Over the last year, we have been busy at the UK & Ireland SAP User Group (UKISUG) helping members to continue to network, collaborate and learn – albeit in circumstances we would haven’t have expected at the start on 2020. In this blog, we take a look back at another eventful 12 months in the world of SAP.
Back in February, users of Business Suite 7 were greeted with news that SAP had extended the maintenance deadline to 2027. This provided users with greater certainty and more time to plan a potential move to S/4HANA. As Computer Weekly reported, this signalled that SAP has accepted that many customers won’t be able to migrate to S/4HANA by 2025. To help organisations continue to plan for the future, we commissioned a whitepaper and hosted an online webinar entitled ‘Navigating the SAP High Road to 2027’ both of which proved to be extremely informative resources for our members.
In April, we saw a big change in leadership at SAP, with Christian Klein being named as sole CEO, in a move away from the Co-CEO model the company previously had in place. UKISUG welcomed the news as Christian remains a great supporter of user groups globally, which was re-affirmed by him becoming SAP’s executive sponsor of SUGEN.
In May, SAP announced the extension of its the Digital Access Adoption Program (DAAP) until December 31st 2021. UKISUG commended SAP for listening to its customers and extending program as organisation evaluate the positions when it comes to Indirect Access.
In July we saw a further SAP leadership change. Jens Amail who had been UK&I Managing Director left the role to return back to Germany, with Michiel Verhoeven replacing him. Jens was the first SAP UK&I MD to assign a full-time liaison to the User Group and he also invested significant time and resource into joint trust workshops, aimed at building improved relationships between SAP and its customers. We look forward to working with Michiel to continue building on these customer relationship initiatives.
Although we were not able to host many physical events in 2020, we were glad to support our members with a vast array of digital events to keep everyone updated on the latest SAP issues. As part of this, we launched the start of our first ever Digital Showcase in September, where we provided members with opportunity to virtually learn and network with each other, SAP experts and partners.
This Digital Showcase culminated with our Digital Insights Symposium in December, which saw the launch of UKISUG’s latest whitepaper looking at SAP skills.
Although we loved hosting you during our digital events, we do hope that our physical events will return later this year – fingers crossed!
In case you missed it, last month we launched our new SUGTalks podcast. So if you’ve really gotten into podcasts during the pandemic or would just like another way to hear about the latest news, be sure to check it out on our website and subscribe.
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