The Digital Workplace Experience: Supporting the Deskless, Remote, and Hybrid Workforce

In today‘s rapidly changing business environment, our customers face many challenges across all of their employee types. From remote workers, office workers, hybrid workers, and even deskless workers. From creating a highly engaged and purpose driven workforce that demands an exceptional employee experience across ‘all‘ aspects of their working life to creating new business models that are real time and facilitate data driven decisions. Organizations want to be an Intelligent Enterprise that deliver a differentiated experience. And it requires people & technology working in harmony, across all processes in a unified manner, for our customers to achieve these outcomes. ​

• Connecting experiences across the SAP landscape, and non-SAP applications and brings it into one, unified place to help your deskless employees get their work done
• Creating an easy-to-use interface available on any type of device to easily find and manage own content, and allowing for a reduction in search time for employees with their personal homepage
• Improving engagement with top-down and two-way communications

So Many Partners. So Little Time.

So Many Partners. So Little Time

Executing a systems implementation is not always easy! There are many steps and processes to consider when you implement a system. However, the work can be less stressful with the right implementation partner. During this session, you’ll learn the importance of designing and building a sustainable system and the role a good partner can play in its success. Specifically, attendees will learn:

How to vet a potential partner to support the work.
How to ensure your business partner positions you for success.
What pre-work should be done before starting the project.

It takes more than two to untangle the ins and outs of a major systems project. Stop by; learn how; and explore the necessary steps to do the work successfully.

Development Trends in the SAP World

In this session we will explore the general development trends in the SAP world.  If you are an ABAP development then you will be interested in the move to Cloud and how that can be supported by technologies like embedded Steampunk and RAP (the Restful Application Programming Model).  Of maybe you are building Cloud Native extensions already and want to hear about the latest developers around side-by-side extensions using the CAP (Cloud Application Programming Model).  Or maybe you are intrigued by the industry trends in the Low-/No-Code space. We will cover a little bit of news and information about all those topics in this session.

Reimagine Global Legal Reporting with SAP Document & Reporting Compliance

SAP Document and Reporting Compliance (DRC) is the next generation reporting platform which aims at bringing in digital transformation in the critical area of Compliance Reporting and Monitoring. The solution helps you to create, generate, and submit compliance reports to the authorities on time and in the correct format. It helps you to ensure compliance with complex and ever-changing legal requirements. The extensibility capabilities of the legal reporting platform also help to adapt and create reports beyond the SAP standard offering and help organizations achieve the last mile of reporting compliance.

Lessons Learned with S/4HANA and Azure

Join Sascha Wenninger as he shares some of the lessons learned from delivering SAP S/4HANA migrations and conversions with public cloud infrastructure. Through his involvement in dozens of SAP on cloud projects to date, Sascha has gained a lot of experience and insight into how to safely and efficiently operate SAP workloads in the cloud. Over the years, customers demand has shifted from not just "lift & shift" migrations of the infrastructure, but deeper landscape modernisations including S/4HANA system conversions as part of their journey to the cloud.

This presentation shares some of the many lessons learned through this work. Sascha will cover topics across the technology stack — from infrastructure to security and data management — as well as some less technical aspects which leaders should consider while planning their transition to S/4HANA and the cloud.

Navigating the Controlling Options in Your SAP System

With more than a dozen options available in the SAP controlling module, choosing the best solution to meet your managerial accounting needs can be challenging. Explore the different sub-modules in the SAP controlling module including cost center accounting, internal orders, profitability analysis, profit center accounting, and the material ledger, and obtain expert guidance to choose the best one for a specific task. Identify key criteria that will affect your choice of sub-module, including how your organization currently stores data, reporting, and training requirements. Find out which sub-modules you can and should use for optimizing reporting speed, database size and transaction processing speed. Understand the impact of SAP NetWeaver BW on your overall reporting capabilities. Take home a matrix with complete details on each sub-module, its functionality, and how it works best.

1. Learn how to decide which of many different CO & EC sub-modules/best suits a company’s requirements

2. Be aware of all the options offered within the SAP product suite

3. Learn why fear of the unknown causing users to stick with the modules they know resulting in sub-optimal solutions

Powering Our HR Future - CS Energy's HR Transformation Journey

CS Energy’s People and Culture strategy is “to empower you to deliver your strategic priorities”. One of those priorities over the past 16 months has been to upgrade the HRIS from SAP to SuccessFactors, including Employee Central, Performance, Learning, Succession, Recruitment, Onboarding and Comp and Variable pay. While they are in the final stages of completing the implementation, they have seen an incredible uptake and response from employees resulting in efficiency gains, record performance completion rates and quality talent conversations.

Laura will showcase their need for a new solution, the foundational planning that went into the various phases and the key lessons learned to drive greater personalization and inclusion for the workforce.

Level up Your SAP BTP Resource Management Skills with Command Line Tools and APIs

You've committed to the cloud, and started to explore the SAP Business Technology Platform via the cockpit's UI. But now you want to get to the next level to understand and manage your resources efficiently, aligned with the rest of your devops workflows. In this session -- which sits at the meeting point between developers, devops, developer experience and the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) - you'll learn what resources there are to manage, and how to manage them with powerful tools that you can build into automated mechanisms. The command line tools and APIs are where the rubber meets the road, and you need to be in the driving seat. You'll come away with an understanding of what tools are available, what they're used for and where to use them. You'll also learn how to combine them with tools in the wider ecosphere to help you explore, create and manipulate resources on SAP BTP. If you're interested in levelling up in this space, and embracing command line tools and APIs that give you superpowers for your SAP BTP environment, this session is for you.

Highlights of the SAP Roadmaps for HR Solutions

It’s an exciting time to be in HR. New technologies and best practices are emerging that will enable us to rethink and reimagine how HR can deliver services and support to everyone in the organization, from up/re/future skilling to supporting how people work, to new ways of guiding an end user through the life and career events that he/she/they experience every day. In this session, you’ll learn about the recent and planned innovations across the SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite that will help you reimagine your approaches to HR. And for those who plan to continue to leverage the existing ERP HCM solution, we’ll have a few updates for you too as well.

Overview of SAP’s Sustainability Portfolio

SAP has accelerated its investment into its sustainability portfolio to reduce emission, reduce waste, reduce inequality and provide wholistic steering and reporting. In this session I will explain what customers can expect from this new range of solutions bundled into the SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises. The session will not only introduce SAP’s strategy and the concrete solutions, but also explain the maturity, the roadmap and give some pragmatic advice about getting started.

How Empathy is Important to Building your Data Culture

According to past research, organizations that base their decisions on data-driven insights are almost three times more likely to achieve double-digit growth.  Achieving a culture of data is as impactful to the company bottom line as meeting quarterly sales goals. Data literacy isn’t enough.  To achieve a data culture, organizations need to understand the emotions involved with a culture change.

In this keynote, Heather Hill will cover:

• Empathy as it relates to culture shifts
• How to avoid the pitfalls of failure
• Key to leading a changing culture
• 3 tips to boost your data culture

Product Costing Insights from Eli Lilly and Company

In this session, Ross Christoph, who is primarily responsible for the processes and solutions for Product Costing at Eli Lilly and Company globally, will review the use of SAP Product Costing at Eli Lilly and Company. Eli Lilly has manufacturing plants located in 13 countries and products marketed in 125 countries. This presentation will take you through a detailed overview of the costing approach, the product costing solution implemented at Eli Lilly and Company, the key concepts of Transfer Control and Group Valuation Costing, as well as the Costing Run step-by-step.

Finance in The Cloud - What's Different & What Can You Learn from a more Focused Approach?

In this session we’ll look at what it means for a finance organisation to move to the cloud and how some cloud thinking can focus the mind, even if you continue to work more traditionally. We’ll start by looking at how standardization is handled in the cloud and the role of scope items in delivering configuration settings and best practice approaches. Even though you don’t have to follow this approach on premise, using the best practices can jump start a project. We’ll then look at the use of business roles within these processes and explain the role of SAP Fiori as compared to the classic transactions. We’ll particularly focus on those applications that only exist as Fiori apps. In the cloud some choices have been made for you, so you’ll be using the universal journal and margin analysis and won’t have the options to add special ledgers. You’ll find that some processes have been completely rearchitected, so some close tasks have been reimagined to run event-based to deliver revenue recognition and WIP valuation immediately. In many cases SAP is taking a cloud first approach, so you’ll find new business processes such as service management and new steering models, such as universal parallel accounting being delivered in the cloud first and on premise later. Finally, we’ll look at your options for extensibility and the interfaces to access data in the cloud and bring external data in.

“Nerd Herding”: The Five Tips to Successfully Manage Technical People and Teams

Getting the best out of technical teams can be a challenge and is often more art than science. Successfully managing technical people is not dependent on the leader having a great amount of technical knowledge themselves, more so using approaches that are tailored to getting the most from your “techies”. Andrew will share his 5 tips to success and explain why an opposable thumb is mandatory

Simplify & Accelerate Your Transition to the Cloud with SAP RISE

RISE with SAP is the vehicle that simplifies and accelerates customer's transition/transformation to the cloud. It provides the essential products, tools and services in a bundle that enable enterprises to embark on and complete their journey toward becoming an intelligent enterprise leveraging a Business Transformation as a Service (BTaaS) model. The journey includes fundamentals such as cloud migration, business process re-engineering, digital transformation, next generation technology adoption, and innovation. The value that it delivers is considerable starting with SAP’s next generation ERP solution SAP S/4 HANA (in either the Private Cloud or the Public Cloud), and many more included offerings like SAP Business Transformation Platform (BTP) and SAP Business Process Intelligence (BPI). RISE has just completed 1 year and therefore is still a relatively new concept among customers. The purpose of this session is to familiarize attendees with the concepts of RISE, its components, the benefits that accrue to customers, and lessons learned from SAP RISE implementations.

1. Key concepts of SAP RISE
2. SAP RISE components
3. How SAP RISE will enable customers to migrate to the cloud in a speedy & pain-minimized manner

The Value of Design Thinking and Why Collaboration is Key to Meaningful Innovation

“I like people. I strongly believe that creative problem solving and empathy are key for better solutions and healthier, happier people.” The way we work has changed drastically in the past years. The way we collaborate and engage with people, colleagues, and customers has changed. Hence, collaboration and a human-centric way of working in virtual settings have become evermore important.
Creative and collaborative problem solving to define and accelerate the development of meaningful innovations that improve health & care is the foundation of Julia's daily work for more than 10 years now. She guides teams in applying the co-creative approach to their daily work and leads customer engagements where Design Thinking is the key methodology. In this session, Julia will share her extensive experience in applying Design Thinking to different contexts.

Key takeaways:
1) An Introduction to the Design Thinking methodology and its background
2) Human-centric innovation
3) Why collaboration is key for meaningful innovation
4) Why failing early and learning fast is one of the main success factors of Design thinking

Financial Control Automation and Assurance

The last 2 years have highlighted the impact of a rapid onset and diversity of risk events and disruption, increasing the pressure on finance and accounting teams, with the potential for expensive losses and even failures. Most organizations are embarking on an ERP and finance modernization program. An often unintended consequence of financial transformation projects is the need to find matching internal control over financial reporting solutions to the resulting gaps in compliance frameworks. Furthermore, with the drive towards automation of business process, standardization, and increasing use of AI technologies, business must also find ways to improve and automate their controls over financial and other processes. SAP Financial Compliance Management is a new and innovative cloud solution from SAP to address this requirement. It enables organisations to demonstrate they have adequate controls in place to safeguard their financial data, which is a fundamental requirement to assure their published financial statements are being prepared reliably. The solution also supports key finance and accounting best practices and can be embedded in core financial business processes. With its growing list of ready to use finance-based automated procedures and native connection to SAP S/4 HANA cloud and on premise, and now SAP ERP 6.0, SAP Financial Compliance Management provides a high value low TCO approach to financial compliance and assurance in the cloud, and increasing the amount of automation, for SAP customers.

• Learn about financial compliance in the cloud, with its characteristic low TCO and short time to operationalize
• See SAP’s approach to continuous process monitoring embedded within the source system, leveraging ready to use content for S/4HANA
• Get an introduction to a single consolidated view of adequacy of financial controls reducing the impact of audit exceptions, share value erosion, fines

Business Transformation is Here. Is Your Team Ready?

Change has become part of our lives. Change cannot be avoided, nor is it unstoppable. One of the critical challenges in today's workforce is catering to the needs of different generations. Our workforce will continue to see a shift within the talent pool, with employees reaching the end of their careers and new generations entering the workforce. Businesses must be ready to adapt to sudden changes, and they must do it FAST! Business transformation is NOT about adopting new technology just for the sake of having "Ongoing IT Projects." Transformation should be tangible, actionable, and immediately applicable with ongoing end-user development. Digital transformation is a journey. It requires cultural and behavioral changes as they can be complex, disruptive, and time-consuming.
Each company is unique, and so is the scope and effort required to achieve a successful transformation. Your digital transformation roadmap must be prescriptive and address specific pain points for your departments and your most significant assets, "your end-users." For a successful transformation, business processes need to be reassessed, remapped, and simplified in advance, but it also takes the right digital-savvy leaders to be in place.

Anglo American Employee Central Journey

Lessons learnt. What we have done well and what could we have done better.
The true reflection of implementing Employee Central. Time Frame and complexity.

Cloud Payroll: Debunking the Risk when Moving To The Cloud

The decision to move payroll to the cloud is not an easy one for most organisations. Most Businesses that are looking at implementing SuccessFactors are keeping their payroll instance out of fear of failure. We are going to look at several areas within the Payroll process where organisations can be better informed and reduce anxiety during their decision-making process when migrating to SAP Cloud Payroll.

We’ll focus on the areas that are typically the most concerning and see how the risks are mitigated, such as:

• Implementation journey – is it that different or have we overhyped the implementation?
• Data security concerns and how to overcome them
• Failure risks within payroll processing
• Benefits of a cloud environment

"Without Data You're Just Another Person With An Opinion" Sanlam's Journey Towards Evidence Based Human Resources

Data analytics and evidence approach in Human Resources have been spoken about for many years as an aspirational goal. The journey to reach this stage of informed decision making is by no means easy and requires a number of clear definable goals up front. In this session the focus will be to share the people analytics journey of Sanlam with specific focus on the following: 1. Our overall digital transformation to enhance the employee experience and increase efficiencies to date as context 2. Start with the end in mind for reporting and analytics - people strategy and required business architecture required 3. How to migrate HR towards evidence based data gathering and analytics champions and the change management involved 4. Select the right skills for data analytics, literacy and science and dashboard visualisation

1. Start with the end in mind for reporting and analytics - people strategy and required business architecture required
2. How to migrate HR towards evidence based data gathering and analytics champions and the change management involved
3. Select the right skills for data analytics, literacy and science and dashboard visualisation

S/4 HANA Margin Analysis Reporting

This session will be an overview of the improvements in S/4 HANA profitability reporting. We'll compare the most often used Margin Analysis apps to the ERP account and cost based CO-PA reports.

1. Features of Fiori apps for Margin Analysis
2. Comparison to ERP account based CO-PA reports
3. Comparison to ERP cost based CO-PA reports

Round Table: Getting Ready for your S/4HANA Journey

SAP has long been an undisputed market leader in the ERP space. Today, we are excited to see how SAP S/4HANA helps companies around the world become intelligent enterprises. As hundreds of new SAP S/4HANA systems go live every month, we see more and more customers asking us for guidance on how to start the journey to the new digital core. That’s why we are hosting a roundtable as a very practical, engaging, down-to-earth talk for executives, project managers, decision-makers, and senior IT leadership. During this interactive roundtable engagement, you will have the opportunity to engage with a team of experts about the practical steps to get Ready for your S/4HANA Journey

1. The key decisions you must make when planning your approach to the SAP S/4HANA transition.
2. Focus on the specifics of conversion projects and new implementations.
3. Essential Tools: For technology-savvy IT leaders who want to understand the most influential technology aspects for successful project planning and execution, such as system readiness, downtime, custom code adaptation, and data loading.

How Finance RISES with SAP (Tips and Tricks to ensure that Finance Benefits from a RISE with SAP project)

The promise of Rise with SAP for driving business innovation has been well publicised. The combination of Industry Innovation to help customers take the lead, Live Insight to never stop improving, and a Trusted Partner to ensure success has proved attractive to many customers considering a move to SAP S/4HANA. However, the benefits for the Finance Team may not be as well understood, so this presentation addresses the CFO who is - quite rightly - asking 'What's the benefit of RISE for Finance?'. Finance will always be called upon to critically appraise the business case for a Rise with SAP project. Attend this presentation to learn how Finance can also benefit directly and avoid missing out on what might be a once in a generation opportunity to renovate and innovate Finance systems.

What is SAP BTP

Many SAP Customers are asking the same question – “What exactly is this BTP?”. This session will attempt to shed some light on this topic – covering aspects like Technically what is SAP BTP?, How do I consume it? How does it align to my on-premise or Hybrid SAP estate?, What components does it include?, What value does it offer organizations? Who would use it?
You should come away with a great overview of this key strategic direction SAP is following for all of its software and how to get access to free trial versions.

How Do You Ensure Success for Your Implementation Journey by Deploying Best Capabilities and Services

It’s not a race. It’s a journey of transformation and investing in SAP technology that supports employee growth, business development and security is paramount. The question then is how to have this SAP implementation and consequent cross-functional integration happen smoothly? How do you make sure your data is protected? Picking the right partner, starting point and path for implementation based on business needs is critical for productivity. Implementation timing must align with business strategies and goals.

Key Focus Areas:

• Why having a good SAP implementation plan and partner is vital
• Aligning SAP implementation and integration with strategy.
• Discussion on data security under new ways of working
• How to maintain frequent monitoring and why making use of controlled devices is helpful to business?
• Guidelines on managing POPIA in your HR department.

Key Take-aways:

1. Deliver an exceptional experience for your stakeholders.
2. Continuously meet your compliance requirements.
3. Embrace a new way of working.

HXM Move – How to Digitalize Your HR

Customers around the globe are transforming their business (models) to accommodate ever changing environments. HR needs to be part of this transformation. In the digital age this transformation needs to be supported by technology changes as well. SAP assists those transformations with different solutions and deployment options to move HR processes to a more human experience centric approach.

The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be

Famed American baseball player Yogi Berra is often quoted as saying “the future ain’t what it used to be”. A quote that rings profoundly true amidst the geo-political, social, environmental and technological upheavals of our time. The world and it’s events move faster and more dramatically, accelerated by the fact that we are now globally connected, always on and awash with data. And where it’s increasingly hard to figure out what to do next. For businesses this presents both opportunities and threats. In this presentation we’ll take a peek over the horizon to discern some of the possibilities that await us in the next five to ten years and share where SAP sees the opportunities to help our customers deliver a better world

How to Leverage AI for Continuous Testing of SAP Applications

In today’s world the usage of AI has become very prominent in many aspects of our date-to-date lives but we often don’t get to see practical use cases to solve our job related problems. In this talk we will discuss the areas of AI that could help us to achieve a modern and robust Continuous Testing strategy of real scenarios that we find in the SAP world. If you’re interested in understanding the value of AI driven Functional Testing for SAP Applications (Mobile or Browser) this is the talk for you.

Understanding of the technology behind AI driven Functional Testing

Real use cases where to leverage AI driven Functional Testing

Current Available solutions in the Market

SAP's UX Strategy with SAP Business and Technology Platform

The attendees should expect to learn about Fiori and extensions. As SAP customers move to S/4HANA, we want to cover how they need to upskill and use the latest development environment to extend applications.

The session will cover The SAP's development strategy. How to build SAP Fiori applications with BTP. What is SAP's new development tool with BTP. SAP's Low code tools in BTP

Intelligent Automation & Innovation in Finance

Many companies have embarked on a modernization of their systems, processes and tools. This trend has only accelerated recently due an increased pace of digitalization. Finance and risk organizations are not immune to this movement: they streamline and automate work with the help of intelligent technologies, they harness data in new ways to achieve forward-looking decisions, they enable companies to adopt new business models and they safeguard their IT investments with embedded controls and cybersecurity.

1. Intelligent Technology at SAP
2. iRPA & Workflow Integration in Finance
3. Industry and customer use cases for intelligent technology

Build Engaging Analytic Applications with SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP Analytics Cloud gives you tools to create a powerful, customized analytic experience for your users going beyond ad-hoc analyses and storyboards with presentation-style documents used to visualize data. The analytics designer capability for SAP Analytics Cloud is a low-code development environment for analytic applications, allowing you to quickly and easily build dynamic applications tailored specifically to your business' needs. Join this session to get an introduction to the analytics designer in an engaging and practical way.

1. Create data-driven analytic applications;
2. Build and use your own widgets in addition to the predefined set of widgets delivered with the analytics designer;
3. Design highly customized, interactive applications by using analytics designer API scripts.

Round Table: Getting Ready for your S/4HANA Journey

SAP has long been an undisputed market leader in the ERP space. Today, we are excited to see how SAP S/4HANA helps companies around the world become intelligent enterprises. As hundreds of new SAP S/4HANA systems go live every month, we see more and more customers asking us for guidance on how to start the journey to the new digital core. That’s why we are hosting a roundtable as a very practical, engaging, down-to-earth talk for executives, project managers, decision-makers, and senior IT leadership. During this interactive roundtable engagement, you will have the opportunity to engage with a team of experts about the practical steps to get Ready for your S/4HANA Journey

1. The key decisions you must make when planning your approach to the SAP S/4HANA transition.
2. Focus on the specifics of conversion projects and new implementations.
3. Essential Tools: For technology-savvy IT leaders who want to understand the most influential technology aspects for successful project planning and execution, such as system readiness, downtime, custom code adaptation, and data loading.

Determine your HR Technology Strategy with SAP Solutions

During the last few years, we’ve seen lots of changes in SAP’s HR related product roadmap. New solutions, new versions, new names, new delivery options and new timelines have left some customers confused. And yet, at the end of the day what feels overwhelming or confusing at first sight is something positive; a wide set of choices for customers to pick from to match their own business needs, timelines, and resource constraints. In this session, we’ll cut through the sometimes-confusing marketing speak and complex options and help you to identify the best option and roadmap for your organisation.

This session if for you if you are facing one or some of these questions:

• Can we still use SAP ECC HCM, if finance and logistics move to S/4HANA?
• Should we migrate to Employee Central Payroll or Sap Next Generation Payroll?
• Can I still use SAP HCM Time Management in the cloud?
• How’s SAP HCM for S/4 HANA different from SAP ECC HCM and do we have to upgrade this year?
• Should we use Hybrid Scenarios with SAP SuccessFactors and on-premise HCM?
• What is the benefit of the private cloud edition?
• Why move to the cloud at all?
• We are unhappy with our outsourced payroll provider. Can Sap technology help?
• What is HXM?
• We’ve implemented the SuccessFactors Suite. What now?

We’ll explain all the building blocks in SAP’s HCM/HXM universe and then walk you through the various scenarios with SAP ECC HCM, SAP HCM for S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors and other solutions.

Key take aways

1. Good understanding of the solutions available and how they fit together
2. Clarity about options available to your organisation
3. Insights to define your organisations best roadmap

Change Management By Any Other Name...

What change management isn't - debunking the myths. What change management is (in our humble view) - driving outcomes Why change efforts fail - revisited What to do differently - setting projects up for success Wisdom and insight to the secret of enablement The art of change management

1. The importance of prioritizing your change effort.
2. Driving the right outcomes
3. How to not do things for the sake of it

SAP BW/4HANA – Liberating Data at Nedbank

With SAP Business Warehouse (BW) 7.4 coming to an end on 31 December 2020, Nedbank had several important factors to consider to meet our strategic objectives, including the following: 1 The upgrade being redundant, because SAP Business Planning and Simulation (BPS) module is not supported in BW 7.5. 2 Nedbank Group's financial-cycle close being impacted by poor performance on the SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Budgeting Planning and Consolidation (BPC) due to an outdated database . In the session we will tell you about our journey to implement SAP BW/4HANA software for different business units, using shared HANA infrastructure on Microsoft Azure. We will also discuss the security, technical and business decisions, the technology choices, the lessons learnt, as well as the key challenges we faced. We will share about our experiences of introducing a new way of work (agile)and transitioning to remote teams amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, how the teams transitioned to embrace a new-found openness to flexibility, agility and innovative thinking – and shifting our focus from merely fighting fires to innovation. We will also share the lessons learnt by using Azure DevOps and SoundCloud principles to manage costs.

Key points to take away from this session:

1. Strong, experienced leads are key.
2. Take your current employees on the journey, pairing internal employees with experience contingent resources.
3. The importance of a strong business partnership and involvement of product owners.
4. Plan, replan, and plan again! When migrating a legacy solution, it is most likely that the initial estimated effort will change. If plan A doesn’t work, move to plan B to meet the goal.

Get the Most Out of Your People Data with SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics and Planning!

Digital transformation is creating hyper-connectivity among people, processes, things, and data. But to succeed in the digital economy, just having access to more data isn’t enough. The ability to provide people with the insight they need to make better decisions and enable them to act is what will distinguish the disruptor from the disrupted. This is the Intelligent Enterprise. SAP SuccessFactors can help you lead your organization’s Intelligent Enterprise journey and address the challenges of data integration, standardization, publication, and utilisation. We provide the most comprehensive library of talent metrics in SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics as the basis to accelerate the analysis of workforce issues. SAP Analytics Cloud complements this with a flexible, robust set of BI, predictive, and planning tools that customers can use to build a 360-degree view of their enterprise data (HR, Finance, Operations, Sales & Marketing, etc.).

1) Getting better insights of your people data with SAP SuccessFactors
2) Understanding the power of the prebuilt metrics in SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics
3) Taking advantage of SAP Analytics Cloud Planning to build intelligent Workforce Plans for the workforce of the future

Business Led Transformation Through the Move to SAP S/4HANA

From off-site Exco Strategy sessions to leadership alignment sessions, to the future of work workshops, to digital ambition labs, to pilot change management sessions, business process reviews and Change Board meetings BEFORE any technical assessments of S4 Hana, RES has journeyed towards it’s digital future. This presentation is the story of how RES leadership, business and I.T. has journeyed together to ensure that the S4Hana implementation we will do in 2023 is a huge success. We rejected the risk approach of impending doom of no support post 2025 and decided to look at our business through a future lens, what would we look like at work, what would we need to be to our customers, our suppliers, our stakeholders and what digital technology would we need to accomplish this. We looked at what worked in our current SAP implementation, what external systems would we require, what could we do as a clean core. We will share our steps along the way in the hope they might help those on the road or looking how to start the journey. Those who have converted are welcome but there won’t be much for you here. Our journey is not finished. We stumbled into a lack of knowledge, a difficulty in imagining what we would be, so we will share our mitigation plans, our strategies and our roadmap to success in 2023.

The three P's for project success. Participation, People and Process

Key Insights on How To Transition To S/4HANA Based On Acquired Experience Of Working With Others Who Have Done It!

Navigating the S/4HANA Transition: Key insights on how to transition to S/4HANA based on acquired experience of working with others who have done it! S/4HANA lessons learnt and why they are important: SAP Activate is SAP’s content-rich, agile methodology for implementation and/or upgrade of SAP solutions across industries and customer environments. It sets out an innovative adoption framework that expedites SAP S/4HANA implementations, and provides a clear process of structured and solution-specific practices for your business to choose how to adopt and extend new and differentiating capabilities across your organisation. This talk will highlight some key lessons to pay attention to that have been realised/experienced by seasoned SAP consultants when delivering SAP S/4HANA projects using the SAP Activate Framework, and details the reasons why it is important to be mindful of these. The talk will focus on lessons learned during some of the 6 phases of SAP Activate framework when transitioning to S/4HANA: DISCOVER, PREPARE, EXPLORE, REALIZE, DEPLOY, RUN HIGHLIGHTS: Business Case & Financials Scoping & Planning Business Ownership Deployment Strategy Fit to Standard Business Value

1. Navigating the S/4HANA Transition;
2. S/4HANA lessons learnt and why they are important;
3. Highlights like Business Cast & Financials, Scoping & Planning, Business Ownership, Deployment Strategy, Fit to Standard and Business Value.

A Journey to Central Finance - Automating Accounts Payable is The Beginning – The Massmart Story

Join Kogilan, Venesh, Subashni and Mohammed as they take you through: • Massmart’s Journey from a decentralized, disparate manual financial operation to a centralized automated and highly efficient financial operation. • The implementation of AP automation. The presentation will explore the challenges faced, how challenges were overcome, the learnings as well as concrete evidence of the success of the journey.

1. Why AP Automation
2. The valuable change management lessons
3. A view of AP automation success

New Normal - How SAP SuccessFactors Helps to Drive Business

As we continue to navigate our way through the changing realities of the pandemic crisis, new workforce challenges are emerging around the world. Strict restrictions still exist in many countries and employees are forced to continue working from home. However, there is an opportunity in any crisis. The human capital management (HCM) challenges that most employers have never encountered before force them to move forward. Fortunately, the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite is equipped with the tools that help employers solve new tasks, meeting the requirements of the new talent ecosystem.

1) HR challenges in new normal.
2) How SAP SuccessFactors helps HR to gain control over HR business processes.
3) Values for business

Track Cash Balances and Optimize Your Chart of Accounts with the Bank Account Ledger

For as long as customers have implemented SAP Finance, they’ve had to create hundreds of GL accounts to track their cash flow between various payment methods. Sometimes, the cash accounts makeup 30, 40 or even 50% of the total chart of accounts. SAP has also delivered finance subledgers for AP, AR, and Fixed Assets ever since R2… but nothing for cash accounts. With SAP S/4HANA 2020 OP, that has finally changed. Attend this session if you want to hear about SAP’s new solution to minimize the chart of accounts for cash accounts with their Bank Account Ledger (BAcL) solution

1) An understanding of a new solution that can greatly benefit cash position
2) understand how to minimize the number of GL accounts in the chart
3) an understanding how the Bank Account Ledger works with Bank Account Management

Is Managing the "Whole" Employee too Big a Bite to Take?

There is a growing consensus that the more you can understand about your employees the better you can manage them. Additionally, allowing employees to be part of their own career journey encourages retention of talent. But how do we get there? Moving to a competency and skills based talent management framework in bite sized chucks has to be doable (i.e. in steps that are consumable by the business without making either HR or the employees sick along the way). How do we do it? What can we consider? Where is the value and what can we do as HXM leaders to realise that value in our businesses.

Embracing Change

We all know that change is both painful and inevitable, it happens all the time and seems to happen faster and faster on small and large scale. We also know that thriving favours those who more easily adapt to changing environments. Why is it then that we still resist? What can we do about it? How can we use this resistance to change to our advantage?

With any SAP implementation it takes time for Business to settle down and for Business Processes to really become optimized. Part of the reason is that although during the project extensive testing is typically done – including User Acceptance Testing, individual transactions and even scenarios don’t really paint the whole picture. It takes time and focus to identify where the “wrinkles” are and smooth them out – this is where it can actually be very useful to identify pain points along the lines of “it used to work better when…”

We often ignore these “complaints and write them off to change resistance. However, if we look a bit closer, there is often a lot of low hanging fruit to be found in realizing some of the benefits you thought would come automatically with implementation.
Taking time and spending energy looking for those “painful” changes, means you get to improve user experience and engagement, as well as open channels of communication that will prove highly valuable for building system and process maturity and ensure continuous improvement.

Why embracing change is important; how to fast-track new system adoption; nothing is really new

NamPower SAP S/4HANA Move: Practical Customer implementation of FI/CO Migration

NamPower is Namibia's state-owned power utility, supplying bulk electricity to Regional Electricity Distributors (REDs), mines, farms and to some extend local authorities throughout Namibia. In this session we will discuss the NamPower implementation of S/4 HANA with first-hand practical experience of implementation process of the following key Finance areas: New GL conversion, Business Partner conversion, Asset Accounting, and our experience of using of Fiori App for FI/CO.

The SAP S/4 HANA conversion of
(1) New GL conversion
(2) Understanding the change In Asset Accounting
(3) User experience of using some of the Fiori Apps for FI/CI

How Consol Glass Automatically Clears Customer Payments in SAP

Consol Glass Group Credit Manager, Marita Baronet, answers questions in an interactive Q&A session pertaining to how Consol automated the allocation and clearing of Customer payments in SAP with BEST. Marita will outline the issues facing her department and the factors that drove Consol to implement the BEST Debtors Remit Module. This BEST module was implemented at Consol in just under 3 months. Using their available OCR technology with the BEST Debtors Remit module, Consol now convert their Customer Remittances so they can be automatically posted to their customer accounts and cleared in SAP. Marita will highlight the key benefits achieved through the implementation of the BEST Debtors Remit Module and talk through some of the high-level processing statistics and benefits achieved to date – especially noting the current clearing percentage achieved of the posted remittance line items. Therefore, if you receive high volumes of customer payments, or receive large remittance files, that result in time consuming customer account allocations – then this session will be invaluable to see how this process can be revolutionised. Time consuming, error ridden manual processes can now be replaced with automated processes and programmatic matching to allocate your customer payments. Consol Glass have achieved this! Attend this session at Mastering SAP Financials to hear how and find out more.

1) Common industry issues and inefficiencies facing credit control departments.
2) Automated Customer allocation options available in SAP using BEST.
3) Overview of Consol key processing statistics to highlight efficiencies and savings achieved to date.

Round Table: Getting Ready for your S/4HANA Journey

SAP has long been an undisputed market leader in the ERP space. Today, we are excited to see how SAP S/4HANA helps companies around the world become intelligent enterprises. As hundreds of new SAP S/4HANA systems go live every month, we see more and more customers asking us for guidance on how to start the journey to the new digital core. That’s why we are hosting a roundtable as a very practical, engaging, down-to-earth talk for executives, project managers, decision-makers, and senior IT leadership. During this interactive roundtable engagement, you will have the opportunity to engage with a team of experts about the practical steps to get Ready for your S/4HANA Journey

1. The key decisions you must make when planning your approach to the SAP S/4HANA transition.
2. Focus on the specifics of conversion projects and new implementations.
3. Essential Tools: For technology-savvy IT leaders who want to understand the most influential technology aspects for successful project planning and execution, such as system readiness, downtime, custom code adaptation, and data loading.

Adaptive Design .. The “Container-Like" Approach for On-Premise/Private Cloud-Based SAP Systems

The “Containerization” of applications and services gets a standard. But how to “containerize” an full SAP S/4HANA System? What are the options, which way to go? Which advantages do you get, which efforts have to be done? The Adaptive Design gives your operations of SAP Systems On-Prem/Private Cloud additional agility and eases the implementation of security options. Even being around for years, the value of the adaptive approach gets even more visible today. This session might contain traces of SAP LaMa 😉 but should give you an general idea how to decouple applications from the underlying layers.

1)Standardise your SAP Systems
2)Thinking in boxes and layers when running SAP systems
3)Decouple applications from the host

A Journey to Central Finance - Automating Accounts Payable is The Beginning – The Massmart Story

Join Kogilan, Venesh, Subashni and Mohammed as they take you through: • Massmart’s Journey from a decentralized, disparate manual financial operation to a centralized automated and highly efficient financial operation. • The implementation of AP automation. The presentation will explore the challenges faced, how challenges were overcome, the learnings as well as concrete evidence of the success of the journey.

1. Why AP Automation
2. The valuable change management lessons
3. A view of AP automation success

SAP Product Strategy - Intelligent Enterprises are Integrated Enterprises

Intelligent enterprises are integrated enterprises. They apply advanced technologies and best practices within agile, integrated business processes. That’s why a key part of SAP’s strategy is integrating end-to-end processes – whether these span SAP, partner, or third-party solutions. SAP’s integration approach goes far beyond technical integration of applications: Holistic integration of data, technology, and business processes delivers significant value to your business. It accelerates the speed of innovation, lowers the efforts for integration, shortens time to value, reduces the complexity of operations, and allows for real-time insight. SAP’s integrated intelligent suite connects your supply and demand chain to deliver an integrated, intelligent process experience. Learn more and see product integration in action in various demos.

1) Learn about SAP's Public Cloud ERP Strategy
2) Learn about the integrated and intelligent ERP in the Cloud
3) Find your business value within RISE with SAP

Supply Chain Finance: A win-win with Suppliers – The Telkom Story

Telkom recognises that their suppliers are critical in ensuring overall competitiveness and that funding of their suppliers through early payments helps ensure trust, builds a sense of partnership and ultimately creates innovation and business growth.  Join Nomhle and Christo and learn how Telkom’s finance and procurement teams with the support from Intellection led the deployment of the Telkom Supplier Financing program, the obstacles they overcame and the results the program is achieving.

A Journey to Central Finance - Automating Accounts Payable is The Beginning – The Massmart Story

Join Kogilan, Venesh, Subashni and Mohammed as they take you through: • Massmart’s Journey from a decentralized, disparate manual financial operation to a centralized automated and highly efficient financial operation. • The implementation of AP automation. The presentation will explore the challenges faced, how challenges were overcome, the learnings as well as concrete evidence of the success of the journey.

1. Why AP Automation
2. The valuable change management lessons
3. A view of AP automation success

What Vaccine Resistance and The Western Cape Water Crisis can Teach us about Successful Technology Roll Outs

Using stories of the vaccine resistance and the Western Cape water crisis, Mike Perk will help the audience to understand the psychology behind resistance, why technology roll outs are often subject to too much change management, and the fact we are naturally wired for adaptability in these situations. Mike will ultimately share a practical framework that can then be used to support your initiatives and provide a simpler way for moving your people forward.

1) Technology roll out, could be simpler than you are currently making it
2) A systemic framework for viewing change
3) A takeaway planner to help your next initiative

Why Are Some SAP S/4HANA Implementations Still Not Going Live on Time & Within Budget?

Steering an SAP S/4HANA Implementation towards success does not commence when project resources are onboarded. Planning for success and ensuring a qualitative solution starts during the sales process & needs to be carried through the entire implementation lifecycle.

Starting with the end in mind: Includes Quality and Governance metrics From Sales process to Hypercare phase

Understanding Digital Transformation with SAP SuccessFactors - Top 8 Things to Consider

Introducing SAP SuccessFactors into an existing HR-IT landscape is a challenging endeavor. There are many factors that need to be considered whilst embarking on such a journey. 1. What exactly is HR digitisation? 2. Firm Focus on Integration - "A digitised landscape is one that is integrated" + Cost of integration 3. Choice of technology platform + importance of content 4. The various systems in the landscape - need for digital process design 5. Payroll and Time strategy 6. Change management 7. Adoption 8. Digital HR Operations

1. The essence of HR Digitisation. Going from lingo to comprehension.
2. Role Technology plays in the SuccessFactors Digitisation journey.
3. Need for a robust change management strategy

Trends and True Value

From personal experience, I know that yearly forecasts are essential to each organisation planning and budgeting; never this has been more true than in the last two years, with multiple emergencies running across the world, each exacting specific needs and requirements. How did we address them as HR professional, considering the duty of care we are entrusted with, and what are the specific needs covered with the help of HR Technology? Are you ready to tackle the future of work, and what key elements of it will be part of your priorities going forward? Lets explore some of these topics together.

Understand the development of trends in Human Resources;
Outline how they change;
Connect them with technology deployments.

Supply Chain Finance: A win-win with Suppliers – The Telkom Story

Telkom recognises that their suppliers are critical in ensuring overall competitiveness and that funding of their suppliers through early payments helps ensure trust, builds a sense of partnership and ultimately creates innovation and business growth.  Join Nomhle and Christo and learn how Telkom’s finance and procurement teams with the support from Intellection led the deployment of the Telkom Supplier Financing program, the obstacles they overcame and the results the program is achieving.

Vendor/Customer Reconciliation in SAPVendor/Customer Reconciliation in SAP

See how to automate these two previously manual processes in SAP:

1. Vendor Reconciliations.
2. Customer Payment Clearing.

Two short and simple demonstrations of how finance departments can save time and be more effective. On the one side, rather than matching vendor statements outside of SAP and producing Excel vendor reconciliations, automate this completely inside SAP. On the other side, rather than manually matching customer remittance advices and payments, see how to load the remittance into SAP and let SAP automatically match and clear the customer account.

Vendor/Customer Reconciliation in SAPVendor/Customer Reconciliation in SAP

See how to automate these two previously manual processes in SAP:

1. Vendor Reconciliations.
2. Customer Payment Clearing.

Two short and simple demonstrations of how finance departments can save time and be more effective. On the one side, rather than matching vendor statements outside of SAP and producing Excel vendor reconciliations, automate this completely inside SAP. On the other side, rather than manually matching customer remittance advices and payments, see how to load the remittance into SAP and let SAP automatically match and clear the customer account.

SAP Integration In a Hybrid World

Cloud and Hybrid landscapes introduce new integration challenges. The good news is that SAP has clear integration architecture guidelines for both Cloud and Hybrid landscapes.

During this session we will unpack the SAP Business Technology Platform to understand what tools are available. We’ll have a look at how SAP has used the Integration Solution Advisory Methodology to assist customers in understanding how to best align and leverage these technologies within their own organisations. We will have a look at Integration Principles, Integration Methodologies as well as the SAP Integration Suite itself.

If time allows we may even get to kick the tyres during a live demo!

SAP SuccessFactors and Fiori - The Debswana Success Story of Business Enablement Through Cloud Solutions

The earliest mention of Cloud Computing dates as far back as the 1950s and 60s. For Debswana, this concept only gained popularity in the early 2000s, and even then there wasn’t enough business drive to fully consider internet based solutions. Debswana’s intranet infrastructure was servicing the business fully (or at least it seemed good enough at the time).
Over the last couple of decades, the cloud fire spreading across all industries, caught the HR business function and soon enough the desire to work from anywhere and at any time became a burning platform for Debswana. However earlier attempts at addressing this need, as observed from other business areas (and other companies) were faced with major constraints relating to, among others, data security, governance, internet accessibility, user readiness etc.
SAP’s cloud based solutions presented Debswana with an opportunity to implement solutions that not only supported the abovementioned desire, but also ones that can be trusted to fully address earlier identified business and technology needs.

While the business transformation journey for Debswana had begun in 2017, Debswana’s delivery of SAP Success Factors and Fiori (at the end of 2020) came at an opportune time when working from anywhere was no longer an option, but rather a critical necessity. Through this delivery, Debswana extended its capacity to empower more employees, not only to transact on HR systems, but also from anywhere and at any time.

1. Business, technical and legal constraints that needed to be overcome
2. It is not a one size fits all
3. Why it is worth it

Why Process-Mining is Among The Fastest-Growing Categories In The History of The Software Industry

Continuous improvement in operational performance has been a business imperative since who knows how long! Nearly three centuries ago, it was the driving force behind the First Industrial Revolution, when steam-driven engines provided the motive power for manufacturing and engineering outputs on an industrial scale. Five decades ago, it spawned the Third Industrial Revolution, when computing power was applied to the automation of transactional processes in business. Today, in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, machine-learning is powering a new toolset for enterprises seeking to achieve new heights in operational excellence, specifically in the domain of business process management. The new process-mining tools now represent a new category of business software – one which is growing at more than 50% year-on-year. In this session, I will explore the concepts of enterprise process maturity, the difference it makes to be at different levels in maturity, the things any organisation should be thinking about to raise their game, the concrete steps they can start taking today to master this domain, and the tools SAP can provide to support them.

What passed muster for Process Excellence (PX) in the past will not be good enough for the future. Thanks to the application of modern AI to this age-old challenge, the PX bar has been raised much higher. Organisations that want to remain competitive need to be adopting the new process-mining capabilities now.

Embracing SAP Authorizations with the next step : GRC Access Control

Securing systems accesses, securing data access along with segregation of duty; enforcing GDPR, these tasks have always been quite a responsibility for system administrators. In this session review your current SAP authorizations concept, take home a list of handy reports; assess how GRC Access Control will enable the automatization for access request through a dedicated platform and spot on approval steps enabled through workflow.

Data-driven Report Stories with SuccessFactors

Data is central to many business decisions and operations. Whether you are communicating with an internal team or a customer, data can help you tell a compelling story that supports and highlights the value of your people, products, or services. By using storytelling as an effective, and convincing communication tool, organisations execute the practice of blending hard data with human communication to craft an engaging narrative. Aiming to bridge the talent gap, people analytics use your talent and HR data to drive strategic insights. Report Stories is the new addition to the SAP SuccessFactors people analytics module. Report Stories uses an embedded instance of SAP Analytics Cloud, allowing you to create queries and employ them in reports using a single unified data model accessing your SuccessFactors transactional data. The data model allows you to create highly formatted, multi-page, and cross-domain reports. Report Stories is described as a revolutionary shift and experience for gathering valuable insights; ultimately designed to become the all-inclusive report type in SAP SuccessFactors.

1. Understanding how Report Stories are used and by who
2. Report Stories permissions
3. Understanding the Query Designer and Data Explorer

Journey of Process Steward

The year 2020 - indelibly etched in our minds as the year our world turned upside down, the year 2020 was also infamous for a lesser-known reason in my world. That is, my journey of a “Process Steward” through a SAP S/4HANA Implementation project. Employed in my company as Senior Finance Reporting Manager, I was given the opportunity to take our company through a SAP implementation where, I was given this fancy role titled “ F2R Process Steward”. What I didn’t know, was that after 18 months on the project I would come through the other side having understood the convergence from Finance to IT. I was thrown in the deep end, having to make sure I obtained an understanding of all our financial, commercial, and reporting related processes of my entity. This implementation project provided me with the exposure of the following, not limited to;
• Design and Configure our SAP system architecture of all finance related processes according to our business requirements
• Take our internal reporting requirements of my entity and help design profitability analysis reports through use of custom reporting fields
• Design interfaces on SAP to send financial information relating to Actual and Budget data of our entity to our Third Party Reporting systems
• Translation of our old financial data in old system to our new SAP system by redesigning GL account, cost center and profit center structures.
• Master Data Clean up
• Change Management

Learnings from my SAP Experience as finance professional, Importance of Master Data for Reporting purposes,

A Journey to Central Finance - Automating Accounts Payable is The Beginning – The Massmart Story

Join Kogilan, Venesh, Subashni and Mohammed as they take you through: • Massmart’s Journey from a decentralized, disparate manual financial operation to a centralized automated and highly efficient financial operation. • The implementation of AP automation. The presentation will explore the challenges faced, how challenges were overcome, the learnings as well as concrete evidence of the success of the journey.

1. Why AP Automation
2. The valuable change management lessons
3. A view of AP automation success