UKISUG Connect - The keynote takeaways you need to be aware of

This year’s UKISUG Connect featured a number of insightful keynote speeches, so what were some of the key takeaways? In the first of our series of post-Connect blogs, we look at some of the main takeaways from the keynotes given by Conor Riordan, UKISUG Chair, and Leila Romane, UK&I SAP Managing Director.

Conor’s keynote: Understanding UKISUG’s objectives, and how we can support your organisation

In his keynote, Conor Riordan, discussed how UKISUG represents over 500 member organisations, 150 partners, and 4,500 individuals – bringing in more £1 trillion in revenue. This represents a significant portion of the UK&I business landscape.  Conor discussed how the UKISUG community has reached a time of real change. Three years ago, the enterprise SAP community was using ECC6 on-premise, whether using their own data centre or working with a hyperscaler. Today’s landscape has dramatically changed. There now exist four customer segments – ECC6 on-premises, S/4HANA on-premises, S/4HANA with Rise, and S/4HANA Public Cloud. And even within these segments, there are subdivisions, like the SAP GUI/BOBJ community and the FIORI/SAC community. In addition, we also have our BusinessOne and Business ByDesign communities. UKISUG works to meet the needs of the new generation of members – all while supporting our long-standing members in the multistep migration from ECC6 on-premises to S/4HANA. 

As part of this commitment, Conor discussed some of the resources available to our members – particularly as they begin or make the move to S/4HANA. This includes the launch of UKISUG’s S/4HANA Technical Academy in Q1 2025. This will offer our members classroom-based training on using S/4HANA, to drive continued value. With an ongoing supply/demand challenge related to skills availability, we hope to give our members access to training plans to close the skills gap, and get the most out of their SAP products.

Finally, Conor highlighted the importance of hearing the voices of all of our members. Our growing Women in SAP community is helping us to drive this strategic objective, and we are aiming to again increase the diversity by adding two more women to the board. in the next six months. By giving a platform to a range of voices, we will continue to drive disruption and change as we aim to improve the SAP community.

Leila’s keynote: SAP’s business goals, and squeezing value for customers

After Conor’s keynote, we heard from Leila Romane, Managing Director, SAP UK & Ireland, who discussed SAP’s business pillars, as well as their ongoing focus on skills.

Leila began her keynote discussing SAP’s three pillars for success: building a resilient business, growing followership, and fielding great teams. As SAP’s third largest market – with 3,000 customers – the UK&I plays a key role in helping SAP achieve these goals.

However, this relationship goes both ways. To quote Leila; “we all need to succeed, together.” And as a commitment to this joint success, it was encouraging to hear SAP discuss the need for them to make skills more easily available to customers – especially as they transition to S/4HANA. Additionally, as SAP AI tools become more widespread, the 30,000 customers currently on their AI journey will need significant support from SAP to get the most out of their subscriptions.

As part of this keynote, we also heard from Rob Geddes, Head of Customer Success Management & Engagement, UK & Ireland at SAP, on how customers can squeeze value from their SAP tools.

Rob discussed how skills and people are becoming more and more important to driving business success, and shared information on the resources that are being made available to SAP customers, including real-time support channels, and training opportunities related to implementations, with the aim of reducing the number of support tickets raised to SAP by 80%.

Finally, Rob encouraged members to carefully consider their partner selection process. With 25,000 SAP partners globally – and partners involved in 90% of SAP implementations – there are a lot to choose from. Helpfully, UKISUG has a partner directory that lists all of the SAP partners who also partner with the User Group. This allows members to assess implementation partners and choose the one that is right for them, so they can hit go-live as quickly as possible and get through their rollouts rapidly.

For more reflection on the keynotes, look out for our next episode of SUGTalks where we speak with Cliff Saran, Technology Editor at Computer Weekly, and Gerren Maye, host of SAPCHAT.

Keep an eye on our blog for further recaps from Connect – and be sure to pick up your early bird tickets for next year’s conference.