Supply Chain Matters Update from 2011 SAP Sapphire Now and ASUG Conferences- Commentary Two

This is our second Supply Chain Matters commentary regarding attendance at this year’s SAP Sapphire Now and ASUG conferences being held in Orlando.  Day two also provided a busy agenda of activities and meetings.

Today served as the formal SAP kickoff of Sapphire with a keynote featuring co-CEO’s Bill McDermott and Jim Hagmann Snabe. A refreshing change from previous Sapphires was the presence of a live band, a good one at that, The Max Weinberg 7 of Bruce Springsteen fame.  There were many “tweets’ noting the exceedingly high production values for the keynotes thus far, not to mention the amount of money that must have been shelled out for this quality of production.

In the end, there were not any significant business or product announcements incorporated in the keynote.  Mentioned was a newly released SAP Sales on Demand application. On a positive note was mention of 40,000 customer deals signed by SAP since last year. Not as positive was the mention that the SAP Business by Design suite, specifically architected for smaller businesses has garnered only 500 customers since its announcement last year.  That seems disappointing.

Co-CEO Snabe specifically addressed SAP enabling the ability to “digitize the entire supply chain’.  We trust that this statement will equate to even more investment and momentum directed at supply chain management business processes and decision-making.  Resurrected from the past was the “sense and respond’ capability that was the fabric of SAP’s Adaptive Supply Chain messaging from over five years ago. This author should know since I was part of the team that helps to refine the content of that vision.  This version however, has more flavors of mobility computing.

Supply Chain Matters attended a specific supply chain panel discussion sessions that featured Lori Mitchell-Keller, senior vice president of supply chain, PLM, manufacturing suite solution management and featuring executives from Johnson and Johnson and Telllabs Operations Inc.  This session augmented what we heard and commented regarding SAP’s new solution extension, SAP Response Management by ICON-SCM at the SAP Insider Supply Chain and Logistics Conference several weeks ago. In our interviews over these past two days, we have heard that the customer interest and pipeline in this solution extension is building rapidly, and that was reflected in a later session that ran out of room for attendees.

Later in the day, we were fortunate to speak with an SAP customer who is evaluating this new solution extension, and learned that the pricing model has similar characteristics to that of SAP APO.  Supply Chain Matters believes that SAP is still evaluating this pricing model, especially for attraction to mid-market companies.

Day Three of Sapphire Now focuses on the technology updates from SAP and hopefully will provide more meaningful product developments and announcements.  We will also focus some of our commentary on business analytics related to supply chain.

Bob Ferrari

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