Question: What makes all European countries the same?
Answer: they all think that they will win the world championship soccer 2010 in South Africa.
The soccer fever in Europe has started. UK thinks they can perform without David Beckham, in NL Ruud van Nistelrooy thinks that he’s in good shape just in time, Germany is as confident as always scoring in the last minute. The starting soccer craziness was also visible at the SAP User Group Days in Maastricht, The Netherlands, on April 8 and 9
The booth of IDS Scheer was coloured completely orange (similar to the Dutch Football Lions). Participants were looking for the IDS Scheer booth to share the warm feelings of becoming a world leader. The vuvuzela’s (what an incredible noise can they produce!) were a very popular gadget to receive at the booth.
Beside this naïve attitude, there were also “more reliable stories” of process-driven SAP successes at the SAP User Group event.
Sanne van Bruijnsvoort presented the global SAP roll-out at PepsiCo of the past years. He explained the holistic approach and governance of the roll-outs, with the important role of BPM and ARIS as the fundament for business and IT changes. CSM, the largest supplier of bakery products and a leading player in natural food preservation, presented with their successful SAP implementation supported by IDS Scheer. Klaas Buist of CSM explained their solution for an international Purchasing organization with a calculated ROI of 2,8 million euro’s in less than 3 years. On the agenda was also a Forum discussion about Business Process Management. BPM and ARIS experts were asked to give their view in this panel: Jack van Gestel (Unibail-Rodamco), Pieter Walraven (Heineken) en Sander van Pelt (KLM). This resulted in some interesting argumentations. The company NL4Business had a good presentation about SAP Netweaver BPM. Consulting company HMB presented the added value of using SAP Solution Manager and ARIS in general and for the University of Maastricht in particular. Beside these sessions, a lot of conversations and demo’s took place at the booth.
So April 8 and 9 were very interesting days exchanging SAP and BPM experiences. Now let’s see if the “orange fever” was a naïve but funny marketing action, or that orange rules in South Africa….?
