“Simplify Everything. Do Anything.”
Hasso Plattner stated SAP’s direction during his keynote presentation at Sapphire Orlando 2014.
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| Hasso Plattner |
He was joined onstage by Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which broke the theory of disruptive change in business. It was clear that SAP is positioning the announcement of Simple Financials as just such a change, and I really couldn’t disagree. If the simplification is really as significant as Professor Plattner suggests it can be, the Finance departments in companies across the globe are going to be cheering.
You can see the technical transition for SAP Financials for an Invoice Posting, with the majority of the aggregate tables disappearing.
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| Before Simple Financials |
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| Pink Boxes Go Away |
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| After Simple Financials |
When this is put into practice, enterprise financial agility is going to be astonishing.
Fiori Is Free!
Fiori was present in every demonstration done by SAP. It’s becoming extremely clear that SAP is taking user experience seriously, and their tool for the job is Fiori. With the announcement that Fiori and it’s hundreds of apps are now free, there should be a tidal wave of implementation coming (with three years of Fiori experience, at
Mindset we can barely keep up with our inboxes!). The responsive design, and simple screens further cement the simplification objective. You can see here the Fiori user experience that lets you drill down from a summary view, right into a line item:
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| SAP Fiori Simple Financials |
Dana Carvey on the Cloud
After a heavy dosage of HANA, Cloud, Fiori, and more Cloud, Dana Carvey and the SNL crew must have picked up exactly what we were all feeling at the end of three days of SAP: (Arnold Schwarzenegger impression) “We are going to innovate, integrate, cloud, mobile, push, data into CLOUD… CLOUD!” The crowd loved Dana Carvey.
Clearly the Cloud is one point that SAP, and most partners are trying to get more engaged in. Hana Enterprise Cloud was promoted by T-Mobile, and a number of other partner offerings were created and announced. HANA also announced a much broader set of partnerships, with
Red Hat support for example.
How to Get Started
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