established SAP footprints, allowing for exciting innovation.”

We’d love to hear about them.

Moving jobs? Hiring new staff?

Send your ‘On the Move’ news to [email protected]


events

SAP Forum Australia’s theme this year is to help Australian businesses run like never before. SAP Forum Australia will deliver a glimpse of SAP innovations and developments, while the SAUG Summit 2012 will address the best of the current environment.

SAP Forum Australia, a free half-day event, will take place on Wednesday 22 August, replacing SAP’s annual World Tour. Featuring the latest in SAP innovation, SAP Forum Australia keynotes include:•NayakiNayyar,SAPglobalvicepresidentofcorporate

strategy, •DrKerstinGeiger,SAPglobalheadofindustrysolutions,• PrakashDarji,SAPglobalVPdatabaseandtechnology

solutions, and •NickBrown,SAPseniorVPofmobilesolutions

management.The SAUG will fill the schedule for the other two and a half days with international and domestic customer case studies, sponsored presenters and panel discussions. Customer presenters include:• BenHaines,CIO,PabstBrewery,•VitoForte,CIO,FortescueMetals,• SteveMoraitakis,programdirector,GalaxyProject,

Woolworths,•KyleMalligan,GMbusinessinformationservices,

Leaseplan, •MichelledeWet,HRISprogramdirector,Transfield

Services, and •AlanHesketh,generalmanager–groupinformation

services, Super Cheap Auto. The SAUG Summit 2012 will also feature a paid

technology track, on Tuesday 21 August, focusing on

platform,middleware,cloud,contentandportals(PMC/CP)andenterpriseinformationmanagement(EIM).PresentersincludeSanjayChikarmane,SVPandgeneralmanager,globaltechnologysolutionsatSAP,andDarrenCrowder,director,GlobalCentreofExcellenceforTechnologyandInnovation,SAP.Theinvitation-onlySAUGCIOForumwilltakeplaceon

Wednesday 22 August featuring international and domestic speakers, and a customer panel discussion. SAP participants includeSimonDale,APJCTO,andColinSampson,APJCFO.Therewillalsobeanexhibitionfloorwith40exhibitors

that will present the latest solutions, products and services from the SAP ecosystem while creating a unique place to connectwithpeers,keySAPexecutives,andpartners.TheSAPInnoJamwillalsotakeplaceonSunday

19AugustandMonday20August.

SAP Forum and SAUG Summit 2012: will you be there?The SAP Forum Australia and the SAP Australian User Group (SAUG) Summit 2012 will be held concurrently over three days from 21-23 August, creating Australia’s largest SAP-centric event. Hosted at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, the event will attract over 1000 senior executives, IT decision-makers and business managers.


EVENTS

SAUG HR/Payroll Special Interest Group

Meeting

10 July 2012

SydneyThe Sydney-based HR SIG has been in operation since the beginning of 2010 and meets quarterly. This event is a great opportunity for networking and discussion around SAP HR and Payroll. This session’s topic is workforce planning: what it is, why it is important and how SAP tools can assist. The SAP Roadmap for HCM through the acquisition of SuccessFactors will also be revealed.w: www.saug.com.au/SIGs_SIG.aspx?sig=yUNBZSJpvu4=

Australian CIO Summit

23-25 July 2012

QueenslandThe Australian CIO Summit is the premium forum bringing elite buyers and sellers together. As an invitation-only event taking place behind closed doors, the summit offers chief information officers and IT solution providers and consultants an intimate environment for a focused discussion of key new drivers for IT innovation.w: www.australianciosummit.com

Mastering Business Intelligence with

SAP 2012

6-8 August 2012

MelbourneSpecially designed to enhance decision-making and organisational performance using SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions. Includes presentations and sessions from local and international companies, roundtable discussions and special sessions and SAP Business Intelligence partners showcase.w: www.masteringsap.com/biau

SAP Summit 2012 and SAP Forum

Australia

21-23 August 2012

Melbourne Convention and Exhibition

CentreSAP Australia and SAUG have joined forces this year and will hold the SAUG Summit and SAP Forum Australia concurrently over three days. See page 44 for more information.w: www.saug.com.au/Events_Calendar.aspx?mode=overview&id=348

Mastering Supply Chain Management with SAP 201217-19 September 2012SydneyA three-day program coordinated with the purpose of enabling supply chain excellence. The event will provide SAP partners, customers and business management with the chance for networking, learning and sharing ideas about SAP Supply Chain Management tools.w: www.masteringsap.com/scmau

SAP TechEd 201215-19 October, Las Vegas13-16 November, MadridSAP TechEd is the premier technical conference offering over 1000 hours on SAP technologies, focused on SAP NetWeaver, analytics, and mobile platforms. Enhance your skills by attending hands-on workshops, demo-driven lectures, and Q&A sessions on the latest developments in analytics, mobile, cloud, database, and in-memory computing. Make valuable connections with peers and distinguished IT professionals from our SAP community.w: www.sapteched.com

Mastering Project & Portfolio Management with SAP22-24 October 2012SydneyA three-day program for networking, training and development for business managers and project professionals. The ideal event for project, engineering and finance people to discuss effective ways to use SAP Portfolio & Project Management tools.w: www.masteringsap.com/ppm

Mastering Enterprise Mobility with SAP31 October – 9 November 2012Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and AucklandThe Mastering Enterprise Mobility with SAP series will provide SAP professionals with a day of networking, learning and sharing in this new and exciting community. The event will include: presentations and sessions from local and international companies and SAP, special networking sessions, roundtable discussions, and a showcase of SAP mobility partners’ complementary services and technologies.w: www.masteringsap.com/mobility/

2nd Annual SAP Ecosystem Foundation

Regatta for Redkite

2 November 2012

Middle Harbour Yacht Club, Sydney Have a great day out on the water and raise much-needed funds for Redkite, a charity supporting children and young people with cancer and their families. Network with other members of the SAP ecosystem in the name of a good cause. w: www.sapef.org

SAP for Utilities

7-9 November

SingaporeSingapore will host the Asia-Pacific region’s SAP for Utilities Conference. After running successfully in the US for five years, this conference will bring together SAP users, process owners and IT executives who use SAP solutions to drive efficiencies in their utilities. This forum is the gathering place for utility professionals to have important conversations, form lasting relationships and pinpoint new and different ways to use SAP for Utilities solutions to get business results.w: www.sapforutilities.asia/apj

Mastering SAP Plant Maintenance

19-21 November 2012

QueenslandMastering SAP Plant Maintenance gathers SAP PM people from around Australia and the world to network, share know how and discover new SAP solutions. Local and international companies will offer presentations and sessions on SAP PM and instructor-led workshops will be tailored to SAP PM topics. SAP PM partners will also have the opportunity to showcase their newest innovations.w: www.masteringsap.com/pmau

SAUG 40th Plenary and Annual General

Meeting

22-23 November 2012Australian Technology Park, SydneyOffering insights into the latest SAP technologies, current business issues and best practices and multiple opportunities for networking, this event will benefit all customers wishing to maximise their SAP investment now and into the future.w: www.saug.com.au/Events_Calendar.aspx?mode=overview&id=417

What’s OnEach edition of Inside SAP includes a diary of upcoming events for the SAP community around Australia and internationally. To have your event listed, email [email protected].


PARTNER DIRECTORY

ASG

As a growing local Australian business, ASG offers the latest SAP and associated technologies designed specifically around the needs of our customers. With experience spanning more than 15 years, ASG delivers some of the most effective SAP projects and services for enterprise and mid market organisations Australia wide.

Compuware

For nearly 40 years, Compuware has delivered software, experts and best practices to make your applications work well and deliver business value. Our people and software ensure that critical technologies work like they should – all the time – for 7,100 customers around the globe.

Esker AustraliaEsker is a recognised leader in document process automation solutions for SAP. On premise software solutions and SaaS solutions include: sales orders processing; accounts payable; e-Invoicing; e-Procurement; and enterprise faxing and mail services. Customers achieve significant operational efficiencies, cost savings and measurable ROI in less than three months. Since 1997, over 1,700 companies in ANZ have trusted solutions from Esker Australia.

Everjoy Consulting

The leading SAP recruitment specialist in the ANZ recruitment marketplace. As an SAP specialist consultancy, you can be sure that your recruitment consultant at Everjoy has a deep understanding of the roles that you require and can work with you to meet your organisational goals and targets with effective people solutions. For the best people or the best opportunities in SAP, contact Everjoy Consulting today.

IQX

IQX provides SAP customers with packaged & bespoke business solutions delivering enhanced Business Insight, Collaboration & Productivity benefits by leveraging Microsoft Technologies. We improve the user experience across all core functional areas of SAP for all user types. IQX solutions include Excel add-ins, SharePoint Web Parts, SharePoint Forms, K2 & Nintex solutions and native mobile apps for SAP. See, Share and Do more in SAP via IQX.

LodestoneLodestone is a global management consultancy, committed to designing and delivering solutions that enable international companies to thrive in today’s complex business environment. We help our clients to define the measurable business benefits that we will achieve together, using our teams of client-focused consultants, who combine a passion for excellence with strong process and SAP skills and deep experience of transformational change in their industry.

SUSE

Established in 1992, SUSE is the original provider of the enterprise Linux distribution and the most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing. With a portfolio centered around SUSE Linux Enterprise, we power thousands of organizations around the world across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Now operating as an independent business unit of The Attachmate Group, SUSE continues its unwavering focus on the benefits of open source and the needs of its commercial partners and customers.


PARTNER DIRECTORY

ReadSoft

ReadSoft is a world leading supplier of Document Process Automation solutions, specialising in Accounts Payable Automation for SAP. Their AP automation solution seamlessly integrates with SAP and has been selected by an impressive range of multinationals seeking to improve control, efficiency and overall performance, along with an attractive ROI. We invite you to contact us for a free consultative workshop and to “squeeze more from SAP”.

Retarus

Retarus is a leading global provider of professional messaging services. Faxolution for SAP is a certified, secure, fully integrated cloud fax service for SAP systems. Any document that appears on the SAP fax queue will be retrieved by Faxolution for SAP and transmitted anywhere in the world via one of our 4000+ fax lines.

Sky Technologies

Sky Technologies provides code-free “configure once, run anywhere” mobile enterprise applications to mobilise any SAP process. Sky’s solutions are backed by more than 13 years of mobility experience, deployed in over 35 countries, and available on-premise or via the SkyCloud. Mobility made easy – it’s what we do.

Systems and People

Systems and People specialise in providing SAP resourcing solutions for SAP-run organisations across Australia. We offer a complete SAP resourcing service encompassing SAP Recruitment, SAP Consulting and Contractor Management. Systems and People can help you to unlock the true value of your SAP investment with the right SAP people, build your internal SAP expertise with experienced contract and permanent SAP resources and reduce overhead with a contractor management solution for your contingent workforce.

To get the best in the business working for you – call Systems and People.

Utopia Inc

Utopia, Inc. is a global data strategy and consulting firm employing its proprietary Enterprise Data Lifecycle Management™ (EDLM™) methodology. Utopia’s offerings include strategy development, master data management, data migration, data archiving, data quality, and data governance. By treating data as a key asset, clients can reduce overall costs and improve efficiencies.

Passion for Excellence. Commitment to Delivery.

Lodestone is a global management consultancy, committed to designing and delivering solutions that enable international, national and local companies to thrive in today’s complex business environment. We help our clients define measurable business benefits that we will achieve together, using our teams of client-focused consultants, who combine a passion for excellence with strong process and SAP skills and deep experience of transformational change in their industry.

To find out more about Lodestone call 02 8571 8300, email [email protected] or visit us at www.lodestonemc.com

Lodestone specialises in:

Strategy and Business Process - helping clients create customer

value, improve operational excellence and manage risk.

Solution Definition - turning established business

strategies and objectives into pragmatic solutions which can

easily be implemented. Including the Implementation of our

newly SAP Certified Expense Management Solution.

Solution Implementation - designing and delivering solutions

by leveraging our extensive knowledge and expertise in the

delivery of complex programs.

IT Transformation - shaping IT to optimise the ability

to deliver measurable value to the business during and after Business

Transformation.

Inside SAP Winter 2012

Documents

Transcript of Inside SAP Winter 2012