Ask-the-SAP-Expert: Himanshu Goel

Ask-the-SAP-Expert: Himanshu Goel

Eursap’s Ask-the-SAP-Expert article is a feature designed to give you up-to-date information on the latest SAP news, featuring key thought leaders in the SAP space, as well as regular interviews with the best SAP consultants in the business.

This month, we feature Himanshu Goel, an industry leading SAP supply chain analyst and architect, who has been active in the blogging world, as well as authoring two SAP books. Currently working in Poland, Himanshu has worked for some of the largest consulting practices in the business in India, UK, Germany and Poland.

Hello Himanshu, and thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Can we start by you telling our readers a little bit about yourself?

Hi Jon, first of all, I would like to thank you for giving me this incredible opportunity to talk to you. Now, to introduce myself, my name is Himanshu Goel. I am Indian, living in Poland for over seven years with my family.

I’m a mechanical engineer by education and an SAP manufacturing expert by profession. I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to work for some of the biggest companies in the world, solving some of their complex supply chain problems.

On the personal front, I am a foodie and an ardent Bollywood music lover. I have also developed the knack for cooking in the past few years and love cooking Indian food.

I enjoy reading and writing which eventually led me to writing a few SAP blogs. Little did I know, it would lead to me being a published SAP author.

You have 16 years’ experience of working with SAP. Can you pinpoint the first time you became of SAP as a solution?

It was during my first job at an automotive company where I got introduced to SAP as a super-user in the manufacturing domain. I found it fascinating since everything was so integrated. My colleagues would tell me that in the legacy system, each department had a separate software and that the communication between them would be all manual, on paper before they started using SAP. For instance, someone would create a purchase requisition and would go to the purchase department to give the printout of the PR. Then SAP changed everything by integrating all the processes. That was the time I decided to make a career as an SAP Consultant. It has been 16 years since then and I have never regretted it.

During those days, people with domain experience were preferred for functional roles in SAP and I think it gives you an edge as an SAP Consultant. For instance, whenever I’m working on a new problem, I would put myself into an end-user’s shoes and think how the solution would help them.

I think this is very important for an SAP Consultant to empathise with their users and think about how they can make their customer’s life easy.

Your experience crosses Cap Gemini and Accenture, in multiple countries, right through to now working for an end user SAP client. Many of our readers will be mulling over whether they should join a large consultancy practice. As you have experience of both sides, what advice or words of wisdom can you offer them?

I have had the opportunity of working with the biggest consulting companies in the world like Capgemini and Accenture where I got the chance to work with some of the world’s biggest companies as our clients. And then I moved to Europe to work for ZF Group which is one of the biggest automotive companies in the world. Currently, I am working for Vesuvius which is a global leader in metal flow engineering. I think working in a consulting company is quite different as opposed to working for an end user company.

In a consulting company, the projects are delivered in a process-driven approach whereas in an end-user company the focus is to keep business up and running. A consulting company gives you an opportunity to work with different clients from different industries which gives you diverse experience. However, in an end-user company, you work very closely with the business, and you get an opportunity to learn end-to-end business processes. Another advantage of working in a consulting company is that there is accessibility to a huge network of industry experts. Also, you can always learn new technologies in a consulting company whereas in an end-user company you get exposure to several different software integrated with your core modules. For example, an SAP PP Consultant works very closely with different teams like PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) etc.

Although, the learning experience could be a bit different, one thing is the same and that is you get to solve business problems and there will always be so many challenges to solve!

And what does a day-in-the-life-of Himanshu normally look like today? What kind of activities are you involved with?

Currently, I’m involved in a big SAP transformation project wherein I’m working as an in-house Solution Architect for manufacturing. My workday starts with meetings and ends with meetings. 😊

Most of my time is spent with the stakeholders to understand their business processes, day-to-day challenges, etc. The remainder of my time is spent liaising with consultants from other SAP teams, System Integrators and participants from different teams like MES, PLM, BI etc.

Evenings are for my family. I generally go out for a stroll in the park with them or play with my son. I like to read a book or pen down my thoughts before calling it a day.

Your skill set is in PP in SAP. There have been a lot of innovations in S/4HANA in this area in recent years. In your opinion, do the innovations go some way to answering that age old PP question: “Should I use discrete manufacturing or repetitive manufacturing in my production process?”

You have just opened a Pandora’s Box with that question 😊. I think discrete vs repetitive manufacturing is a topic of one of the biggest debates in the SAP world. While I like discrete for its detailed traceability, I love repetitive for its ease of manufacturing execution.

Coming back to your question about innovations in S/4HANA, most of them are around production planning (PP). Be it MRP Live, DDMRP or pMRP, whereas discrete vs repetitive manufacturing focuses more on the execution side. So, I think S/4HANA couldn’t settle this debate yet.

What are the other areas in SAP S/4HANA which you are excited about? Lots of talk about AI and ML at the moment, for example…

SAP is changing a lot, especially in the last couple of years. If you look at it, SAP has been, more or less, the same since 2004 when ECC was launched. Of course, there were support packages but there was no big change. However, now SAP is heading into completely different direction with the inception of Cloud. The classic (and my preferred) GUI will be totally replaced by Fiori Apps which is a big change. Also, it is pretty evident that the world is now moving towards Cloud platforms like Rise with SAP. However, I personally believe that SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform) is the game changer. It would totally transform the way SAP projects are executed. So, I would highly encourage people to familiarise themselves with SAP BTP as it would play a big role going forward.

Of course, there are lots of discussions around AI & ML and I’m pretty sure it would have a big influence on the SAP ecosystem. SAP’s AI Joule was launched just a couple of months back and it looks amazing. However, I feel AI is still in its nascent stage and it’ll evolve a lot in the years to come to an extent where it would predict customer demands, machine breakdowns or even delays in vendor shipments.

AI will change the world, similar to how the internet did in late 1990s or early 2000s. Probably, it would have an even bigger impact in the Business world. I’m very excited to see how AI would impact supply chain.

Let’s come to your writing. How did you come to write an SAP Press e-bite? Personally, I love the e-bite series – you often get just as much information, but set out in a succinct and concise format, for a much more affordable price. Can you tell our readers a little about the content?

As Paulo Coelho says ‘“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” This is exactly how I got to write my first e-bite.

I have always wanted to write a book and be a published author, but I never knew what I wanted to write. I had even attempted to write a novel in the past but couldn’t finish it. However, the thought never left my mind.

Then life happened, I got busy, and the focus shifted to other things. During the pandemic, I had some time at hand, so I got back to writing SAP blogs. One of my blogs titled “Decoding MRP and MRP views” received good traction and I was approached by one of the biggest authors in the SAP world. He complimented me on my blog and suggested I consider writing a book. Initially I was hesitant, but then he suggested to me I should start with an e-bite instead of a fully-fledged book.

I gave it some thought and finally decided to give it a try. I reached out to SAP Press and expressed my interest in writing an e-bite. Things fell in place, and I received a go-ahead from the Editor. She suggested that I write on material master. I liked the idea and the topic because I personally believe that material master is the most important master data object in SAP. And a few months later, my first e-bite titled “Introducing the Material Master in SAP S/4HANA” was published by SAP Press on April 21, 2021.

Since that day I have an even stronger belief in God. By the way, did I mention the Godsend was no other than Jawad Akhtar?

And from there, you went on to author a book on SAP PP in S/4HANA, for APress. How did that come about?

Once I published my e-bite, the desire to write a fully-fledged book grew stronger and I wanted to write a book which would get published in print edition. I wanted to experience the joy of holding my book in my hands. Although I knew it wouldn’t be easy, the first e-bite gave me some confidence and I knew this was the time to start thinking about writing another book. It was a ‘Now or never’ moment.

I started to work on the concept of what the book would look like and how it would be structured. I also wrote the first two chapters before reaching out to the publisher. APress liked the proposal and came onboard. After a year of hard work, my book titled “Handbook for SAP PP in S/4HANA” was published by APress on September 29, 2022.

By the way, it was Jawad Akhtar again who motivated me to write this book.

You’re pretty active in the SAP blogging world. How do you find that helps you?

I have always loved writing and I enjoy technical writing equally. I started blogging again during the pandemic. Since I realised that most of the blogs focussed on the ‘Hows”, I started writing focussing on the ‘Whys” and I really enjoy it. It also helps me in increasing my knowledge on the subject because one needs to do a lot of research while writing. Blogging also helped me to connect with many experts in the industry with whom I have now developed a great friendship.

You’ve also attended and even spoken at a few SAP conferences, such as SAP Inside Track. What was the topic of your presentation there and how did it go?

I have had the opportunity to participate in the SAP Inside Track, Warsaw in 2022 & 2023, wherein I spoke about the Innovations in Manufacturing in SAP S/4HANA. I chose this topic because I wanted to explore these areas myself, as these topics were new for me too at the time. Secondly, I wanted to challenge myself by speaking on a topic that was not my area of expertise.

Overall, I really like to attend SITs and other similar events because they are an incredible platform for networking with industry experts and gives an opportunity to learn about so many diverse topics from them.

Cast your mind back to when you were consulting for Cap Gemini and Accenture, a few years ago. When you look at the projects you were working on, were they mainly SAP S/4HANA projects, or did you notice a reluctance in many organisations to deploy S/4HANA, when they had a perfectly good ECC6 system?

I worked with the consulting companies till 2016 and since then I have been working with the end-user companies. The first version of SAP S/4HANA was released in 2015 so it was still too early to judge the acceptance of S/4HANA. However, I’m aware of the dilemma that a few companies are in regarding whether they should stay on current ECC systems or move to S/4HANA. I have also heard that some companies are not too comfortable with the idea of moving their systems to the cloud.

I believe, no matter how stable ECC6 systems are, most of the companies will eventually move to S/4HANA, not because of the end of support in 2027 but because of the advantages S/4HANA would offer. We’re all aware of the benefits S/4HANA provides over ECC like speed, performance, better UI/UX with Fiori, etc. However, with the advent of BTP and cloud solutions, S/4HANA would become more agile and flexible and it would enable easier development of new functionalities. Also, in the coming days, a lot of AI based applications would be developed which would run on cloud.

The uptake of S/4HANA is still slow, but there seems to be an approaching tidal wave. How do you see that affecting the jobs market, especially in relation to the shortage of S/4HANA skills?
We’re all aware of the slump in the market and it’s so sad to see massive layoffs in the Tech world. If you compare the situation with SAP, it doesn’t look so bad. At least I have not heard of any major impact on SAP consultants.

On the other side, migration to S/4HANA is inevitable. Sooner or later, most of the companies will move to S/4HANA. I believe that this is a golden period to be in the SAP ecosystem. Next few years would witness a massive wave of companies migrating to S/4HANA which would eventually mean it would open enormous opportunities for SAP consultants.

You must have worked on some big projects in your time, Himanshu. What was the most memorable one and why?

I have worked with many customers like AkzoNobel, Halliburton, Ecolab, ZF Group to name a few. Working for each of them was unique as every industry, plant, customer is different and there is so much to learn in every project.

However, if I have to think about the most memorable one, I would say it was my first project while I was working in CapGemini. We were working on an AMS (Application Management Services) for the European automotive supplier, Neapco. What made that project special was the team that I worked with. More than half of the team members including myself were rookies in SAP. However, the camaraderie amongst us was unique. Each one of us supported each other. If there was a complex issue to be solved, the entire team would sit together and brainstorm to find a solution. I think that is something which is not very common among teams nowadays.

Earlier, I used to believe that technical skills were the most important for a successful career. However, now I have realised that what really matters is to have an incredible team that trusts and supports each other. I believe, SAP is a team sport after all.

And finally, the question we always ask our experts: what advice would you have for new SAP consultants just starting out or established SAP consultants facing new challenges?

Like I mentioned earlier, there would be a huge demand for SAP Consultants in the next few coming years. S/4HANA is very different from ECC and it would mean that consultants currently working on ECC would need to upskill themselves. Their biggest advantage is their knowhow of business processes. However, that shouldn’t make them complacent because S/4HANA would operate in a completely different way. For instance, most of the development would be in SAP Build and SAP BTP with a focus on ‘Clean Core’. Likewise, the integration would be more via EDI, webservices, etc as opposed to classical IDOC’s. So, the message is clear: ‘Upskill’.

Also, it is a great time for people to make a career in SAP who are currently working in domain and are interested in working in SAP. Of course, SAP is a very lucrative career for freshers and young professionals too. I hope they won’t complain about SAP looking ugly and old school anymore. 😊

Everyone entering SAP as a new Consultant, have the advantage that they would be coming in with a clean slate and wouldn’t need to draw comparisons between ECC and S/4 HANA. Learning SAP has become much easier today as opposed to in the past. There are tons of freely accessible learning material available all over the internet. So, I would recommend them to make the best use of it. Also, there are so many SAP experts who share incredible knowledge on LinkedIn, so one should connect with them and learn from their experiences. You can learn SAP on help.sap.com, blogs.sap.com and other similar forums. So, start your learning journey and gear up for an exciting journey in SAP.

Himanshu Goel talked to Jon Simmonds