What about the other pillars?
The fourth pillar is operational excellence. It’s the experience team. The experience team’s goal is for end customers and partners to be delighted to consume SAP products. We want to make them easy to procure, easy to install, easy to enable and easy to use. It must be a delightful experience.
A doctor who is the CEO of a hospital in Texas said to me, ‘When I plug in my electric razor in the morning, Kevin, I don’t think about the power to the fuse box, to the fuse box to the pole, the pole to the high tension lines, the high tension lines to the power plant. It just works.’
Small, medium-sized business owners and operators, that’s how they think: I want my business analytics to work. I want my ERP system to be up and running and easy to install and easy to deliver. I want to procure it easy. I don’t want a 40-page lease document or finance document. I don’t want a 30-page maintenance document that I have to hire a lawyer or contract officer to understand.
It needs to be easy — one pagers, one-and-a-half pagers. The team teases me, but with everything we do now I say, ‘Is it SME-ized?’
So how do you make it easier?
Again, taking the leasing document. I talked to our CEO, Bill McDermott, about this. I told him I wanted the finance document to go from 20 pages to two pages. He said, ‘No. One page.’ And that’s what they want — something they can fill out on the Web, something that doesn’t take very long to complete.
These guys want to spend their time doing other things. They worry about their balance sheet. They worry about cash flow. They are high risk from their business thinking and lower risk when it comes to their cash. We need to be sympathetic to that.
If you are an SME and I say to you, ‘Here is the maintenance contract for your software.’ If you see this incredibly complex document, you’re going to think, ‘I hate legal bills, and I can already look at this and tell you this is $5,000 legal bill for the lawyer to run.’
But if I hand you a one-page maintenance agreement that you can understand and that you feel confident about and that you have a local channel partner that you trust and who you know has the resources of SAP right behind it, you have a comfort level that’s important and that leads to a delightful experience. So that’s the fourth pillar.
And the final two pillars?
The fifth pillar is designed around talent and training and having a combination of legacy SAP people who really know their way around SAP, know application software and business analytics software cold and a group of new people who are challenging the status quo, have a DNA of partnering and have a DNA of SME. This gives you the best of both worlds.
So the sixth pillar is around products. We want to make sure that our channel partners and salespeople are talking about or developing products on a regular basis. Our channel partners talk to lots of customers every day, so we’re making them a focus group that will go to Waldorf, Germany (where SAP’s global headquarters is located) twice a year and meet with our development and design team. They share what they’re hearing on the streets from entrepreneurs.
What is the next end goal for SAP through this initiative?
We’re not looking at this as a 10 percent growth play. This is a potential rocket ship. Our vision is to go from more than 110,000 users to more than a billion, and SME is going to lead the way.
