August 13, 2009

SUGEN Digest, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Q3, 2009

Welcome to the first issue of the SUGEN Digest, our quarterly communication to all SAP user groups around the world designed
to keep you informed of our progress and provide you with
information to share with your membership. As this is the first such communication, we wanted to quickly review our mission and primary deliverables, so that you have a framework for the quarterly
updates we will be sharing with you.

Mission and Goals: All Together Now

SUGEN was founded in December of 2007 in order to unite regional
user groups and create an open, honest dialogue between
members and SAP in order to help drive the market towards
excellence, innovation, and success. Our primary goals are to
provide governance and alignment on information, experiences,
and ideas within the global SAP user group community, consolidate
and prioritize strategic issues that need to be addressed by SAP,
provide an efficient method for sharing information among user
groups, and establish a long-term partnership with SAP in order to influence SAP’s solutions and services delivery and enable best
practices on product strategy and product development.

It is a mission all members take seriously, as you’ll see from the progress updates for 2008-2009 below. Over the last two years,
SUGEN has chartered several task teams to focus on the following
key areas:

*         ERP Upgrades
*         Enterprise SOA adoption
*         SAP Long Term Strategy
*         Enterprise Support

Please share back with us any questions or comments you receive,
so that we can address them in future issues of the SUGEN Digest.

Sincerely,

Mike Stoko, SUGEN Chair (ASUG)
Per Högberg, SUGEN Vice-Chair (SAPSA)
Otto Schell, SUGEN Vice-Chair (DSAG)

 

SAP User-Group Executive Network Collaboration Workspace

 

 

SAP User Groups Around the World

 

 

SAP User Groups Spotlight

DSAG - German-speaking SAP User Group

The German-speaking SAP User Group is the independent lobby for users in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The work of DSAG is based on three pillars – network, exchanging experience and exercising influence. This is what happens primarily in the more than 150 special interest groups and work groups focused on industries, technologies and processes. Based on this, DSAG offers members exclusive information on SAP strategies, (product) developments and services at an early stage. The user group is the communication platform in the German-speaking SAP environment. Due to this active and close cooperation DSAG has become a “Trusted Advisor” of SAP.

 

 

Upgrades

In January 2008, the SUGEN ERP Upgrades task team was charged with working with SAP to develop the necessary strategy and information to help customers migrate to new SAP ERP releases in an economical and feasible way. In partnership with the SAP Global Upgrade Office, the team created and distributed a worldwide 360° survey to identify customer pain points and barriers to upgrading to SAP ERP 6.0 and created a robust informational and educational program that included new customer-facing collateral, educational sessions at many user group annual events, technical and value services workshops, and also executed a training program to help partners better support the customer community. As the group was successful in fulfilling its primary mission, the task team officially closed the charter in early 2008. The results, however, continue to provide strong benefits to the customer community.

Enterprise SOA Adoption

Also formed in January 2008, the enterprise SOA task team was created with a charter to provide specific guidance to customers on how to begin an enterprise SOA project, as well as to advise the customer community on what governance and organizational models work best in selling adoption internally. Working closely with SAP, the task force developed an enterprise SOA boot camp methodology and in April 2008 successfully delivered two boot camps in India and Brussels. Following this success, the group developed a rollout strategy and timeline for boot camps in 2009, as well as the Enterprise SOA resource center, which contains the starter kit the group created to support the adoption of Enterprise SOA (www.enterprisesoaresourcenter.com).  Having fulfilled their mission, the task force officially closed the charter in early 2008; however, as with the ERP Upgrades team, the enterprise SOA task team’s work continues to deliver value to customers.

SAP Long Term Strategy Charter

Also in 2008, SUGEN members began working with SAP on developing a Long Term Strategy Charter, with the objective of collecting early feedback from the user community that could directly impact SAP’s long-term development strategy and its product and service portfolio. The first iteration of this work concluded in early 2009, where, working within the initial scope of 4 product roadmaps, SAP and SUGEN members developed a streamlined process for sharing information and collecting customer feedback. These early successes have provided key learnings about how best to engage customers and scale this offering in future iterations. Based on the outcomes of this first phase, SUGEN will take a more strategic approach to Influence SAP, by not only covering roadmaps but also helping prioritize SAP’s portfolio on a larger scale. This expansion encompasses standard development projects, as well as the validation and prioritization of the portfolio. SAP and SUGEN will also continue to better connect this process with other ongoing activities of both SUGEN and other groups. We look forward to sharing more updates as this important initiative continues.

Enterprise Support

Shortly following the Enterprise Support announcement in June of 2008, SUGEN began working with SAP to validate the value proposition behind Enterprise Support and help justify the customer investment. That collaboration resulted in the November 2008 announcement of an SAP Enterprise Support task force whose mission was to communicate collective member feedback and ensure value delivery.  Over the last ten months, SUGEN has been working closely with SAP to not only establish Value Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for SAP Enterprise Support, but also to create a benchmark program to jointly evaluate the progress of these KPIs against customer expectations. Formal measurements in the areas of business continuity, business process improvement, innovation and protection of investment and total cost of operations will help SAP quantify and deliver on the success of the offering and help customers gain insights into their business and IT operations, compare their individual performance, and assess value realization year over year. The task force is currently working with over 130 customers on this initiative, which were nominated by SUGEN member user groups. And while for the majority of these customers their assessments have been scheduled, SAP has already completed over 50 assessments, with the expectation that the first results will be made available at the end of 2009.

The next version of the SUGEN Digest will be distributed in Q4 and we look forward to hearing from you in the meantime.