Boost your SAP project’s ROI: Reduce and manage costs

I'd like to welcome everyone for today's session. So we are gonna be talking about how to boost your SAP projects ROI. So let me just introduce myself. I might not be a familiar face. I'm actually part of the global marketing team here at New Slabs. And just a few reminders for today's session. This session will be recorded so you can actually go back to it after, this time slot. We'll be sending it out in an email follow-up. And, also, you can ask your questions through the control panel. You can see that, chat icon maybe on your right with a question mark. And, also, we'll be answering them at the end of the discussion. And before we start, I'd just like to share some of the following schedules of some webinars that we have prepared for our lead partners exclusively. For today, we're gonna be talking about, reducing and managing costs and, delving into data minimization, identifying cost saving opportunities, and so on. But on the thirteenth of February, we also have a session on accelerating greenfield s four HANA deployments. So if you're interested in data extraction and identifying, again, cost saving opportunities for your clients as we do these projects, please do, sign up for that. We have two time slots for that. We have one for year, and we also have one for Asia. The demographic for this current, webinar is actually, mostly Europe. So we have partners from Germany, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and so on. And, also, last but not least, for the month of February, we actually have another webinar on the twenty sixth of February. This one is gonna be in the time slot for Americas, but it's gonna be talking about reimagining as per HANA implementations with a strategic SBT approach. And, yeah, enough about, promoting those webinars. So now I'd like to introduce our for today, Paul Hammersley. Take it away. Thank you very much. So, thank you for joining us again. Thank you, Mariel, for, introducing. I am currently the product owner for data sync manager. I've probably had conversations with some of you at various events over the years. So, again, thank you for giving us your time today. And what we're looking to talk about is specifically around these projects. So, I'm sure with all of your clients who are having conversations, about running S4HANA projects. Have they embarked on it? Have they started to move some of their SAP, environments to S4HANA, or are they planning to, to move still in the future? Are they looking at RISE? Is that something that they need to consider? And, obviously, RISE doesn't require HANA immediately, but it is part of that RISE journey. It's intended to be a way to help people to move towards AMP as well. So one of the big differences that people are, finding when they start to look at the s panel project is the hardware costs. So on traditional database types, you can add more disk relatively easily, and the memory is a separate point to the application servers have the memory allocation. They are working in conjunction with the data, which is being read in from the database, written back to the database. With s for HANA, it's in memory, and so you aren't simply needing the disk space to be, to be the right size for a particular system. The memory allocation goes hand in hand with that, and the cost of those applications or the cost of a, t shirt sizing perhaps on one of the hyperscalers or the hosting provider, that cost is typically a lot larger. So from of the from projects we've been involved in, the systems that we, have helped with, we've seen that when someone makes that journey from an ECC system, the typical running costs of that system will actually go up around threefold. So that is obviously, a very significant, increase in costs. And in those projects, the systems tend to be quite data hungry as well. So this is just the initial day one of a brownfield migration, but then as the new processes are brought on board, you'll find that those systems are growing and the costs are increasing. So what we ought to look at today is, probably our most popular selling component of data sync manager. I'm gonna take you through just a quick demonstration of it for anybody who is, not familiar with it. But the purpose of this is to understand that throughout the s panel project itself and then beyond that project, you will be increasingly needing to be able to test functionality. Your clients will need to be able to test interfaces to new systems, make cloud, native systems that are going to interface with S4HANA as their main system of record. And so being able to refresh test systems efficiently is becoming more important than it was previously because the rate of change in those systems is becoming quicker. But the costs associated mean you need to be much more flexible. We can't simply have three copies of production, four copies of production, even temporarily, because the costs of that become far higher. Simultaneously, as well as looking at the S4HANA journey and preparing the landscape perhaps for that or providing the landscape for that project, there is also the need to allow businesses to start to look at how AI will impact them. So it's been headline news, I would say, LLMs and Generative AI for at least the last eighteen months. And, of course, every business is asking themselves the question or their senior leaders are asking, how will this affect our business? What do we need to do in order to adapt our business to make sure that we are, leading in the space in which we play? How do we avoid falling behind, our competitors? So this also requires data. AI models need data to be able to train on, and that means being able to potentially spin up separate systems, separate datasets. And if that, that project is using external technology, then you may need to consider should that data also be anonymized. So simply having a an exact copy of production could cause you other problems. So this is also a way to cater for those existing requirements in the nonproduction environments for those types of projects as well. So we're gonna jump into a source system. So you'd be looking at this as typically your production system. In some large organizations, they might have a preproduction that is a copy and they use the preproduction as a source to populate all of the lower systems. And this is essentially where you're starting your client sync from. So if I come into the create sync option, we now have a short road map that tells the user the process that they're going to follow in order to either create a new client or potentially refresh an existing client on the test system. And then we have options. So on the selection options, the first choice that we make is what type of copy are we going to be doing. So if we do the drop down here, we can see we can do a customizing copy similar to the SAP customizing client copy. We can do a full copy similar to the SAP, what the SAP client copy can do. But that's typically too much data for organizations to be able to use with the SAP standard functionality, and that's why they would have switched to system copies that are much more invasive, require a lot more post processing. The power of client sync is that we can then break this down further. So we could, for example, say we want to create a client with just master data and customizing, And this preview is showing me if I'm going to an existing target client, what will happen to the data. So the transactional data would be removed. At the moment, the users and authorizations will be removed, deleted, and not copied. But as I may make changes to this, we'll see the impact of those changes is then updated in that preview. So just this particular option of master agent customizing would allow you to have perhaps an additional testing client, that has all the master data and the customizing from the production system or preproduction as it is now. And that in itself could be a perfectly good, client to be able to use for interface testing. If there is a cloud solution that is needed to be able to interface and get data for business partners, that data would be here, and it could be that cloud solution would start to create transactions as you test the interface. Typically, you would see a master data only. Copy could be ten percent of the size of production, could be less. It does depend on the business, depends on how they use SAP, what their processes are, but it's that type of order of magnitude. And when you think about that hardware cost on HANA, even if the organization hasn't gone there yet, adapting this as a way of providing additional test clients could be preparing the way for when that project comes. We could even be looking to clean up, consolidate maybe two existing test systems into one that actually has more than one client within there. Sometimes, however, you do need some transactional data. The users want to test reporting. But when you think about the system copy, if you do a full copy of a production system over a test system, how much of the older transactions are actually used? Anything more than a year old will typically sit there in the test system untouched. Nobody's viewing the data. Nobody's reporting on the data. And then a year later, it gets replaced by itself and, again, sits there completely untouched. What ClientSync is allowing you to do is to say, to represent the production system effectively, we don't need that historical data. That older data doesn't need to be present. So we can actually take a slice up to today, always up to today, and we can go back a specific period of time. So we could say, I want all of the data, all the transaction data for the previous year or just the previous month, just a week if I need a small amount of transactions, or I could have a specific window going back thirty days each time. Or it could be a from date. So you could say, I want everything for this financial year. So perhaps we'll go back to the start of the financial year, but we'll maybe go a week earlier into previous year. So we get everything inside this financial year. What the client sync engine is then doing is leveraging the intellectual property that we have inside data sync manager. So the same definitions of data that are used by object sync and some of the other engines are used by client sync to be very specific about what is included in this client we're creating. So if you have a document flow that is started maybe, this document that happened exactly a month ago, let's say it's a purchase order, for example, ClientSync will identify that document as being within the time slice, but it will then look to see what are the preceding documents in that document flow, and it will choose those and bring them in if this option is selected. So, typically, we would use this. There is an option to switch it up if you don't want to, but it would go and say that purchase order has a preceding requisition, maybe a preceding contract. Those will be picked up and will be included in our test client even though they were created before the start date that we've selected within you. We can also provide an enterprise slice. So if you need to create a testing, area for a business project, a change that's happening that only affects one company code or a set of company codes, you can enter that in here, and DSM will then derive all of the related enterprise keys. So the bank areas, valuation areas, purchase orgs, sales orgs, plants, everything that is linked, the data will then be filtered by those keys. And you can see from the diagram, it's not just the transactional data where it's quite clear what is inside of what's relevant for a particular sales or a particular company code, but also against the master data. So you can have much leaner clients that is just specific to that company code, and you can also make that setting against the master data profile as well. So we could have the test client for just one company code and none of the transaction data. So very specifically targeting what a particular project needs to do. That is also a very useful option if you're using any type of test automation where you might be, automating the creation of the transactions. If that's how your test automation starts, it begins with the start of the SD or the flows, creates all of the documents in the flow and tests each step in the flow. That test automation does not require any historical transactions. So a master data only client would be a very good starting point for that and would allow you to reset that client maybe on a monthly basis. So your test automation is always happening against the very latest data from the production system, and, obviously, you're applying customizing changes as they make their way through the landscape to also come into this particular client. If the system has, a full HCM, payroll set of data in here, you can choose to do specific exclusions within it. So we can say for the project that we're doing, maybe we don't need payroll data at all. This would reduce the volume yet further, or potentially, we don't need any employee data. There's nothing there's no link between employee records and, sales order contacts or anything else that's actually relevant for this project. It's not gonna cause us a problem to simply say, we'll actually exclude all of the employee data, make it a much leaner client. We don't allow the client's user through this screen to be able to say, exclude materials or exclude vendors in the same way because that data is fully integrated across finance and logistics and would cause problems if we allow choices of things to leak out. However, there are ways to easily set, custom tables to be excluded. So if a custom table is used for, an interface or a log, you might choose to exclude it completely for the run, and that can be done easily through the administration area. We then have, advanced options at the bottom, which is just helping the user to understand what they might want to change depending on where they're going to. So if you're going to an existing client, we would exclude tables that are used for things like the ALE setup, so we're not going to disrupt what's already in place. Whereas if you know you are going to be adding a new client on to your existing test system, you might want some of those, configuration tables to be brought through so that you have a baseline for doing ALA configuration as an example in the new client. Then with data sync manager five, client sync and also the object sync engine, which is, for data on demand, are fully integrated with data secure. So the policy that it's pulling in now is actually data secure policy, and that has lots of standard options for anonymizing, customer data, business partners, could be names, addresses, vendor names, addresses. If you're including employee data, obviously, that's a common one for scrambling. So, again, one of the use cases could be we need to build, an SAP testing client or training client for AI, and we want to make sure that the AI is not going to be getting any real ID numbers, government ID numbers, bank numbers, etcetera. So this is allowing you to just pick from those standard options. If we expand business partner, we can see common rules in here that we deliver, and this is highly extensible as well. So if an organization that you're working with has very specific things they need to do or they have sensitive data in a, set of custom tables or custom fields, it can easily be extended to cater for that. Finally, the user comes through to the execution options, and they can send the data directly to a target system now with an RFC, or the data can be exported to file, and then you would go on to your target client and import the file to read that data in, and you can also use an estimation run to just get a sizing, how much data will be here, and you can include a sampling of that data. For performance, you would want to use parallel processing and if the customer's system has a number of application servers you can see how many are configured, how many are currently available, and then you can assign work processes to each application server. And this is something that we help with during implementation to see what's the optimum number. And if you were sending the data via an RFC, so for example, a client you want to refresh monthly, you could even schedule that as a job to happen monthly, and we have notifications so the user can receive updates every hour on the progress of the client sync or you can have, an email when it starts or when it finishes. So hopefully that gives you a good idea, of the options that are available and dials into some of the use cases. When we take that specifically to S4HANA, there is another implication, of the hardware size in the way that this works. So if we consider a production instance that is in a one terabyte appliance or a hyperscale sizing of a terabyte, when it's copied down to the QA system, it's gonna bring obviously the same set of data and needs the same size appliance. When that production system grows, you would need to go up, and, typically, they go up in a double of the sizing, so to two terabytes. So immediately, your costs have gone up for production and for QA. If we then look at how clients think impacts that, you are bringing potentially a three month slice or a twelve month slice of data. That slice doesn't necessarily need to be significantly bigger than it was a year ago. Unless the business is creating a lot more transactions or in that annual period or is generating more master data than they did previously, you would be able to remain on a smaller appliance. Your customer can remain on a smaller appliance for a lot longer. And even as that data does grow, even as a year slice does creep up with increasing master data when the business goes through a period of growth and is creating more transactions, you would still have options in order to be able to time that investment decision. So if you are reaching the limits of what that QA appliance can hold, You could look at reducing from a twelve month slice to a ten month slice just to claw back a little bit of that space, or you could decide the, test system can be limited to just a specific company code just to delay maybe a year that decision to upgrade the hardware or your clients can delay that decision if it's their hardware to own. So these are the options that are, being provided that you wouldn't otherwise have because of implementing client sync in a particular system. So as partners, we've got resources to help you with this. So we have an ultimate guide for, data and landscape management within S4HANA. We also have a blog that we wrote a while ago around the need to have, anonymized data in test systems. So SAP updated their own data processing agreements around the time GDPR came in, and that states that test systems should not have real data in them. So if your customers are going to rise, they do need to think about what is the impact of the way they currently refresh their test systems. Are they anonymizing task sensitive data? And then there is another, webinar that goes into more detail about how DSM can help during the process of moving an organization to RISE. We also have a brochure that you can download and have a look at, and this is a partner brochure, so you can have your partner logo inside this brochure. It just gives your customers a first look at some of the concepts that we've talked about here and how DSM, in particular, client sync, can help them over the next few years in their test data management. K. Mariel, I'm gonna hand over to you to talk a little bit about the partner workspace. Yep. Thank you very much, Paul, for that. And I just wanted to share again to, our partners about our partner workspace. So the resource that Paul shared previously is gonna be available in this workspace, and it's accessible through Client Central. I won't delve into much detail, but you can find more resources not only on Client Sync, but on all the other solutions that Paul also mentioned, which is object sync, data secure, and also data sync manager and for other portfolios as well. And aside from that, we'd like to highlight that if you do encounter any customers that are a great fit for, ClientSync or any other solutions, we have the capability in the partner workspace to actually log leads. And if you need more, information on this, we'd be happy to share them with you. But, for now, we encourage you to get in touch with your account executives on how to do this once you have a, great fit for Client Sync or any other solutions and services that we may have. And, yep, that's it for our partner workspace on Client Central. I hope you guys do, access that portal since it's pretty, heavily, packed with a lot of information that may be helpful for you, especially in your client presentations, especially with the, s four HANA projects coming in. And, yep, that's it. I think we can now open the floor for some questions that you may have, especially as partners. There may be questions on how to better, promote this to your clients or better qualify them. So please feel free to use the control panel on your right, and we'll adjust them now. And now I have a couple of questions for you, Paul. Thank you very much for discussing the data minimization, opportunities with client sync. And there's actually a question whether this works with RISE. Yes. So as part of the this certifications that we have for data sync manager, the allocation of works with RISE with SAP was also provided. So it very much does. If you are go if your clients are going into a RISE contract, then, obviously, being able to align the landscape beforehand means they will be taking significantly less, disk space through, whether that's a traditional database or a HAN appliance. It will impact the cost of their RISE contract, so you can help them to prepare for that and reduce the cost of that contract. Up until recently, we'd seen that the sizing of systems was set out in that agreement and cost it accordingly. So once someone was in RISE, there was less capability for them to then reduce their costs. But, of course, it would allow them to increase their flexibility by potentially having more clients in the test systems without going above the contracted size that they'd agreed to in their rights agreement. I have also heard in one region, quite recently of a RISE agreement with a Taylor option where, an organization is essentially allowed to move credits between different areas of what they're consuming within RISE. So, therefore, somebody who is already, on that Taylor agreement, if they could reduce the size of their nonproduction systems by, fifty percent, that could then equate to credits that they could use in other areas of the RISE agreement. Thank you very much, Paul. We're a bit short on time, but I have this another question. They're asking whether Evoque serve any industries that this is mostly applicable to, whether ClientSync shines in, more in a certain industry compared to the other one? It's applicable across industries. So we've used, and deployed Client Sync across a really wide variety of industries worldwide. I would say it's applicable to all. There are some industries where you make decisions about how you implement it and the decisions around how the landscape should be structured might be slightly different. If you have, fast moving consumer goods, customers, they might have waves of projects rolling down after each other. So you may need to maintain one, client all the time in the test systems. Those projects can roll through then you might have additional clients. Whereas other organizations like utilities organizations tend to go in, deployment waves. So they'd have a particular, wave that is working its way through. And once one wave moves forward, that's a good time to reset the whole, landscape. So I would say the industries really just affect guidance on the best practice for using data sync manager in general and particularly client sync. It doesn't, it's not applicable, for any it's not that it's not applicable, sorry, for any particular industry. It's just, how you deploy it might be slightly nuanced. I see. And that's all the question that you can adjust for now since we are really short on time. So I'd like just to thank everyone for joining today's webinar. Thank you all for your time. We'll be sending all the useful links and follow-up email. And, of course, if you want to know more about client sync, maybe you'd like to do a demo with one of your clients together with us. We'll be happy to assist you. Just send out an email of those shown at your screen. And that's it for now. Take care, and stay safe.