SAP announces new leadership team

SAP announced that Bill McDermott has decided not to renew his contract and is stepping down from his position as chief executive officer. In activating the company’s long-term succession plan, SAP Executive Board Members Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein have been appointed co-chief executive officers, effective immediately, with the approval of the Supervisory Board of SAP SE. McDermott will remain in an advisory capacity until the end of the year to ensure a smooth transition Read the full announcement on www.sap.com.

“SAP would not be what it is today without Bill McDermott,” said Professor Hasso Plattner, chairman of the Supervisory Board of SAP SE. “Bill made invaluable contributions to this company and he was a main driver of SAP’s transition to the cloud, which will fuel our growth for many years to come. We thank him for everything he has done for SAP.

“Every CEO dreams of being able to transition a company to its next generation from a position of significant strength,” said McDermott. “When you look at where we were and where we are, I simply could not be prouder of what this company has achieved over the past decade. I am thankful for the opportunity to lead one of the world’s finest companies. Now is the moment for everyone to begin an exciting new chapter, and I am confident that Jennifer and Christian will do an outstanding job. I look forward to supporting them as they finish 2019 and lay the foundation for 2020 and beyond. To every customer, partner, shareholder and colleague who invested their trust in SAP, I can only relay my heartfelt gratitude and enduring respect.”

With the formal endorsement of the Supervisory Board, the company activates its leadership succession plan, designed to preserve continuity and empower its next-generation leaders in advance of the formal kickoff to calendar year 2020.

“As they have already demonstrated, Jennifer and Christian complement each other perfectly and will be strong co-CEOs, a leadership model that is time-tested at SAP with multiple prior instances of success.” Plattner added.

Morgan and Klein bring decades of experience in the enterprise applications software industry. Both serve on the Executive Board. Morgan, who joined SAP in 2004, most recently served as president of the Cloud Business Group, overseeing Qualtrics, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Customer Experience and SAP Concur. She was named an Executive Board member in 2017.

"We are sad to see Bill go. He was a fantastic leader but it also is great to know who is taking the helm at SAP. Jennifer is a fantastic leader and will lead the organization with Chris in the right direction and keep building upon what Bill has built as a base over the last 10 years," added Christopher M. Carter, CEO of Approyo.

Read the full announcement at www.SAP.com 

SAP Fiori 101 (Updated - 2019)

SAP Fiori is a framework that provides the porting of applications on mobile devices and was released in 2013. It enables applications to be used on desktop computers, tablets and smartphones. SAP Fiori supports HTML5. The initial release had few applications to start and gradually increased to complete the SAP Business Suite.

SAP Fiori is the UX of the Intelligent Enterprise that changes the way you work. It equips designers and developers with a set of tools and guidelines to create apps for any platform faster than ever – providing a consistent, innovative experience for both creators and users. SAP Fiori enables you to turn new ideas into great apps as quickly as the market demands.

Three types of Fiori apps:

• Transactional apps - which allow users to perform SAP transactions on mobile devices as well as desktops. For instance, there is a transactional app for creating a leave of absence request and another for approving a purchase order.
• Fact sheets - which display information about key business objects in SAP. For example, there is a fact-sheet app for viewing a central purchase contract; it allows users to also drill down into related entities, such as vendor contacts, items under contract, and terms.
• Analytical apps - which allow users to display key performance measures and other aggregate information about the business.

SAP Fiori 2.0
SAP Fiori 2.0 was released in October 2016 and is the leading design for all SAP applications providing a harmonized user experience across on premise and cloud solutions. A new visual theme – named Belize – comes along with light and dark flavors. Using SAP S/4HANA, the UI Theme Designer allows you to adapt the theme to your corporate identity.

SAP Fiori 3 - September 2019 update 
SAP has chosen to deliver the SAP Fiori 3 innovations in a stepwise approach. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1908 and SAP S/4HANA 1909, the very first step becomes available to end users: the new Quartz theme as a successor of the Belize theme used with SAP Fiori 2.0, and the new shell header bar, which also replaces the viewport introduced with SAP Fiori 2.0.

Designed and developed by all SAP product teams, SAP Fiori 3 offers a more consistent and integrated experience across the entire SAP portfolio. This helps decrease training time, increases application effectiveness and provides consistency of use across devices from anywhere. Embedded artificial intelligence in SAP Fiori 3 provides intelligent home pages that show everything a user needs to focus on, and supports proactive business situation handling, which offers explanations, insights and proposed actions.

The new SAP Fiori 3 theme “Quartz Light”
The new Quartz theme is lighter and more neutral, to blend more into the background, giving application content the center stage. It is simple and minimalistic, making it easy for customers to theme it to their brand.

Approyo Welcomes Brandon Paulos and Femi Shah

Approyo is proud to announce that we have expanded our team again, this time welcoming Brandon Paulos and Femi Shah to our headquarters in Wisconsin.

Both Brandon and Femi join the Approyo team after previously working in the summer internship program as members of the Approyo Service Delivery team. Brandon and Femi will now be Jr. SAP Basis Administrator, working with our customers and partners to manage and support their SAP needs.

Brandon says his big draw to Approyo was the opportunity to work with developing and new technologies in a fun work atmosphere.  And Femi added that she is excited to be part of a fantastic team and culture that supports learning and development.

 “We are pleased to add Brandon and Femi to our growing top-notch team in Wisconsin. We are proud to be based in Wisconsin, where there is an exponential amount of growth in the technology sector,” says Christopher M. Carter, CEO of Approyo.

Approyo Among “Best Entrepreneurial Companies in America” For Second Year in a Row According to Entrepreneur Magazine

Entrepreneur Magazine recognized Approyo, a leading enterprise SAP HANA Solutions Provider headquartered in Milwaukee, as one of the “Best Entrepreneurial Companies in America” on its 2019 Entrepreneur 360™ List, the most comprehensive analysis of private companies in America. This is the second year in a row that Approyo has been honored by Entrepreneur Magazine for its impact, innovation, growth, leadership, and value.

“It is an honor to be recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine for the second consecutive year,” says Christopher M. Carter, CEO of Approyo. “2019 has been a great year of growth for the team at Approyo and this recognition further validates our success in the SAP ecosystem. Thank you to our team, partners and customers.”

"Every entrepreneur knows that a healthy business isn't just about growth. It's about being well-rounded—growing your culture and your systems as strongly as you grow your revenue," says Jason Feifer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine. "That's why we're excited to celebrate these companies with our fifth annual Entrepreneur 360. The companies that make the ranking have pushed boundaries with their innovative ideas, fostered strong company cultures, impacted their communities for the better, strengthened their brand, and grown impressively as a result."

Honorees were identified based on the results from a comprehensive study of independently owned companies, using a proprietary algorithm and other advanced analytics. The algorithm was built on a balanced scorecard designed to measure five metrics reflecting major pillars of entrepreneurship — innovation, growth, leadership, impact and business valuation.

For additional details on the E360 List and the companies recognized, visit: entrepreneur.com/360

About Entrepreneur Media, Inc.
For 42 years, Entrepreneur Media Inc. has been serving the entrepreneurial community by providing comprehensive coverage of business and personal success through original content and events. Entrepreneur magazine, Entrepreneur.com, GreenEntrepreneur.com and publishing imprint Entrepreneur Press provide solutions, information, inspiration and education read by millions of entrepreneurs and small business owners worldwide. To learn more, visit entrepreneur.com.

Approyo Announces Promotion of Tim Reiss to Vice President of Service Delivery

Approyo is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Tim Reiss as Vice President of Service Delivery.

Mr. Reiss has solid leadership experience with a highly customer-oriented focus. He has broad experience in all SAP delivery activities and developing quality service delivery teams.  As part of his role, Mr. Reiss will develop and implement new delivery policies for the organization and work closely with our clients to ensure their satisfaction.

Prior to Approyo, Tim held a variety of senior positions including Managing and supervising SAP Basis teams and service delivery for Virtustream and Symmetry. 

“Tim is a highly experienced SAP Basis executive, with a solid track record of building and leading high performing teams, as well as a strategic focus on world-class customer care,'' said Christopher M. Carter, CEO of Approyo.  “He has been a great asset to our company over the past year and his skills are exactly what Approyo needs to best leverage the opportunity presented by the market.”

Mr. Reiss had this to say regarding his new position leading the team at Approyo, “It’s exciting times ahead, we have a number of customers in production to support the ever-increasing demand for SAP Basis.” Mr. Reiss continued, “I’m looking forward to the challenges on this journey. I know with the support of Approyo's highly skilled engineering specialists, we’ll continue to lead the way with innovative solutions and firmly establish Approyo as a trusted partner in the SAP market.”

SAP Releases SAP S/4HANA 1909

With the 1909 release of SAP S/4HANA, SAP continues to focus on delivering leading-edge value in three key areas: intelligent automation, insight and prediction, and next-generation best practices. Intelligent automation, insight and prediction, next-generation processes: SAP S/4HANA 1909 is the Intelligent Enterprise Foundation and brings many new and innovative capabilities to the market. View the complete announcement on www.SAP.com

Foundation of a Digital Core

• An architecture that delivers a scalable foundation to transact at the highest possible automation
• A system of intelligence that supports and steers the business using embedded analytics, simulation, prediction, and decision support to run LIVE business
• An end-to-end experience that can be faster implemented, consumed, and adapted
• An open architecture to allow connectivity and adoption of micro-services

What makes the Digital Core intelligent?

• A digital age UX: Conversational UI´s and natural language processing allows us to target a hands-free ERP by 2020.
• Automation of business processes: Automation mainly addresses companies´ bottom lines and helps to reduce costs. We strive for an automation of 50% of all ERP business processes within the next 3 years.
• The next generation of business processes: We provide a streamlined architecture and a technology that did not exist before. We aim to increase the top line by providing an infrastructure which allows us to completely rethink value creation and service tasks.

While the list of new capabilities in SAP S/4HANA 1909 is extensive, it is important and consider the big picture. In 2017, the number of SAP S/4HANA innovations was 966, in 2018 it was 2,389, and now, in 2019, it stands at 3,312: an increase of almost 3.5 times! User experience (UX) innovations have gone from 646 to 1,048, and to now 1,496 — up by more than double in three releases.

Major SAP S/4HANA 1909 Highlights from SAP

• In finance, improvements in the continuous closing process will drive increased process efficiency and faster insights into your business. Integration of SAP Analytics Cloud with financial planning provides quicker, clearer insight so you can run your business more effectively. 
• In manufacturing, intelligent robotic process automation (IRPA) helps deliver predictive material resource planning (pMRP) so you can better serve your customers while reducing inventory costs.
• Predictive analytics now helps improve sales forecasts and delivery performance. Added blockchain capabilities make supplier quotes more secure.
• Improved integration across all lines of business drives end-to-end processes that lead to improved customer-centricity.

View the complete announcement on www.SAP.com

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise and SAP S/4HANA with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. We are already helping our customers start the move the SAP S/4HANA 1909. Get started today...

SAP S/4HANA: The Speed and Power of Simplification

SAP S/4HANA eliminates the complexities of legacy ERP databases, giving organizations a vastly simplified digital core with access to business-critical data in real time. The “S” in SAP S/4HANA is a nod to SAP's legacy business suite. SAP S/4HANA is optimized for SAP HANA, which supports a data model that simplifies the business computing environment dramatically. To take full advantage of this design, SAP S/4HANA was created to reimagine and recode the business suite from the ground up.

REUNIFICATION
Traditionally, the typical enterprise computing environment has been split between online transactional processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP). This split is a compromise made long ago: each system gets a copy of the original transactional data, commonly in a different data model, with each optimized for the type of workload (OLTP versus OLAP) in that system. This compromise, though, comes at the cost and complexity of managing two separate environments and moving data between them. Because SAP HANA can support performing analytical calculations and transformations on the fly, organizations can now bring OLTP and OLAP together again. Gone are the complex “helper structures” (indexes and data aggregate tables) that are used to overcome system performance issues running at the speed of disk. Now, with a simplified data model and the speed of in-memory processing, organizations can perform analytics on all data (live and historical) in a single environment – in the moment, as needed.

SIMPLICITY
By redesigning ERP for SAP HANA, the SAP S/4HANA reduces the number of tables dramatically across a wide range of functions. Take, for instance, finance and controlling. While in the past, data was structured in subledgers (accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, asset accounting, cost center accounting, and so on), today they run on a single universal journal. This universal journal brings together postings related to finance (FI) and controlling (CO) in one single source table. The integrity of financial data is guaranteed by design, eliminating reconciliation effort between FI and CO and ensuring that every-one can always access the most current data. Teams are aligned and more effective because the complexity has been removed. Forecasting is faster and more accurate. Key performance indicators such as days sales outstanding (DSO) are avail-able in real time on a granular level. Profit center reporting, profitability analysis, and other real-time analytics performed on top of the universal journal become a reality.

As much as this simplification helps SAP, it also helps our customers. The SAP Tax Compliance application, for example, helps to streamline tax compliance through an automated tax control framework and now runs in SAP S/4HANA instead of a separate system that requires data replication. This application provides an enterprise-wide repository of compliance checks and enables corrections continuously during the current declaration period, freeing tax specialists from searching for anomalies. This simplification to a single source of truth supports new benefits – such as a comprehensive enterprise search. Now business users can search for master data and documents across different LoBs and across systems for a holistic view of the enterprise with zero latency in a modern user interface. At the same time, a built-in authorization framework helps to minimize administrative overhead and enable single sign-on so that users can work across LoBs in a secure fashion, without impediments.

INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY FOR THE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE
A simplified data model is imperative for intelligent technologies, such as machine learning. Traditional database models that maintain acceptable performance only with added complexity simply cannot scale to meet the needs of machine learning deployments. To run simulations, train algorithms, and improve visibility into what’s coming next, technologies need a data model up to the task. SAP S/4HANA is leveraging machine learning technology in the solution itself. One example is accelerated accounts receivable. With legacy databases and complex data models, accounts receivable can be an error-prone process that crosses multiple systems to match purchase orders to invoices. With SAP Cash Application software on SAP S/4HANA, machine learning technology does the matching automatically – and gets better over time with the addition of new data.

THE DIGITAL CORE
With SAP HANA as its foundation, SAP S/4HANA serves as a digital core for the business – one that helps drive business agility, improve customer experiences, and increase business performance.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today...