RISE with SAP: Beyond the migration

Thank you very much for the introduction. I really appreciate everybody's time today. Understand that everyone is busy, and, I'm just glad that you've spent a little bit of time to come listen to me speak for hopefully not too long. Let us switch across the agenda, and then I will do some introductions of myself and the company that I work for. So on the agenda today, as mentioned, I'll be explaining a little bit more about who we are, why have we decided to bend your ear today, with the topic at hand, you know, the understanding a little bit more of what RISE is as a platform, and then, you know, getting into the real meat of the understanding as to the opportunities that we've identified as a company and how my company, the company I work for, can assist you, going forward on RISE. And then finally, just a few questions and answers that I hope, might shed some more light if you do have any outstanding information that you need. As discussed, a little bit more information about who I am and who the company I work for is. So my name is Brad Jackson. That photo was taken at my wedding, so probably things have probably changed a little bit since then. But, yeah, I, I'm a SAP technical architect. I've worked for Group Elephant, and my sub company that I work in called Epius Labs for the last seventeen years. I started as a very junior basis consultant that long ago and have, you know, built strength upon strength to end up as somebody that loves to work specifically within the areas of migration, you know, whether it's clients moving to newer or better architecture or, hardware or operating systems or whatever it is. My job there is to help them seamlessly make that migration, understanding what's gonna go well, what's gonna go badly, avoiding some of those pitfalls, and ultimately enjoying the journey while we're taking it. I've also mentioned below that, I do enjoy a golf and a whiskey. So if anybody's ever in South Africa, please look me up, and we can meet up somewhere. I did mention GroupElephant. GroupElephant is a group of companies. You can see on the sort of little mind map here, we have various partners within our little group, anywhere from standard SAP, sort of technical functional work, all the way through to research and development platform hosting, various different ERP solutions, all the way through to things like AI, different regions all over the world. So, you know, as it says there on left, we do span around three thousand seven hundred people globally. And it's important that we can cover all of those different time zones, to help all of our customers in those time zones and in those regions. A little bit more information about APUs Labs specifically. I'm not gonna get too bogged down in all the detail, in these slides, but some really interesting things are, obviously, the large number of clients that we have worldwide, very, very satisfied clients as far as I'm concerned. You know, we've, focused our business on, two things, at EPU Slabs. One is research and development, and the other one is using said research development to actually fulfill the role of IP leverage managed services. So we take some of the really awesome stuff that our gurus in our company build, and we use them to drive efficiency, reduce things like downtime, and just clear out some of that complexity in the environment. One of our methodologies that you can see in the middle there is called Prism, and it's, no mistake that Prism is, something that will help get you into RISE faster. You know, we're not obviously not focusing today on rise migrations, but, certainly, that's another avenue that we might be able to help you with if you are interested. But, you know, the this little sort of view on the screen here is just a nice way of just representing that, you know, we've been doing this for a very long time. We have a lot of really, really happy clients, and we have a really, really big base around the world in terms of people that will recognize the name, recognize the work that we've done. You know, one of our major pieces of software that actually helps with the prism, methodology and everything is a certified SAP product. So, you know, it's really, really great that we can use some of this to actually help the environments that we work in operate better and faster. Some more things that are relevant to the discussion we're having today is, things that my team does. You know, this is a sort of a very generic view on things that a Basis team would be expected to do, obviously, with a lot of secret sauce and some benefit from some of that r and d that I mentioned, to actually make our work happen faster, you know, more predictably. But, looking in the top right there, your IP leverage managed services, I mean, that we've already discussed. We have a lot of automation innovation around how we operate, which means that we reduce, a lot of the pain points that clients would experience. I mean, you guys know what innovation will do to an environment. We have a lot of those innovations running to fast track things like our transport management system and our daily checks and everything like that. It it really, really does save us time. You know, bottom right, something we've touched on the previous slide, but it's sort of focusing within a massive team, which operates in all different time zones. We can chase the sun when it comes to work, And, you know, I would trust all of the people at work. They're all great people. They're all driven to try and do things better, to learn to, you know, pick up things when they have fallen down, etcetera. And I think it's great that they do that. On the left hand side, you know, SAP will obviously offer some of their standard refreshes and, you know, client syncs and things like that. But, you know, we've got a lot of automation and software that allows us to do that on a much faster, much more selective scale when it comes to that. And that's really important when you're managing data in clouds because, you know, the one of the biggest things that people assume is that I'm just gonna move into the cloud. Therefore, everything's gonna be much faster and much cheaper and everything like that. But the real hard work is in partially in the planning when you go into the cloud, and then afterwards, actually having a look and seeing what can be improved once you're there. And then lastly, just something to touch on is, you know, it's proactive automation around execution of tasks. You know, it's us understanding how your environment works and looking at ways that we can actually improve existing mature processes so that they run better, more predictably, and that we can actually assess when things might be going wrong, which is really, really great for us and great for the clients as well. Getting into the meat of why we're actually here sitting on this call today. You know, I've already spoken for quite a while, but, this kind of technical term popped into my head when I was in the car the other day, and I thought, I'll fulfill the role of a digital Sherpa for the next few minutes, you know, for the specific reason that you guys are trying or helping a client or trying to do something yourself, where you're trying to take your environment on a journey, your business on a journey. And that journey normally ends up somewhere where you're looking to reduce costs. You're trying to improve optimizations and everything like that. And, you know, RISE might be one of those directions that you've chosen to go in. There is a heck of a lot of information out there when it comes to RISE, and some of it is easy to understand. Some of it is slightly more complex. And I think, you know, I don't think anybody is out there to misinform people about what RISE is and whether you should go there and what does twenty seven mean and what does twenty thirty mean and what is what happens with Suite on HANA and all that sort of stuff, and what are compatibility packages and all that sort of stuff. But, you know, ultimately, what we're looking for here is clarity, and that's one of the things that I hope, maybe not specifically in this presentation, but, you know, if you do reach out to us here at Labs, you know, we would be more than happy to have a conversation with you, try and understand what's happening with your environment, and maybe just provide some advice based on other clients that we've worked with. And out of that would come clarity, which, you know, it helps everybody at the end of the day. You know, it's not only clarity for clients, but it's also when a client comes to us and said, this is exactly what we need to do going forward, it actually makes our lives easier. And I mean, that third bullet point, you know, we're not here, talking about RISE and talking about this bridge offering that I'm going to talk to you guys about now because we are trying to cut people out of work or talk badly about software or companies or whatever it is. It's not at all. What it is that we're trying to add value, and we've identified based on some pretty in-depth investigations we've done into RISE where there can be some augmentation of work that we can do to supplement SAP to make sure that your environment runs as well as it can. Because, ultimately, on that fourth bullet point, the main problem is that, you know, we're moving to new solutions all the time, and things are new and things are interesting and exciting. But, you know, with everything that's new, there are good things, but there are problems as well. And it's about leveraging experience of people around you in order to avoid some of those pitfalls that might have been experienced by other customers or other companies. And why make those same mistakes when you can have someone sort of guiding you in the same direction or guiding you around that problem, which would make a lot more sense to me? In the next couple of slides, we'll talk about RISE. I don't wanna spend too much time discussing RISE itself because, you know, if you're here listening to this right now, you either have a very good understanding of what RISE is, a reasonable understanding, or you don't know a lot, in which case, I think you probably need a little bit more than the last sort of ten, fifteen minutes of my presentation. So, again, please feel free to reach out. So I've just I've taken this from SAP's own sort of marketing stuff, so, you know, this is nothing I've done myself. But, essentially, RISE is a platform that SAP have put together, and it's been a long time coming in terms of the sort of moves and the relationships of certain databases that SAP has managed, that they would end up in a space where they would be offering their very own sort of SAP approved platform, that they manage themselves. And, you know, it's it's a really, really good place to be. You know, you're operating within the control of SAP. And, also, I mean, the sort of newish I won't say new, but the sort of new direction that SAP is moving with a lot of their data is to focus on things like, clean core and, you know, low code, no code kind of solutions. And, you know, the RISE is really, really sort of synonymous with this sort of thing where they're using these environments in a very controlled way to contain clients' data and then also allow peripheral systems to be able to use that data and work on it and everything. And I think it's a really, really sound model. You know, if you look at some of the sales stuff around it, just picking some things, I mean, improve productivity, secure, they manage the technical operations and, you know, best practices and everything and unlocking the power of your ERP system. I think that is all very, very central to what RISE is trying to do. And, you know, looking at security and stuff like that, the thing at the moment is that IT and these kind of ERP systems are very much driving towards that as a service kind of mantra, where you have a CIO that doesn't really want to know what database their production system is running on or a CFO that doesn't want to know that their system went down on Saturday morning or a CTO doesn't need to understand what specific, versions of SAP people are running. They want to be able to operate on a business perspective, you know, and that kind of AMS layer, and everything else beyond that is taken care of. And that is very synonymous with this as a service thing. And I think that this is great, and the platform is here and it's here to stay. And what we need to do is we just need to assess it, and that's what we've been doing for a good while now, and start looking at where companies like Labs can help augment the Rise offering to actually make it way more attractive to clients. You know? It's already fantastically attractive, but it's about using some of our experience, using some of our know how to actually take it just to the next level, which I think will help everyone at the end of the day. If you've, dealt with SAP, on something like RISE or ECP, this screen might look quite familiar to you. This is something that's provided by SAP. It is a RACI matrix, that is a discussion as to what's covered within something like RISE, what's partially covered, what might be covered by a paid service, and what is excluded altogether. And if nothing else, from the entire presentation I'm gonna show you, I would love for you to just absorb this point of this this slide. And that's that when you push the magic go to cloud button or go to rise button, you know, a lot of your trouble does go away. But there isn't a reality currently that states that, you know, you can push this button, you can go to RISE, and then you can get rid of all of the people that aren't using it from a functional and a technical perspective, and the systems will just continue to run. There needs to be some kind of layer in this operation where there is management of the system, which is done by SAP, and then there is operational management that would be done as a middle layer, which would then interface with SAP but also interface back to the client. And if we look at some of these offerings, so, you know, these cheerfully pastel colors here, you know, your top three items, these are all things that are provided by SAP. I don't no questions asked. But then the two at the bottom, there is a blue block, which is services provided by the CAS, which is a costed service. And then the last block there, that funny pinky color, is something that's completely excluded by SAP. These tasks are not gonna be performed by them, and this is gonna need to be performed by somebody, whether it's somebody at your company or whether it's a service provider like APUs Labs. And this screen is taken out of a really, really big RACI matrix, and I'll show it kind of show you what it looks like on the next slide. But what's important to note is that of these services that are included or excluded or whatever it is, there are about two thousand of the things in this Excel spreadsheet. And what our team has done is we've gone through this thing sort of with a fine tooth comb and gone through and figured out what is relevant to SAP, what are things that would be worked on by SAP, what makes sense to be done by the CAS, and what things would make sense to be done by us because of our experience, and what things are completely excluded by SAP, which we would then be able to fulfill the role to actually perform. So as mentioned, you know, this is just to kinda show you the information that you are presented with when working on one of these racing matrixes. Now this is twenty seven lines of two thousand. And, I mean, we identified of that previous slide, that SAP are on the hook to do about fifteen hundred of those tasks. But there's definitely a delta of a few hundred where things are either expected to be done by the client or it's negotiable with SAP around the CAS. So it's just important to understand that there is a learning journey to happen when working on RISE. And, you know, for anybody listening on the call that has moved to RISE, I'm sure you understand what we're talking about. And for those of you that are looking to move to RISE, it's just I implore you to just understand and remember these slides just to say, you know, there isn't a big magic shiny button that just gets everything across and everything's automatically managed. There is there are places that need to be worked on from your side or from a managed services side to help SAP get your environment where it needs to be. And I think that's just really, really important to understand. So what EpiUS Labs has done is, while going through that document with a fine tooth comb, what we've done is we've distilled some of those concepts down into something that's a lot simpler and a lot easier to sort of consume. And then what we've done is we've actually assigned sort of ticks on the right hand side as to whether this thing's done by SAP, this thing is a shared responsibility, or this thing might be done by a, a managed services team such as ourselves. So I'm not going to go through each one in extreme, detail, but, you know, I will touch on some of them. So, I mean, service request management and incident management. I mean, we understand if you've worked with SAP for any amount of time, you've probably logged a ticket with SAP. You know, there is definitely a process that has to be followed in order to do this. And, you know, there are lessons learned. There's ways of doing it that, you know, we've learned over the years, who it needs to be logged against, who we need to escalate with, how we need to word and format the messages so that we get the best response in the fastest amount of time. And I think that's why we have sort of dual ticks for those. You know, the third one, the online support services, of course, that's SAP's job to do. I mean, that's the sort of under the hope stuff as below. Your infrastructure management and, by extension, below that, your backups, restores, disaster recoveries. These are very solid ticks in terms of, SAP's work to do. So, you know, we're certainly not ever going to intrude on that space because, this is the platform. This is the clean core. This is everything that SAP are trying to do to keep everything as standard as possible. But we understand, as technical people, that moving data in and out, having distinct differences when it comes to interfaces and where they write files to or how the jobs run or what they where they write files to. Every client is different, and we need to allocate effort and understanding to these differences. And, you know, I mean, from a network and storage perspective, one hundred percent, it is SAP's responsibility. But there are definitely instances where we would have to advise or you would have to advise SAP or you would be asked to make a decision by SAP on whether a new drive needs to be added to your HANA data directory or whether, the SFTP directory needs to be split into a dev and a production for testing perspective and things. And, you know, these are potentially not questions that would be appreciated, hey, at a CIO, CTO level. You know, the this was something that was performed by a Basis team or by a managed services partner, and there is still a lot of value in there. Monitoring, still solidly done by SAP. They have a really nice cloud ALM platform. We also perform monitoring on our side, but from an SLA perspective, SAP are definitely on the hook there. The next three are very interesting because, you know, your daily checks, your landscape health, your job monitoring, I mean, those are sort of above your triple zero client triple zero level of SAP. And at that point in time, your SAP Rise team does step back and say, we've got all the checks in place. The systems are available. Everything's green, but it's up to you to manage the system now. And, you know, that is something that the team that I work in has been doing for years. We've been operating above and below that line, but we add a lot of value above that line. You know, whether it's using some of our automations to let people know when things are gonna go wrong before they go wrong, whether it's having a look at things like short dumps and all that kind of stuff. You know, all the boring stuff that makes us techies excited but might bore other people. And it's about taking those repetitive services, automating them, and then using that automation to save us time where we can start focusing on other areas within the environment. So moving on to the next part of this table, performance management. Yes. SAP will manage the environment if something goes down, but that's not what I'm talking about here. Here, I'm talking about things like, buffer size parameters, all that sort of stuff within SAP. I mean, that is something that we would need to make sure is running really nicely in the system because, you know, SAP offers some really, really fantastic hardware that the systems will run on. But we all know that if the system is not tuned correctly, it doesn't matter what you've got under the hood. It still won't run particularly well. So it's about that level of understanding and management of the system that we would help with. Okay. So last few before we move on to the next slide, but these are kind of important. So, you know, upgrade support packages and system copies. Of course, those refreshes, system installations, that's all the responsibility of the RISE team. But, from our experience, you know, there are specific points where you will then instruct SAP, the RISE team, to take over and continue with an upgrade or to perform a support package stack. But any prep work that needs to be done, whether it's testing ahead of time, whether it's data comparisons, anything like that, assessing support package stack levels, having a look at SAP notes, that is all done by the client or managed services partner. And those things are still very, very key for any of these three ticks to actually operate correctly. The system installation and migration, if you are migrating into RISE, there is still a step where you have to migrate into a staging area. And that's really, really important to understand that there are parts of the migration process where somebody like you or a managed service partner would migrate it into that staging area, and then SAP would take it from there and move it into their environment. Another very interesting thing to consider is hybridized landscape. So we have a few clients that will operate most of their workloads within RISE, but then has still have some systems left behind. And it's about, going to the previous slide, about the networking and the firewalls and the integration of those kind of environments that's really, really tricky. And making sure that we're secure at all times, that we are ISO compliant, that everything that we have that is connecting to other systems is secure and consistent, and that's definitely somewhere where we would operate and SAP wouldn't. Last but not least, the last three, client triple zero management. I've already mentioned that is squarely within SAP's area to manage. There are very unique scenarios where we might get access to do certain things, but, generally, that's SAPS area. And then for the last two, I mean, these are general day to day business activities, and you'll notice SAP doesn't operate in that area. This is BAU. This is, you know, transport management. This is system operation and everything like that, and we need to be sure that the system's operating in a consistent way. And we can definitely, from a basis technical functional perspective, help from this AMS layer to help ensure that the systems run successfully and, you know, in an optimized manner. I think, everything that I've spoken about on the preceding slides up until this one gives you a fairly good idea of the service offering or the direction that I will be leading the conversation into. But in essence, we're looking at those kind of gaps that we've identified within the previous tables and the RACI matrixes and how we as labs can help sort of bridge that gap successfully. And it's not about looking at, specific parts of the Rise solution and identifying shortfalls or anything like that. As I've mentioned repeatedly throughout this presentation, Rise is an incredibly solid platform, but there are abilities to take certain parts of that whole RISE engagement and leverage it a bit further and actually make sure that everything is being covered and everything is running as smoothly as it should. I promise this is the only wordy slide in this presentation, not my favorite. But, you know, just in summary, what our RISE bridge offering focuses on is a complementary solution to bridge gaps and enrich RISE, as an environment. And, you know, we offer our specialized base of services to ensure that the environment works as well as it should. And something to really understand is that, you know, with RISE, there are definitely two service providers. The one is SAP, who provides that infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and certain basis tasks. But there is definitely an avenue, an opportunity for an additional, service here, and that is Basis support service and application managed services. So how do we bridge this gap that we've identified on the previous slides? When I say gap, I don't want anyone to take offense to that or, think that we're being threatening about anything. We've we have gone through with our years of experience from a Basis perspective and our years of experience working on RISE, we know that there are certain things where a professional managed services team would be able to augment a connectivity between what you've got in the image at the middle there at the bottom, the SAP enterprise cloud services, your infrastructure as a service platform as a service with your road map, your existing business, which is the application managed services that runs along the top. And we've identified specific areas that we can help with in order to make sure that your business operates at its maximum capacity. And these things around the sides, yes, advisory services, thresholds, modernization. These are things that you feel you might be able to do yourself, which is wonderful. But I would just like to stress the experience and the expertise that we have as a team and the familiarity that we have with these environments. And I think you would be remiss not to at least consider having a look at the services that we have to offer, in order to take your business to the next level while working with SAP on RISE. Nearly done. So taking all the stuff that I've spoken about on the previous slides, I would just like to sort of finish with a success story. You know, one of the clients that we have deployed our Ryze Bridge on, is a very big medical company in Europe. And they moved to Ryze a while ago, and they had two managed services technology partners in that time, one that helped them migrate and one that took over when the migration team, it didn't work out so well. So when we were asked to get involved, we started investigating the landscape, the systems, and we found some very strange things. We found environmental issues. We found, things that we could address. We found that there was an audit being done on the system and certain security patches hadn't been loaded in two years and everything like that. So, you know, in a nutshell, you know, there this is not something that SAP RISE needed to focus on at all, the RISE team. This was something that either the client or a managed services partner would need to drive from their side. And it's just further proof that, you know, just pushing that magic button and being migrated into the cloud is never ever going to save you money and time, and it's never gonna optimize itself until you work with SAP and with a team like ours in order to optimize and make sure that the environment is running how it should. And irrespective of how clean that core is, there are gonna be differences, and every difference means a different way of handling a SAP system. And that's what we're all about. We're about understanding clients' environments, and we're about, you know, making the changes specific there and taking that environment onto the next level. Last slide from my side, and it's just a question slide. So I would just like to thank you all for your time and attention. I hope, not all of you look as unimpressed as some of the people in this photograph above me, but I really, really look forward to hearing from you. Feel free to contact me on my email address, which is at the top of the presentation or the sales one below, and we would be able to help you, map out a journey. And whether it's to get to RISE, whether you're on RISE and you need to see if your environment is running as well as it can, let us help you bridge that gap, and let us help you join the powers that SAP are providing you with your own AMS and your own business requirements and take you guys where you need to go. Thanks very much, and I hope you guys have a great afternoon. Cheers.