Chris Botha (Partner and Co-founder) and I (Omar Zuberi – Director of Consulting Services) had a chance to attend the SAP’s annual Sapphire Conference in Orlando, FL. As in years past SAP has combined the annual ASUG (Americas’ SAP Users’ Group) meeting, primarily for current customers, with Sapphire which is geared towards wooing new SAP clients (Wal-Mart, Hallmark, American Greetings come to mind). Fifteen thousand “happy” SAP Customers, Partners, and Employees had a chance to see the latest that SAP has to offer and enjoy Eric Clapton perform. The Orlando convention center site was setup to offer both booths for SAP partners and break out sessions for ASUG meetings.

On the ASUG side, Chris and I had a chance to attend some of the breakout sessions that show the direction that SAP is going with Supply Chain Software. Most noteworthy and standing room only were:

1. APO SNP and PP/DS Influence Council, presented by Eric Simonson, SAP Labs and Tod Stenger of SAP Labs
2. What’s New in SAP APO 7.0, presented by Tod Stenger

It was great to see the packed Influence Council meeting with many vocal new users of APO. Customers that started with APO 4.0 or later and are now voicing their complaints, such as forecast netting and CIF issues.

Both sessions talked about the enhancements to APO which are primary for process industries, better reporting on CTM runs, and better performance for interactive SNP and DP planning. Customers will now be able to do cross plant characteristic based planning in SNP. They also mentioned that tank resources are now fully supported but only from a storage standpoint, not a reaction standpoint, i.e. two products go in and one final product comes out.

(Note–I will update with Link to these presentations once that they are available.)

We also had a chance to sit in on some interesting client presentations, these included:

1. Dashboard Reporting for Solae, presented by Subbu Subramaniam (Director of Applications)
2. Demand Driven Innovation: Supply Chain Transformation at Kennametal, presented by Gary Dietz

From a Sapphire standpoint the SAP Pods where bustling with activity and we noticed quite a lot of people huddled around Supply Chain Pods, Business Intelligence and Business Objects Pods.

On the final day Hasso Plattner, Co-founder SAP and Chairman of the Supervisory Board, SAP AG talked about the future of SAP and software in general. His admittance that Google is providing software which is stable, simple, and fast over the internet was very interesting. As he called it “cloud software” is a reality and SAP needs to address this. He presented the SAP Business byDesign suite which is completely portal based. (See www.sap.com for more information.)

All in all it was an excellent opportunity to meet current clients, make introductions with potential new clients and run into some old friends and bosses. It was good to see all the activity around supply chain software, which let’s agree, is good for business!