The percentage of U.S. workers whom Gallup reports are "not engaged" is 49.5% -- and 16.5% are actually "actively disengaged." This level of disengagement costs organizations not just in turnover costs, but also through toxic work environments, employee theft and accidents, and customer service deficiencies. (data from 2016)

Poor employee interactions and organizational habits are number one issue that major programs such as Digital Transformation are facing today.

Take the Quiz from our assessment workshop and see how you do:

1. Does your management practice daily stand up meetings(huddles)? A daily huddle brings together everyone in a department or even a small business to get things quickly and accurately communicated. A five- to 10-minute stand-up daily meeting gets everyone focused on the most important issues and cuts down on telephone tag and other time wasters.

2. Does your company have weekly messages from the leadership? On a weekly basis, the top leader of the organization issues an email, voicemail, or video message to everyone. It's a platform for them to explain the current priorities and to make a personal connection with employees by sharing what's on their mind.

3. Does your organization regularly uses Digital Forums, chats to collect feedback and insight from the employees back to the management? Communication must flow in multiple directions, not just from the top down, so organizations set up employee forums such as ongoing digital bulletin boards.

4. Do your employees connect with your customers? Engaged companies directly link employees and customers.

Imagine a world where every transaction that is done is transparent but secure at the same time completed in a public ledger, where there is no Audit, IRS, no lawyers with $700 per hour M&A fees, and verification is done peer to peer, where code becomes law and where currency is no longer printed by the government but created in a protocol where value is being exchanged. Well this world is coming and faster than you think! Today bitcoin is equal to 740+ USD, today on the hill enthusiasts are trying to re-write policy to accept crypto-currency the law and give it ability to be easily traded and smart contracts are becoming part of the business.

What does this mean for the SAP world? Well it means a lot of change, like HANA buzz was not enough and we need something else to keep ourselves busy with. But yes this is bigger than HANA and this is even bigger than internet.

Today financial system is an archaic model which is both expensive, unnecessary complex and has a lot of useless redundant processes, and not to mention hack-able and completely corrupt. How nice would it be if all public companies opened up their ledgers and made them actually public and transparent? I know it sounds crazy, but why? If the company is public, then the ledger should be made available for all to see no? And I see SAP being front and center to develop SAP Public Ledger, forget individual GL for each client, imagine Public SAP GL on blockchain technology, imagine how much simplicity and accountability this would present where there is 1 GL and every client connects to it and runs their transactions through it. Imagine combining 250,0000 GLs into 1.

And all the public companies would have to really adhere to the same accounting rules and methods, not just on paper but in reality. How much money could be saved on auditing and legal work!

Best Practice #1- Defining the Global Template

Most global SAP-programs are based on a template and deployment approach. The approach as such is hard to question, but there are a few potential pitfalls.
Far too many SAP programs talk about the Global template as the Holy Grail. From the view of the steering committee meeting, with the CEO, all sounds good. However, many of the programs have not defined what the global template must contain in detail. Some refer the content of the global template to the business processes, some to the documents to be produced, and others refer to it as entirely something else. If such a fundamental component is not defined in most SAP programs, how can you then be sure that you have delivered according to expectations?

A dependable Global template should contain, describe, and address truly the Global Business Processes. An attempt to portray a local practice as a Global Business Process and include it in the Global Template would not be beneficial to the project, in fact quite the opposite. Instead, select the truly Global Business Processes and make sure they are discussed and understood by SMEs in all regions / functions, and avoid creating a “corporate” template.

When designing the Global template, it would definitely be worth looking at unifying tools and systems to achieve a more homogeneous environment (though it may not always be possible) supported by (global) software and (global) hardware platforms. Even though sometimes it may mean more effort and (or) cost upfront, this will result in far more stable and sustainable solutions in the long run.

Today, SAP unveiled new BW4HANA, where SAP states that today BW offers 10 to 15 different object types; remember the DSOs, the Infocubes, and the Multiproviders for building the data warehouse. In the new BW/4HANA, there will be only 4 which right now are not clear on what specific functions they would be responsible for, aggregation or summation, data cleaning, physical or logical storage. SAP also states that EDW will be pushed to HANA, but there is little information on this yet.

So we know that an InfoCube is a set of relational tables arranged according to the star schema: A large fact table in the middle surrounded by several dimension tables. InfoCubes are filled with data from one or more InfoSources or other InfoProviders. They are available as InfoProviders for analysis and reporting purposes. The data is stored physically in an InfoCube. It consists of a number of InfoObjects that are filled with data from staging.

A DataStore object (DSO) serves as a storage location for consolidated and cleansed transaction data or master data on a document (atomic) level. A DataStore object contains key fields (such as document number, document item) and data fields that, in addition to key figures, can also contain character fields (such as order status, customer). The data from a DataStore object can be updated with a delta update into InfoCubes (standard) and/or other DataStore objects or master data tables (attributes or texts) in the same system or across different systems.
Unlike multidimensional data storage using InfoCubes, the data in DataStore objects is stored in transparent, flat database tables. The system does not create fact tables or dimension tables.

A MultiProvider can consist of different combinations of the following InfoProviders: InfoCube, DataStore object, InfoObject, InfoSet, VirtualProvider, and aggregation level. MultiProviders only exist as a logical definition. The data continues to be stored in the InfoProviders on which the MultiProvider is based.
A query based on a MultiProvider is divided internally into subqueries. There is a subquery for each InfoProvider included in the MultiProvider. These subqueries are usually processed in parallel.

This is what SAP is proposing to change from the modeling perspective. MultiProvider, InfoSet, VirtualProvider will be Composite Provider in BW/4HANA. Operational Providers will become Open ODS Views. InfoObject will still be the building block and InfoCube, DSO and PSA will become DataStore Object. This means that Persistent storage is gone and hopefully data activation of DSO could be either eliminated completely or streamlined. We would be interested to see what functionality will be enhanced by using Composite Provider and other new HANA objects in the BW4HANA. SAP HANA Studio will be used for data modelling, admin, monitoring and query design.

In Conclusion, Lazar will be working with few clients that this roadmap may interest as well as SAP to complete POCs to test the new modelling and EDW functions that are coming in the near future.