Global Vice President Digital Transformation Consulting | Partner | SAP Enthusiast | Thought Leader | Author | Keynote Speaker
*** Your old-school SAP GUI does not attract young talent *** Recently, I had a conversation with the CEO of a mid-market company in Germany who told me an interesting story: He expressed his difficulties in attracting young graduates to his company, despite having numerous working students. Many of these students did not return to apply for permanent jobs after their final exams, and he wanted to understand why. Taking matters into his own hands, he then decided to personally contact many of them and find out the reasons behind their decision to apply elsewhere. Interestingly, it turned out that in most cases, the reason was not due to negative experiences with the company culture itself. Instead, the young graduates mentioned their dissatisfaction with working on "that old system." The company had migrated from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA using a lean approach in 2021 (with a different SAP implementation partner). However, they had continued to use the old SAP GUI from their legacy SAP R/3 and SAP ECC systems after the GoLive. It is noteworthy that by not adopting the modern SAP Fiori GUI, the company provided the young talent, who are digital natives, with an unpleasant user experience reminiscent of a 25-year-old system, which is exactly what the old SAP GUI is: 25 years old! The CEO learned an important lesson from this experience: You can't attract young talent by using ERP setups that use not a modern UI like SAP Fiori but a user interface that is actually older than the target group itself! #sap #experience #students #jobs #userexperience #s4hana
Seems like there is a bias for “young talent”. Try migrating to Hana or IBP where most users are in their role and have the same UI for 25 years…quite the opposite experience. Do you know what is really important for an ERP system? Functionality. You could have a shiny new Ferrari but with no engine and inexperienced drivers
I made the same experience. Users tell me the old SAP GUI is more efficient compared to the FIORI. However the change to S/4HANA remains just a technical upgrade to a new version rather than rethink processes , adjusting them to the future needs and using new S/4 functionality.
Employees who aren't flexible enough to work with legacy user interfaces might not be talented at all? I ask for a friend.
I'd like to propose a more nuanced perspective than the dualistic (either/or) framing this discussion often assumes: "Fiori vs native SAP GUI". Large SAP users in "blue collar" industrial environments, (including manufacturing, transportation and logistics) with years of development and investment in ECC, cannot just decide to adopt Fiori, particularly in a resource consuming S4 upgrade environment. The practicalities of such a transition cannot be understated. Replacing existing interfaces poses substantial risks, demands considerable time, incurs substantial costs, and often results in business disuption. In real-world conditions, these elements make a 'rip and replace' strategy untenable. It would indeed be enlightening to delve into the analytics behind the many Linked In responses to this dilemma and scrutinize the underlying data. Understanding these complexities and nuances is an integral part of doing our jobs. Our mission should be to foster a customer-centric viewpoint acknowledging user needs and environments. We need to strike a balance between introducing innovation and maintaining stability and robustness, while demonstrating empathy for our users navigating a complex decision landscape.
Current SAP: Still looks more or less the same... 😂 😉
I worked with many process experts from client side and they dont want to see fancy screens as they like gui and they love executing transactions rather than clicking hyperlinks in fiori.
The original SAPGUI’s dark mode emits far less carbon than the blue theme. Bring it back as part of a Net Zero transition plan, says I. 😉 https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7082970019965325312?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
This is also often a conflict of interests: young colleagues want to use the latest technology, but the older generation is sometimes afraid to break new ground. So quasi it has always worked great in the past why should we change that...
Doesn’t really matter GUI or FIORI. Excell wins 🤦♂️😂
SAP Technical Consultant | PMI-CAPM® Certified
6moJudging a book by its cover… 🤔 What is more important eventually? A system fitting perfectly to the business needs despite being of « old style » and unpleasant to new recruits, or a system trying to adjust to an eye-catching UI but being miles away from the existing business reality? Ideally everybody wants the best of both worlds, but that’s not always achievable (and we haven’t included the $$$ parameter here…). I am not saying that SAP Fiori cannot be considered as the right solution, but concluding that a modern UI must be seen as a KPI to attract users is a tad exaggerated (speaking from experience with REAL users…).