This and next week we want to give you and me a bit of a break from Corona. We will continue the Resilience and Recovery series here shortly with great episodes featuring SAP Customer Experience President Bob Stutz, Celonis Chief Product Officer Hala Zeine and others. But for this and next week we want to break out of the COVID monoculture a bit to talk about a different topic. I was approached within the last tho months almost daily and asked for guidance “How to make a podcast” and these mails...
May 25, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 35
In our series How to build crisis resilience and win in the recovery we already covered the topics CIO, Strategy, HR and Supply Chain Management. Today we will take a look at the perspective of the CFO with the return of Christian Straub, Head of Customer Advisory Finance at SAP. We talk about how the Shock and Recovery phases impact the topics of a CFO, what are the capabilities that are needed within these phases and how they are accomplished. Guest: Christian Straub – Head of Customer Advisor...
May 18, 2020•18 min•Ep. 34
When demand volatility for goods and services met constrained capacity in manufacturing and logistics, something thing happened a lot of people know only of because of stories their grandparents told them. Uncertain supply of critical materials and goods. I had the insightful pleasure to have Mr. Martin Barkman Senior Vice President and Global Head of Solution Management, Digital Supply Chain, SAP as guest for the DEEP DIVE covering Supply Chain Management in our series "How to build crisis resi...
May 11, 2020•30 min•Ep. 33
In Episode #31 we laid out the baseline for our "How to build crisis resilience and win in the recovery" – series for which we resieved very positive feedback. Thanks a lot for that. Here in Episode #32, we want to do our first deep dive starting with the essence of every company, its people. I talked to Dr. Florian Dreifus, the COO MEE of SuccessFactors about how HR organizations reacted to the first shock, what are crisis specific Best practices, and how HR digitalization is the major ingredie...
May 04, 2020•36 min•Ep. 32
Guest: Victor Hoeck – Customer Advisor, SAP Host: Alexander Greb – Customer Advisory Lead S/4HANA, SAP [Long description] This episode marks the start of a highly interesting and relevant series of episode on this channel called “How to build resilience and win in the recovery”. In this series, we present you several episodes of condensed Best Practices and strategic Know How. Information that helps you and your enterprise to make the right decisions now concerning your actual firefighting activ...
Apr 28, 2020•50 min•Ep. 31
COVID-19 took the world by complete surprise and turned it upside down. Most businesses are now in a tough struggle protecting employees, understanding the risks to their business, and managing the supply chain disruptions caused by the efforts to contain the spread of virus. While the full impact of this epidemic is hard to grasp, I am happy that our SAP CIO Florian Roth, whose main task now is not only to keep the lights on but navigate our foundation through these rough waters, took the time ...
Apr 20, 2020•34 min•Ep. 30
With the global economy dumping down the same rate that corona infections rise, it is not very easy to get a clear picture of the situation, neither for us individuals, nor for enterprises who are struggling to cope with the challenges and build resilience. When taking a look into media, you will find many opinions about the situation ranging from we are all doomed to “we are getting out of this with a black eye”. It is a good idea to take a look into the reality of SAP customers how they are do...
Apr 14, 2020•43 min•Ep. 29
The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is causing widespread concern and economic hardship for consumers, businesses and communities across the globe. PE enterprises are facing a situation in which they have multiple underlying companies with hundreds or thousands of employees looking for guidance and direction during this crisis. I sat together (virtually) with Sean Epstein, Senior Vice President Private Equity, SAP to discuss the actual situation for Private Equity firms, crisis response strategi...
Apr 05, 2020•56 min•Ep. 28
Five years after the initial release of S/4HANA it is interesting to see that still some are unsure about the Dos and Don’ts when approaching S/4HANA and this is not only about adopters, but I talk about partners, and ourselves at SAP and I am straight looking at Sales, Presales and Value Engineers. That’s why I sat together with Mr. William “Bill” Bowers, Global Vice President of the Solution Management S/4HANA at SAP to discuss not only the Top3 common mistakes made while approaching S/4HANA, ...
Mar 28, 2020•41 min•Ep. 27
Not only in a working relations, Leadership is a topic which affects anybody be if you are in the position to lead others, or others lead you. Even though we are talking mostly about enterprise applications in this podcast … and this industry, it is undisputed that the way key functions do their job probably affects enterprise success even more than bits and bytes. Leadership might be a hot discussed topic, leadership gurus like Simon Sinek might be omnipresent and whenever you see some shared w...
Mar 25, 2020•48 min•Ep. 26
Having the right mindset and principles at the beginning of a digital transformation initiative is vital to its success. Five years after the first release it has become obvious, that there are certain patterns of common principles that will determine the ease, speed and success of your Digital Core initiative. Or in other words: There are Best Practices that all those who implement SAP S/4HANA fast and with great success have in common: They Prioritize Core over Edge They separate Differentiati...
Mar 15, 2020•43 min•Ep. 25
In case you are working in a tech corporate environment and you have not founded the company you are working in, chances are that you have an almost romantic view about the life and work of entrepreneurs. I met with one of those at the office of his company in Munich who pass on safe and frequent salary checks for the sake of freedom and being able to do their own thing. It is Stephan Odoerfer, who is founder and managing director of 4tiitoo a tech company that is leading in enabling computer op...
Mar 08, 2020•54 min•Ep. 24
Around Christmas I sat together with Hans Thalbauer the SAP Senior Vice President responsible for Digital Supply Chain Management and Internet of Things and we had a conversation about what can we can expect logistically out of 2020 and what requirements possible events in 2020 could have on setup, performance and flexibility. We talked about how political events, natural disasters and pandemies are affecting the global supply chains and the business of enterprises. And what is happening now: Do...
Mar 01, 2020•38 min•Ep. 23
Today’s guest is promising fun for several reasons: “Radio Personality become Customer Experience Expert" Steven Spears, who is Global Program Manager for SAP CX and also uses his skill from his former being as a radio star to create and host the "Future of Customer Engagement & Experience Podcast”. So what we did was to do something new. You can surely find a lot of interesting podcast resources covering the topic of experience management in a very competent way. But Steve and I dialed up o...
Feb 23, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 22
Today we are talking about Logistics and Manufacturing also known in a wider sense as Supply Chain Management. For this it is great to have somebody here who knows his discipline from actually having had laid his hands on from a practical point because he started his professional life constructing huge diesel engines. Today he is the Solution Hub lead for Digital Supply Chain at SAP and a prominent face in meeting rooms and big stages of Supply Chain conferences alike. Since he is also an aspiri...
Feb 09, 2020•44 min•Ep. 21
Ten years ago, the highest valued companies had names like ExxonMobil, PetroChina, Petrobras and Royal Dutch Shell, 2020, things look bit different with names taking a prominent spot on the list that nobody thought about in 2010: Alphabet/Google, Facebook, Tencent, Amazon and Alibaba. Companies that don’t see their economic purpose in digging for oil. They are digging for data, which is the oil of the 21st century. I am pleased to welcome Dirk Häussermann, who is Senior Vice President and Head o...
Jan 26, 2020•32 min•Ep. 20
Second part of my conversation with Ivo Bauermann about the principles and success factors of modern analytics solutions and specifically SAPs next gen solutions in that area which are the SAP Analytics Cloud and the Data Warehouse Cloud. Also we talk about the economic implications and success factors to bring all horsepower of these capabilities to the street to enable 100% insight to action. Part two of a two-part conversation. Follow Alex: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-greb-b3a836155...
Jan 19, 2020•44 min•Ep. 19
“… Be open, bring new and creative ideas and help us build the next version of SAP. Bring a new mindset and don’t comply … I would hope that everyone of us still has this young kid inside that says: Brake the rules!” Interesting records about “making the difference”, awesome messages and great storytelling at the SAP Experts Podcast Episode #18 by this week’s guest Ivo Bauermann, Senior Vice President and Head of Product Strategy - Database & Analytics, about what type of people and personal...
Jan 12, 2020•52 min•Ep. 18
2020 is going to be a very exciting year as many digitalization initiatives across all industries are full steam ahead. Early January is generally the time of the year when often questions are asked if there will be something like a determining topic for the next 12 months that will produce a lot of new capabilities and will have a big effect how enterprises do their business. If you ask Sven Denecken, who is kicking of this year at the SAP Experts Podcast and is Senior Vice President and Head o...
Jan 06, 2020•37 min•Ep. 17
Before we go into Christmas break, we have not one guest but two guests for you. First, we welcome back for her second visit Ms. Saskia Fontanive of innovabee, who became prominent because of her successful high-speed S/4HANA Cloud implementations. And second, it’s great to have Mr. Jan Gilg who was responsible for the other extreme: The internal S/4HANA implementation at SAP. Additionally, Jan is now as Senior Vice President directly responsible for any S/4HANA related development, and reports ...
Dec 15, 2019•47 min•Ep. 16
Lately there was some interesting story in tech news. For the third year in a row, the board of a Californian giant in the world of enterprise applications rejected a shareholder proposal for the company to release data about how much women are paid at the company relative to men. While many tech companies incl. SAP have provided disclosures around gender pay equity issues and committed to closing pay gaps, this one tech company has continued to refuse to do so because, as they stated, it would ...
Dec 08, 2019•52 min•Ep. 15
Today’s episode is all about the tool you hopefully use most in your life. Your brain. My guest in this episode is Mark Raben, the CTO MEE at SAP who is heavily involved in Neuroscience to research how unartificial intelligence influences the way innovation is adopted and Mark and me will discuss how this Connection between a brain and innovation works and what is the recipe for excellence. We will tell you who will be the winner in an experience economy, how your job can get you busted at the a...
Dec 01, 2019•52 min•Ep. 14
SAP Experts Podcast #13 - A day in the life of a CFO Guest: Dr. Carl-Christian von Weyhe Host: Alexander Greb Today I am humbled to welcome a man who is a master of his craft: Dr. Carl Christian von Weyhe who is Chief Financial Officer of SAP in Middle and Eastern Europe and a sought-after lecturer and speaker in matters of financial and strategic management. We talked about the rapidly changing role of a CFO and Corporate Finance Management, Finance Transformation from the view of a CFO and the...
Nov 24, 2019•37 min•Ep. 13
Basically, turning people’s heads by talking about innovation is easy. Invent some fancy title for yourself which should ideally contain the words “Innovation”, “Digitalisation” or in the best case “Alchemist” and, very important, dress up like a hipster. That adds credibility. Then you look up youtube for the latest TED Talks and you will be able to reel off the fancy inventions and cloud castle and hope the whole linkedin community will cheer for you. Well, unfortunately at times it happens to...
Nov 10, 2019•48 min•Ep. 12
If you have not yet gotten the message that SAP has now something with an X, or Experience Data, you probably live behind the moon. So it is quite obvious that the experience topic has a big strategic relevance for SAP, and that’s not because we want it to be like that, but because winning in the 21st century means adapting to an experience economy where customer centric processes and the emotional connection of your customer to your products should not only be of utter importance for you, it sh...
Nov 03, 2019•41 min•Ep. 11
If you remember Episode 8 of our podcast series featuring the right approach to S/4HANA, Uwe Grigoleit told about the Viessmann case. Viessmann, an international manufacturer heating, industrial and refrigeration systems, had a quite clear case to move to S/4HANA. Inventory savings in two-digit millions as a result of an ERP transformation to S/4HANA made the path for a fast decision to do the Move. But of course, not in all cases, it is easy as that. Imagine a typical approach to S/4HANA. While...
Oct 20, 2019•41 min•Ep. 10
Today we are talking Finance! Being a logistics guy, I want to know anything about Corporate Finance, its changing role, challenges, and strategic aspects. Especially financial transformation and which role digital technologies play in all of that. And to do exactely that I have one of the best people as guest for these questions: Christian Straub, Head of Customer Solution Advisory Finance in Middle & Eastern Europe. He is a trusted advisor and frequent guest in the CFO offices throughout E...
Oct 13, 2019•38 min•Ep. 9
Welcome to the SAP Experts Podcast -Spinoff. With this episode I want to introduce and add an new label and a little bit different piece and format to the SAP Experts Podcast which will co- exist with the future episodes of the classic format that you already and hopefully love by now. The reason: We at SAP have many different Podcasts which differ a lot in format, style, content and length. Many of them are purely internal podcasts, that are not available to the public. But from time to time, t...
Oct 13, 2019•32 min•Ep. 8
For this episode, I deliberately chose the same title as my linkedin-blog. Because if you are working in sales, presales, services or consulting no matter if here at SAP, one of our great partners or you are a customer, this episode is a must for you in which meet Uwe Grigoleit. As Senior Vice President he has the global responsibility for the Go-to-Market of S/4HANA, and Uwe has quite some messages for all of us. We talk about S/4HANA, strategy, readiness, value, the role of cloud, what are the...
Oct 06, 2019•54 min•Ep. 7
In highly disruptive times, Digitalization is the area where the main decisive actions concerning your business model, processes and infrastructure are taken. It is the main business battlefield of the 21st century in which your actions and decisions result in either being the disruptor of your industry or being out-disrupted into marginalization. But what does this mean for SAP, its partners and its customers? For this episode I have met with one of SAP’s key players in the area of product stra...
Sep 26, 2019•44 min•Ep. 6
