Andreas Berg - SAP Sapphire 2011 - theCUBE
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2012-04-27

Mark Finnern (SAP) with John Furrier and Dave Vellante at SAP Sapphire 2011.

Dave Vellante and John Furrier sat down with Andreas Berg, CIO of Wolfkran AG at the 2011 SAP Sapphire annual conference to discuss Hannah, the in-memory solution and Mobile and how they resonate with Berg. Wolfkran AG is a European Crane Manufacturer based out of Zurich with several facilities spread throughout Germany. The company mainly operates in Europe and the Middle East, offering about 600 tower cranes for rent throughout. Berg has been with the company for an extended period of time and has overseen many changes throughout.

Wolfkran has been an SAP customer since 2006, and are rolling out SAP systems and have had one problem, a loss of process for a service technician, who have to assemble, disassemble, and reassemble products worldwide, and there was a problem with the SAP software and knowing who is available, where and when with the product and even if the tech was in the right place. The solution took weeks or months and was heavy with inefficiency and an unrealistic to maintain reliance on paper. A service tech had to have six carbon copies; with 2,000-3,000 orders a month the volume of paper was less than optimal and with all the data having to be keyed into the payroll, quality assurance, SAP for invoicing, leaving "many people working on this issue and this really wasn't productive for us so we had to find a mobile solution and we have finally found it," with an iPhone with an addition of SAP software to the phone enabling effective communication.

Furrier asks Berg how the mobile aspect of technology has changed the business and how its going to change it. Berg believes that they're now much faster; with the sophistication of mobile connectivity they can connect easier across the globe. Berg, over the next coming months, wants to make the customer relation management mobile by giving iPads and iPhones to representatives globally so that they can instantly upload the information about how the business is doing, customer information, and sales data to help streamline the business. Networking is now at the device level, no longer do you just have a central office with branches all working together. Thanks to mobile devices you can have that constant access with a small hand-held device.

Furrier is curious as to how Wolfkran is able to manage the complexity of the networking ability in the mobile device, is it through core cloud technologies, software at the edge, how does Berg get the effectiveness?

Berg's response is that it's the excess of branch offices that are vital and remain the same, with the mobile solutions being maintained through cloud computing, which he views to be safe. Their business revolves around travelling—a lot. They need access to information quickly, and need to be able to transmit information quickly and mobile cloud solutions give them that ability to do so. With GSM being almost always available, "I do not need a direct online access to online SAP systems, you can download the data, upload the data to the SAP system whenever you have access."

Vellante points out that security in the cloud is what keeps CIO's up at night being a relatively new technology but Berg is clearly not bothered by it, believing that "behind the cloud there are big providers like big telecom companies and Amazon, and they have much more money than I have for security. I cannot really provide security for my company, but they can."

Furrier and Vellante then ask about Hannah, and what they make of the strategy, to which Berg says that this is the really the first time he's heard of it as a development from SAP, "but that knowledge management, cranes are complicated devices and there are many news all over the world about many cranes and to provide all this news to engineers and technicians, I could use a database loaded into the main memory, of course, making it possible to search information," but this was the first he's heard of Hannah really, and its interesting knowledge management and business intelligence is also important.

In closing, Vellante asks about the changing roles of the CIO, Berg feels more responsible for the decision makers; no longer it's in the process—invoicing, improving purchasing, but instead he has to bring added value to the top management, sales reps, and he needs to stay on top of new devices, new databases and new communications in order to stay on top.