Charting your SAP S/4HANA navigation

Again, Thora, for joining today's webinar. So today, I'm going to let my amazing speakers introduce today's topic and, themselves. As you probably all know, this is one of the many webinars as part of our derisking s four HANA transformations series. So if you haven't already, make sure you have a look at the other sessions in this series and make sure that if there's any others that you'd like to, to be part of, you can join. This is probably number maybe seven of those that we've done. So there's a number that are, that are prerecorded and available on our website for anyone who has jumped into the series late and hasn't seen, some of those other episodes. So feel free to jump on and view those, as well. So the session today is gonna go for a little bit longer than our average sessions. So you our content generally goes for about thirty minutes. I'd say we're closer to maybe forty or just over forty minutes for this one just to manage, expectations and time. If you do have any questions, as always, there is a question mark in a little box at the top right of your, screen. You can pop questions in there. We will reserve answering any, those questions until the end of the session. If we run out of time, we will answer those questions via email after the, after the session, probably early next week. The session will be recorded, and we will be sending through the recording through sometime next week if you'd like to revisit it as well. Okay. So it's two zero three. I'm sure we'll have additional people drop in over the course of the next few minutes, but I think it's fine for us to, to get started and do some introductions. Over to Bradley and Marion. Thanks, Cass. I hope I can ask some questions as well. Welcome, everybody. Thank you very much for joining. For you guys, it's approximately two PM. For Marion and myself, it's a little bit earlier in the day. So please forgive us if there's a bit of blurriness. So what we are here to talk about today is our enterprise navigation strategy. This is a offering that, our tech ops team within SAP HUSE Labs is offering our clients, and it allows us to better charge our navigation to an s four reality. Before we get started, just wanted to introduce myself. I'm Bradley Jackson. I'm part of the tech ops team. I am an architect and have worked with SAP for twenty years focusing on data loads, migrations, upgrades, hyperscalers, private cloud, SAP RISE or, you know, private cloud, and, just gonna be helping you chat today around the navigation strategy and, you know, pitfalls and positives and options you have. And, my colleague, Meron, will just introduce himself as well. Thank you, Bradley. Hi, everyone. I'm Baron Perosky. I've, been a tech ops engineer with the tech ops team for over eight years. Yeah. EPI's Labs has been my home pretty much straight from university. So, yeah, it's been an amazing opportunity, amazing place to work with. I've had a lot of opportunity to work with Bradley on various projects as well. So, yeah, a lot of fun times. So let's just focus on what we're getting into today. The session or the presentation is split up into six sections. The first one is quite a hot topic for everyone, I suspect, in the room or people that are wondering what's gonna be happening with their SAP enterprise systems in the long term. So that's the clock that everyone's watching. Specific dates are coming to people's minds and wondering what to do about these dates. The next thing is, good preparation. You know, if we are eventually going to an s four, reality or modernization or anything like that, we need to know what preparation needs to be done now in order to be ready to get to where we need to go. The next one is where the systems actually land. So looking at your different options in terms of, you know, migration parts or staying where you are. Then we focus on conversion, modernization, and managing the systems. Those are interesting topics that sometimes get lumped together and sometimes are separate, so we just wanna cover those. Then Marin and I will talk about where we've seen things go wrong. Again, this is not a blame game or why we're good and other people are bad, but this is just a few things that we've seen that can, you know, trip people up when it comes to this journey. And then lastly, just a bit of a summary and bringing everything together. So, yeah, let's crack on, shall we? Perfect. So chapter one, the clock that everyone's watching. So what I want to focus on during this slide is certain dates that are going around. We have to assume that the quite a large percentage of the people running ERP systems do have some form of ECC landscape in their environment, and that's generally, like, the central monolith in their environment. Some clients really move through to s four, which is great. But, you know, based on a lot of numbers that we see at the moment, ECC seems to be quite a common environment in people's systems at this point in time. And there are messages around there that state that mainstream maintenance ends at the end of twenty seven. So what does that mean for people? What it means is that, you know, the license fees and the sorry, the support fees that you currently pay will go into extended maintenance from then on, which will run to roughly twenty thirty, and you're looking at roughly two percent on the current feeds. So is that a sign to start running, to start worrying about where s four is and where rises and where I need to go with my environment? No. But it is a catalyst. It is a starter that if you have been sort of sweating your assets, looking where you are at this point in time, it's an opportunity to start planning for that future state. You know? And what we want to avoid is situations where we rush now to beat deadlines and have issues, whether it's through scope creep, whether it's through failed projects or something like that. And, you know, that's what we want to avoid because what we're trying to do now is we're trying to build a runway for clients and assist them in visualizing where that twenty thirty date is even later than that, what what that looks like for them, where they need to go, what they need to consider at this point in time. And it's just about preparation. So you'll notice at the bottom of each slide, there is an in the room section, and that's kinda where we just sort of trade a few war stories between Marron and myself. So from this perspective, Marron, I'd like to ask you about a mining client that came to us in a panic. And you obviously had some words with them. You had some experiences with them. You shared some things. You had some workshops with them as part of the enterprise navigation strategy. What helped them explore the best solution? That was quite an interesting engagement, Brad. I think the biggest thing that was evident at the start was just sort of how the client viewed all of these options and just from their perspective, considering this is the first time that they're looking at all of these other, you know, hosting solutions, just the conversion options was quite an overwhelming set of information for them to go through. Because not only are they trying to focus on the SAP portion, but they're also trying to focus on all the technical side. You know, they have their internal IT team as well, which has their own specific set of skills. So it was very interesting having to engage with them on various different fronts and try and find the best solutions that made the most sense for their business. So I think for them, what really helped them the most is the that sort of guiding process, especially with the assessment, helping them really break down all the different type of conversion option that they had available and for them to really make a decision that made the most sense from a business perspective, and they started realizing that as well. They were getting, you know, a lot of advice from different players and eventually consolidating that information with us, really trying to understand what made the most sense to their business. From a technical point of view, this was very much the same When we spoke with their IT teams and liaised with them trying to get the technical assessment sorted out for them to understand what their target environment was going to look like, there was a lot of time that it took to get to a point where they felt comfortable making a decision around how they wanted their environment to look like. But, eventually, their strategy ended up channeling in the right direction, trying to, you know, split apart the focal points and trying to really break down those problems, understand what they wanted at the end of the day, and then be able to actually correctly reach that target and combine those views and make sure that everything holistically was the right solution for their business needs. I think yeah. Marion, I think there is certainly a lot of noise in the market, you know, and it's this is certainly no shade on SAP or anything like that. But we have a lot of different vendors out there. We have a lot of websites, blogs, AI that we go to for information on this. Quite a lot of the information is contradictory or it's old or something like that. And sometimes people can just get reworked up about dates that don't actually mean much right now. So it's about acknowledging the time, but it's also about, you know, allowing it to be something that's going to drive us to prepare properly. You'll notice at the bottom of each slide, once again, this is not Groundhog Day, but right at the bottom there, there is a little section that says, want more detail or want full details detail. So we have put together in our team a blog series on all the different aspects of moving to an s four environment. And we really, really encourage you to go and have a look at the blogs, and there's also a proper website that we've put together on the enterprise navigation strategy. So at the end of this presentation, the very last slide or second last slide, Marant's put the links for all these different blogs in. So if there's a specific piece of information that you want to focus on that does resonate with you, then please go look at these blocks. They'll be very, very interesting. I hope because, you know, we wrote them so yeah. Okay. So chapter two, what good preparation actually looks like. Marron, you've participated in plenty of discovery workshops. What do people always underestimate? Yeah. So just to wrap all the various workshops that I've been a part of, I can almost summarize it to, I would say, three main different markers, and just to introduce that, and I'll dive into detail on each. So firstly, starting with just the s four conversion process itself, especially if that is your end goal. That, you know, has a lot of complexity on its own. The second being the technical perspective, so looking at your architecture of your landscape and, you know, how things will function from a day to day. And then the third point being your business processes and your target goal for what you want from a business perspective. So starting off with from the s four point of view, there is a lot of things to consider when doing an s four conversion. There's a lot of, you know, functional technical components, a lot of things that change in the environments. And that is very easy to underestimate how much work it actually takes, especially from the business team themselves, just to basically understand what they want from their web system and what features they want from an s four system and what business processes they might actually have to change. But, again, that all then ends up underlying, to work that needs to be done from a functional perspective, and that forms part as a major, major portion of that s four conversion. It's just having that full understanding, you know, that your teams have the capability to be able to engage on that level. So that's something that we've found out that does come up a few times, and then I think clients really start realizing, woah. You know, we might actually need a bit of help with this or, you might need a bit of guidance with that. From a technical point of view, this is also something that sometimes tends to get overlooked or sometimes tends to get overfocused depending on sort of the situation with the clients, the teams that they have available, and, again, also who you're interacting with from that perspective. But irrespective of that, technical portion can sort of be a afterthought. So, you know, you might get provided different architectural solutions, different hosting strategies. And for that point of view, you know, you might be sitting there going, ah, whatever. You know, it's just where the servers run. It's not a big deal. But it actually you know, that is quite a massive deal because that, at the end of the day, is your, you know, normal monthly costs essentially that you're gonna be operating on the outside of just the SAP portion, you know, what your service look like, their sizing, know, the run costs for, all of those systems. That's a very big thing, and that can also really change how you interact with your environment, you know, where you're hosting, the latency to those servers, the type of, you know, cloud technology you might need to leverage, maybe to even improve your business processes. So very important things to actually take into account, because that does shape the surrounding layer, on your SAP systems. And then from a business point of view, I mean, this is equally as important, but it's also something that can sometimes get missed by the technical teams or even potentially the functional teams. At the end of the day, these systems are there to serve a purpose. They're there to make sure that, you know, your day to day can operate, your business can operate smoothly. And if that is not the key goal at the end of the day, you could end up having all of these, you know, additional technologies that might end up actually hampering, some of those day to day business processes. So, yeah, it's very important to take into account. Those workshops really, really help iron those expectations and just help clients understand that there's a lot of pieces to this puzzle that you really need to build together if you want a successful conversion or migration or whatever your target is at the end of the day. Awesome. And I think it's important to note that, you know, the enterprise navigation strategy that our team offers, this preparation is just one facet of what we do when we come and engage with the client. But some of these points are really, really critical. You know, we have extensive workshops with the with our clients. We don't just come in from a specific perspective. We come in from a holistic perspective. We, as part of our group, which is Group Elephant, which you can see in the bottom left corner of the screen, comprises forty two technology companies. And we have a lot of experience. So we don't come from a specific angle or with a specific goal in mind or with an agenda. You know, we try and be as agnostic in terms of approaches as possible. So, yeah, I think it's just really important to understand how critical this preparation is. So, Marin, I mean, the discovery phase uncovered something with one of your clients that nobody expected. Is that such a bad thing? It's a very, good question to ask, Brad. And I think this is where there are certain scenarios you might be sitting with the client. You know, you're in that maybe potentially blueprinting phase or even just at the entry level of the assessment. And if you're picking up issues at this stage, that's exactly where you want to be picking up your issues. So having something that might pop up that might be a roadblock to a client or might be a massive issue, you know, that's where you wanna find out. Because you don't wanna be halfway through your project, and then all of a sudden, you're uncovering issues then because you haven't actually done proper investigation. You, you know, you haven't actually asked the right questions. You haven't done the right workshops that cover the information that you might need. And to be fair that the clients might not even realize, Sometimes they're in situations where, you know, they don't know what they've heard. So you can't ask questions if you don't really have that context. And you I'm pretty sure from their perspective, you know, you don't wanna be stuck in a situation where halfway through your project, you've been promised, you know, the solution, and then, oof, there you go, like, five roadblocks. So those workshops and does that discovery phase is very, very critical to the entire project. And all of those issues that you might uncover at that stage, you know, should be always looked with a different light. Maybe it's opportunities that could end up actually improving your environment, things that you might actively have issues with right now that you might have maybe not been aware of that you can actually make sure when you do a conversion or migration or, you know, with you're moving your, your environment to different cloud technology. All of these things can play a role to actually give you better solutions at the end of the day. So that communication is super important and understanding that if weaknesses are identified in an environment, it's enough it's not there to expose them and to sort of criticize them. It's there to actually change them into strengths. So that's the objective, especially for that discovery portion. So identifying those things as early as possible is very, very critical. Okay. So just moving on to some options. So we're looking at chapter three now, where systems led, and this is just a graphic that we put together. These are not this is not an exhaustive list, but it's just something that we kinda consider as part of the navigation strategy when we do speak to clients. You know, we've got multiple directions we can move in. You know, we can look at converting, modernizing, and managing to an SAP cloud. So that's your sort of rise, grow, private cloud, public cloud endpoint. You can do the same thing, but move to s four HANA on premises, on a hyperscaler, or in our own hosting environment that we do provide. So bearing in mind each of these options, there is a conversion option if you happen to be on an ECC environment or modernize if you're on an existing s four, but an older version, or manage where you might be where you are currently sitting on premises and you don't wanna go anywhere. You know? As I mentioned earlier, you're willing to sweep the assets because your environment is actually in a good shape. The third option is to modernize, manage traditional on premises. We see quite a lot of clients that have this sort of mindset where they don't want to move right now. You know, they wanna see what's happening with the market. The those dates, even though twenty thirty seems close. And, obviously, you know, projects like these are quite big to do a migration or a conversion or something like that. So that twenty thirty date looks quite close, but I think the market is changing so rapidly that, you know, just making a knee jerk reaction right now can often be really, really dangerous. So, you know, there's some clients that wanna just sort of stick where they are, make sure their environment is in the right shape to kind of last until winter, as we say, you know, twenty thirty. Not that we're trying to say that twenty thirty is winter, but, anyways. And then, you know, we put a little couple of little pluses there. You know, something that is happening with some of our clients is talking about third party support as well. You know, we're not trying to push anyone to go anywhere, but that is a reality for some clients as well. And last but not least, not that we'd want, anyone to leave the SAP stable because that's where we operate. But other clients are looking to transition away from SAP to other enterprise solutions. So this is one of two slides. So I'm just gonna switch to the next slide quickly. And it's just a slightly different view on exactly the same thing. But, you know, I just wanna focus on at this point in our enterprise navigation strategy journey with our client, the assessment phase is done, and there are now options to be looked at. You know? And it's not straight away. It's potentially whatever suits the business requirements of the customer or the client that we're talking to. So from the left to the right, this is not a you know, polar opposite or anything like that. It's just a series of options that we can look at. I've mentioned most of them, Marie, but I think there's some really important things to focus on in terms of what resonates with your business strategy. And that's what's so important is with the enterprise navigation strategy, we also want to understand where you are looking to go. It's not up to us. I know we're the professionals and we're the people that are being paid to come in and have a conversation and do the all this work. But, ultimately, we don't want to lead your business in a direction you don't want to go because it's not part of your five year, ten year strategy. So some clients are looking at staying on the left, staying on premise. You and whether that's by design because the client that likes the way they'd like to handle the environment. They make their own rules. They manage their systems. They do everything themselves, and that makes them happy. And it also allows them to sweat assets and start looking at other ways of modernizing their environment. I guarantee you there is a large percentage of SAP customers worldwide that have a module that they've installed that they might not be using to its full capability, or the training might not have been done on that module so that it's actually not being stretched. So just by looking further right on this graph doesn't mean that you're always necessarily going to be getting newer, better functionality. If you're not using it correctly, then it doesn't matter where you are. But the these are options going right. So, I mean, we can look at cloud hosting, which is, as we mentioned, hosting that we can provide or that another company can provide. That's sort of your private cloud. And sorry. I don't wanna mix us up with the Rise private there, but, unfortunately, these are the naming things that we have to deal with. But, you know, you've got your cloud hosting. You've got flexible options there. And then you can start looking at hyperscalers like AWS, GCP, Azure, where you have public cloud power, but you have a lot more elasticity in terms of, you know, large datasets and everything like that. And then we move to the two options on the right, which is rise and grow. Now these are very, very popular options at the moment, especially Rise for us. We are helping a lot of clients move to Rise. We are helping clients manage their systems in Rise because it is a SAP managed environment, but there is a very, very clearly set up RACI that are that's provided by SAP where they say, we do this. We don't do this. The client does this. This is paid for. This is free, everything like that. So sometimes people just think, I'm gonna go to Ryze and, you know, I can just sit back and not worry about anything anymore, but that's not really the case. There is still quite a lot of engagement from a technical basis perspective. In the room there, just while I'm sort of in the mode here, is actually focused at me. And this is a financial services client that is in the process of weighing up partner hosted SAP or other ERP solutions. Now this client of ours, I have personally been involved in for the last seventeen or eighteen years. And what they are looking like doing is actually going to another ERP solution. Now that, to me, makes me very sad. But what I do appreciate is the fact that the business models that people are looking at is changing. And we're not looking at a specific monolithic environment right now where SAP does everything. People are starting to look at the best in breed on certain solutions and everything like that. And people are evolving. Requirements are evolving and stuff like that. And it's just about finding the best combination of these items for you guys going forward. So, yeah, I'm gonna move on to the next slide. So converting, modernizing, and managing. What we need to focus on here is that I think in a lot of people's road maps in the next few years, they're gonna look at these three words, each one meaning something slightly different, and thinking I can do this all in one go. So, you know, conversion, potentially looking at something like moving to s four, modernization, doing upgrades, and looking at the environment, and looking at AI, and looking at a lot of different things, looking at third party solutions and middleware and everything like that, and then managing, looking to current environment and making sure it's running smoothly and looking at archiving and everything like that. So these are all part of the journey. But when we look at environments where we need to get somewhere in a hurry and this is look. People getting worked up about the twenty seven, twenty thirty that they say, how do I get this done with as little pain as possible? You know? Because if I have to go through these three activities, I start looking at that three projects, that's three sets of money I need to pay, that's three sets of testing cycles I need to worry about and everything like that. And in certain aspects, that is a very valid opinion. You know, get it all done in one go, see what happens and everything like that. But, you know, once you start moving these kind of activities together, those times where you have the project times, the project cost, the complexity, the go live times can be exceptionally long. So sometimes it's better to break these apart, you know. And what we're trying to do here is with that road map that we provide is actually to figure out what do we need to do now in order to prepare for a conversion in twenty eight or a modernization or something like that. And it's understanding what is the best fit for the business. So something we need to focus on as well is that looking at the outcomes or the cost of these activities can sometimes be quite scary because, you know, it's a large amount of money for a project and everything like that. But bearing in mind, what we're doing now is setting you up for the next three to five to thirteen years, of running your ERP system. And who knows in thirteen years' time what the environment's gonna be looking like. So what we're trying to do here is help avoid unnecessary cost because we should not be doing things out of fear or out of discomfort around dates that aren't actually that scary. So yeah. So, Marin, one of our retail manufacturing clients had large hosting costs caused by migration, by proper planning. Do you wanna just explain a little bit more about what happened there? Yeah. So it's actually a very interesting case, I would say. So, yeah, basically, the client ended up performing a lift and shift, sorry, from their on premise to a cloud hyperscaler. And with that lift and shift, there there were quite a few consequences that came out of that decision. And what ended up happening is that their costs for their month warm up, their monthly costs associated to their cloud hyperscaler was actually was quite drastic. It was way, way over what they estimated it would be. So they were in a situation where, you know, their it's their own production environment, you know, their nonproduction environment was there now. They're running their day to day business. And considering they also do point of sales directly integrating into the SAP landscape, you know, it's not just something that you can just kind of shut down and just revert and change, you know. So, you know, they're they're now. They have to basically make the most of it. And what happened is we came in and with different sets of expertise, actually helped them optimize their hyperscaler environment. And this is a very, very critical point because we needed to do it in a way that also wasn't going to interrupt their day to day. We did also actually use a bit of custom, automations, that we had made just to help out certain, portions of that architecting, specifically in their backup and recovery space. So all in all, after our involvement, we managed to reduce their costs by, I think, was around forty percent, forty, fifty percent or so from a monthly perspective. So, you know, they went from panicking, you know, almost to this massive bullet they're getting to trying to get that environment stable as possible, and we pretty much helped them with all of that. And, yeah, it was quite a drastic change, you know, from before and after. And I think based on the stability they also gained from those architectural positions that we ended up making to assist them. It was just a apart from even their costs, they actually ended up getting a more stable environment at the end of that as well. But it also just goes to show when you're doing these type of migrations, it's very important to understand that just because you might have something that's working for you now, you can't assume that's just going to work for you wherever you end up going. You know, there's a whole different set of rule books, especially going from something, you know, hardware that you own on premise to, you know, your, cloud hyperscalers. I mean, there's a whole bunch of different technology stack there. Your costing is calculated differently. So it's a lot of factors to really take into account, when you're doing these things. So, yeah, it's just an it's just one of those interesting reminders that, you know, whenever you're making these decisions, it's yeah. Don't just assume things. If you're not sure, you know, get the expertise that you need to come into assist you to make the decisions so you can avoid the issues, you know, when you're at your targets. So Yeah. I mean, obviously, the purpose of this entire, presentation or webinar that we're doing is around, you guys coming and speaking to us about our enterprise navigation strategy. But if there's a second thing you can take out of this presentation, it's that please don't use lift and shift in a sentence because these are exactly the words that cause the issues that Marron's just described. So yeah. Okay. So here, we're gonna focus on things that have gone sideways that we've noticed happened during projects or planning on projects and stuff like that. And like, Marin, I'd love you to focus on some of the stuff that didn't go smoothly as it could've and what lessons you learned around that. Yeah. No. Of course. Yeah. So I think starting off with the points, especially at first from there with regards to the technically focused. And, again, this is this kinda comes down back to some of the points I've already raised previously. If you're gonna treat a project as technically focused, And to be fair, this can also extend to other avenues where you're looking at it from a business focus perspective or from a functional focus perspective or even just a cost saving point of view. Right? So it's it's really important to not hyperfocus on one specific thing. And I think with these type of projects, considering there is a lot of complexity, a lot of moving parts, you know, it's very easy for teams to really kinda sit there and just, hey. This is the most important thing. Right? It's my responsibility to make sure the architecture's fine. So that's what I'm looking at. And it's my responsibility to make sure that, you know, the functional code is fine. So that's all I'm looking at. And, of course, you know, they're you know, different teams are part of we're all responsible for those different components, but it's very important to have a understanding of what's actually happening between your teams and making sure that the holistic focus is actually for a balanced one. Right? That's for what your target is gonna look like at the end of the day, what your business process is gonna look like at the end of the day. So and this has happened a few times, especially on the technical side. It's, you know, very easy. You discuss that with the IT teams, and, you know, they it's like, well, I just care about the hosting portion of the service. Well, it's like, that's fine, but you also need to worry about how those integrations are gonna work, you know, what the performance is gonna look like, you know, what the you know, even if getting the migration sorted, what can help even the functional teams make sure things happen in a smoother way. So at the end of the day, all of these moving parts really need to work together. So just specifically focusing on the one portion is just it's gonna be the to the detriment of the project. And, again, the reason why we highlight the technical one is because that's the one that's really, really easy to just sort of get lost in the weeds. Because, again, of all the detail and because you wanna kind of, you know, optimize this or fix that, you kinda lose sight of the big picture sometimes. So very important to kinda state take a step back and say, okay. Wait. You know, how is this actually working together at the end of the day? So that's a very, very big one and a very important one. Second, one for the data issues. This can really, really have a massive effect, especially for conversion. If you look at it, in a lot of cases, you know, you'll be going from a non, for instance, HANA database to a, you know, s four system, for example, which runs on HANA, and that already means that this entire architectural change from the way you'll interact with your data. If you're, you know, if you're not looking at archiving strategies, you might end up having a system and I guess, let's say, for example, you do have a system that's, you know, over ten years in terms of operation, and you have ten years of data on that system, and now you're taking that and putting it from a, you know, database that only runs on storage to a database that now runs in memory. So you're sitting with the system that might be five, six terabytes in memory, which comes at a cost. You know, you're basically losing performance, and you're also gonna be paying for a much larger system than what you actually might need. You know, in your actual day to day business, you might only be using one to two years of that actual data. Right? So the rest of it can go to a archived solution, which will not only be, you know, a cheaper way to store that information, but also boost the performance of your system at the same time. So this is also something that gets overlooked. And in some cases, I've also seen where there's an assumption that things are being archived correctly, but meanwhile, you know, the archiving strategy isn't actually optimal for what the business is doing, and that's something that can also greatly impact, you know, that end outcome. So it's if you are doing archiving, it's definitely good to revisit that and make sure, you know, you're actually looking at the right data and you're doing that correctly because it does save you that effort down the line. You know, you're constantly keeping your system in a leaner format. So whenever you do need to make a decision, your archiving is not really one strategy you have to worry about too much now because you know it's a solid strategy and it works. From a functional perspective, and I guess, I mean, this extends to other teams as well, but I think specifically considering these, the amount of work that needs to be done, especially in a conversion, project, there is a lot of functional work that needs to be done. And this is something that can really put those teams under pressure. You know, you're looking at a whole change essentially from a you know, from how you might be running certain business processes and even custom, you know, code that's being created on those systems, you now basically need to get that team to reevaluate years of, you know, development and functionality. And if you're not putting those teams under additional pressure where they're already date you know, busy with their day to day. Now they have to look at the conversion process on top of that. It's something very important to be cognizant of. And, I think this is important for, again, that communication and, you know, just understand what those expectations are. And if there is assistance that's required, you know, to reach out. Again, from a industry perspective, you know, APUs can also provide that service as well. It's very important just to understand what the capabilities are and how much pressure the teams can handle and how much external assistance those teams need to really make the that conversion successful. I would but, yeah, from those points, I think if you if we dive into anything more to probably get a bit too detailed, but I would say those essentially summarize the main ones. Otherwise, we're gonna be here for, like, another hour. So but, yeah, moving on from that. Brad, I think it'll be awesome if you can share just from a, you know, fashion retail company perspective, just with what happened with their SAP migration that didn't have any planning. There wasn't really much consultation, and the just decision making was really, really quick. So, yeah, if you can run into that. Yeah. Sure. So, yeah. We got called in last minute to assist just with the go live of a client moving into a different cloud environment. And, you know, when we arrived, we did ask, you know, can we get run books? Can we get your, you know, network topology, your integration map? All of these kind of things that we would normally have gathered way in advance. And the feedback was, you know, oh, we're busy working on the documentation or we don't have that kind of thing. And bearing in mind, this was a week before go live. So needless to say, the system did go live in a longer time than was originally planned. But, you know, the issues occurred afterwards. You know, the people were unable to pay specific vendors and certain things like that. It was a real tough experience. And I think just with a little bit of planning ahead of time and a consideration of what could go wrong, this could have been avoided. You know? And I think, you know, this is not a unique scenario. I'm sure everyone on the call has experienced a project similar to this. But I think with the amount of money and time and the functional and technical and architectural teams that merits mentioned on this slide, the amount of effect that these decisions can have, I think stuff needs to be considered very carefully. Just switching on to another slide that's slightly different to the rest is just thinking forward, you know, post twenty thirty. There's definitely like we've mentioned on the previous slide, there's definitely gonna be in our estimation a, a drive towards reducing that sort of monolithic, dependency on SAP and looking at sort of best in breed microservices that would, you know, that clients can go and explore or AI can provide, things like that will look at optimizing your environment even further. And you'll see on the right hand side there that there are sort of three graphics overlay there. The first one being the gray one where, you know, today, we're looking at traditional safety environments having a very large dataset there, as well as certain of the other aspects surrounding it, like automation, like AI and conversational UI, hybrid and composable architecture, ID sort of, you know, and like I've just make mentioned the best in breed in specific software and hardware offerings and everything like that. But as you see time increase onto the blue and then onto the purple, you'll notice that there is definitely a drop off in the traditional SAP environment. Not to zero, but certainly, there'll be less of a reliance on those. And, you know, you would have SAP providing a database or, you know, your core ECC functionality. But then other sort of aspects, other software providing the best accelerators around that kind of thing. And that's kind of where we envision things going to a lesser greater degree. But what we need to do is we need to focus and accept the fact that in our position, those the traditional SAP environments are still gonna be around for quite a long time. And even though there are, you know, thoughts of, you know, there's cutoff times and everything like that, you know, I don't think that is gonna become a reality anytime soon because there has been so much pushback on, you know, whether people want to go to RISE or whether people want to go to s four and stuff like that. And I do think it's an eventuality, but I don't think it's an eventuality anytime soon. So, yeah, I'm just gonna move forward. So just bringing this all together. So, you know, if somebody listening to this call or a future recording, hello the future, if someone is thinking, where should I start? You know, as part of this the messaging around our enterprise navigation strategy, I think it's just important to do two or three things here. And the first one is don't panic. You know, we've we've spoken about the timelines in the past in a few slides ago, and we need to be comfortable with the fact that there are deadlines coming up, but they aren't deadlines that should be driving snap decisions right now. You know, it's something we need to keep in mind. It's something we need to acknowledge, but it's something that we need to incorporate into a future roadmap that will allow us to get from where we are now to a place we want to be rather than a place that we've just ended up because we needed to move. I think the second thing is industry experience. You know? And while selfishly, Group Elephant is an industry leader in SAP, HR, hosting, migrations, and everything like that, I challenge everyone on the call that's thinking about one of these journey to just speak to someone that can help you take your environment to the right direction. And I'd love it if it would be us because, you know, the navigation strategy, the assessment that we do as part of our huge group of companies we'll be able to provide perspective on every different aspect of the way your business is running. And when I say that, I'm not talking about, you know, us just coming in and doing a high level look at your environment and kinda giving you a boilerplate piece of information. It's about speaking to people, understanding the business road map from an XCO level, understanding where you want to go, what your ethos is from a technical perspective, and looking at doing an assessment and building that road map to get to a end point where everyone is happy, and it's where you want to be. So the call to action is if any of the stuff that Marion and I have mentioned during the course of this presentation webinar has resonated with you at all, I would really, really like it if you could come and speak to us and let us see what we can do to help you on that journey. It doesn't matter if you haven't started yet, if you are busy starting, if you're halfway through and you just want a second opinion, we are here to help you because, you know, as I've indicated already, there is no specific agenda that we have. We just want to help clients get to the point that they're happy that they've made the right decision. So these are the links that, Brad mentioned earlier. So there's quite a few things that you can actually take a look at here. There's a, each one will take you to a different block link that covers different points. So yeah. I mean, definitely, if any of these specifically interest you, would highly recommend that you go take a read and just take a look at the links. There's quite a bit of information there. I believe there's also quite a few videos that are just scattered there that kind of summarize some of the information and just cover topics of more detail as well. So, yeah, would highly recommend. So if any of those blog posts seem interesting to you, please feel free to take a look. And I think at the head of the presentation, Kat did mention that if you do have some questions, our emails are out there, or you can chat to Kat directly. I do apologize that the webinar has run longer than you guys might be used to, but I we really do appreciate your time and your attention on this. And once again, if anything has resonated with you, please feel free to reach out. If you want to, disagree or argue or agree or share your own story, please do. And, yeah, I'd just like to take the opportunity to thank my co speaker, Maren, and to thank everybody on the call, and I wish you all a wonderful rest of your day. Amazing. Thanks so much, Bradley and Maren, for your great session today. We had, yeah. We had people say, basically there's only one person that dropped off. So, obviously, there was a lot of engagement and interest in what you were talking about even though it has gone for longer than our average session. But you covered a lot, and I think it's complex topic and that there is a lot to cover. So, as, as Brad mentioned, there's a lot of work on creating, content to support what we've discussed today. And so we will, provide some links to, to those blog posts and other assets when I send through the recording next week, which will, help as well. And for those that are watching as a recording, I'll find a way to, to link those assets to the web page that has this recording in the future as well, so you'll be able to access that easily. Anyone that had a question, we will reply via email just to prevent needing to keep holding anyone up that needs to head off. Thank you again so much for your time. Make sure to have a look at our upcoming sessions on as part of this series. There's still quite a few to go if you haven't already, and we'll see you at the next one. Thanks again, and have a great day, everyone. Thanks, Kent. Thank you, everyone.