Ask-the-SAP-Expert – David Lees

Ask-the-SAP-Expert – David Lees

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 David Lees, who has been involved in the SAP ecosystem since the late nineties. David is now the CTO for Basis Technologies, who empower the world’s most dynamic SAP customers to predict change failures and automate change management.

David, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. For those readers who don’t know you or Basis Technologies, can you give us a quick overview?

I have worked in the SAP domain for over 25 years. The majority of my career was spent on the customer/user side with global consumer goods company Procter & Gamble. I’ve had the opportunity to live & work in the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, South Korea, Australia, Costa Rica and I’m currently based out of Spain.

I have been with Basis Technologies now for over 5 years and am the Global CTO – I am loving my time here. The company is nimble and growing with a great set of people and we continue to bring new capabilities to empower the world’s most dynamic SAP customers to predict change failures and control change processes, eliminating operational risks.

And how did you personally get into the world of SAP?

Starting in the late nineties when I was leading the implementation of R/3 (3.0f) into one of P&Gs manufacturing plants following an acquisition. Since then, my career has continued to be connected to SAP in a variety of roles including implementations, upgrades, support, architecture culminating in a Global Platform architect and S/4 Program Manager role also within P&G.

It was within that role that I identified the need for best-in-class solution for change and release automation and I brought in ActiveControl from Basis Technologies. I was fortunate in being a customer before joining them a few years later as it gave me (and them) a great opportunity to see what I was getting into!

Can you explain how your change impact analysis tools differ from traditional methods used in SAP environments?

We view Change Impact Analysis as an activity that should take place at multiple stages of the development lifecycle, starting with the design/scoping/approving of changes all the way through development and into the more traditional test scoping related activities.

In addition, with our System Comparison capabilities, we can also help highlight where test systems are no longer representative for regression testing.

Our solution capabilities, combine to automate and de-risk many aspects of the lifecycle beyond simply what to test.

I like the following quote from Steve McConnell: “Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don’t improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. ………. If you want to improve your software, don’t test more; develop better.”

How does your automation suite handle the transition to SAP S/4HANA for enterprises?

Handling upgrades has obviously always been a use case for our customers and S/4 brings in additional opportunities and risks.

From an opportunity standpoint, an S/4 transformation, both greenfield and hybrid, gives the customer the scope to be open to consider optimal landscape design (e.g. Global Template) which they may previously not have considered due to complexity or lack of tooling. Additionally, it can be used as a catalyst to transform where and how application development is done by the customer, even in the case of brownfield. Including understanding when to choose between In-app or BTP extensions in support of clean core for example and can mean looking at more automation and a switch towards an agile approach.

From a risk standpoint, all customers want to avoid a change moratorium and need to be able to manage the resultant complexity of dual maintenance across ECC and S/4 landscapes during an extended transformation program. Again here, we bring automation to help ensure strong governance of this process whilst minimising manual interventions required.

How does Basis Technologies’ automation software adapt to the varying SAP landscapes of different industries? How do you balance the need for standardization in your products with the unique requirements of different industries?

We are fortunate to have many of the worlds leading and most complex and dynamic SAP customers (e.g. P&G, H&M, Booking.com) across virtually every industry segment. We are functionally agnostic aside from some specific capabilities we have recently developed to look at change impact within EWM where the application configuration is more unique.

We support all landscape topologies and can integrate with all best of breed enterprise tools (SNOW, Jira, ADO). We even support more edge cases like airgap deployment required in some more sensitive Defence customers. We are yet to encounter a customer or industry segment which we cannot support.

Our solutions are highly flexible and configurable without the need for custom developments and we have multiple customer references across the various industry verticals. We continue to work closely with our customers to extend our solutions, including the extension of our ActiveDiscover solution to analyse change impact within EWM

Security must be a big issue for you. How does Basis Technologies address the security concerns associated with automating change within critical SAP systems?

A key aspect linked to improving security is looking to automate where manual activities can either introduce unnecessary risk or where automation itself enables more thorough analysis and prevention of issues which could not be realistically expected via manual means.

Our solutions allow workflows to be configured to enforce code quality and security scanning, and our automated deployment – in addition to ensuring strict separation of duties – all combine to help in improving the security posture within the development lifecycle.

The two letters everyone is talking about: AI. What role does AI and machine learning play in your current or future product roadmap?

We view AI more broadly than the recent focus on Gen-AI only. Already within our solutions we have advanced rule based automations, insights enabling decision support and continue to explore practical and secure opportunities for AI within our product roadmap.

How does Basis Technologies approach integration with non-SAP systems that many enterprises use alongside SAP?

We believe SAP should not be an Island.

This comes in two dimensions. Firstly integrating the SAP application lifecycle within an end-to-end toolchain used within an enterprise incorporating backlog management / change approval from systems like ServiceNow or Jira in addition to ITSM systems where routine change can be approved or incidents require application fixes to address.

Secondly, we obviously help customers orchestrate change across their SAP estates, but also enable orchestration with Non-SAP related changes which have some dependency or linkage to an SAP change. This is via integration with other pipeline tools like AzureDevOps, GitHub actions, etc.

What steps does Basis Technologies take to ensure its products comply with various international data regulations?

All of our solutions are SAP certified and we are actually in the process of becoming ISO27001 certified in the next few months.

SAP have recently announced that Joule will be able to automate 80% of repetitive tasks by the end of the year. I have a few questions related to this. Firstly, is that a threat or an opportunity for Basis Technologies?

I see it as exciting and as an opportunity. For some customers, SAP systems have taken a back seat in terms of innovation and this brings them back to the fore in terms of driving value for their businesses.

There are also examples where Joule can be used by developers to accelerate the activity of development itself. We can support our customers by ensuring that the change deployment process itself is not a bottleneck through many of the automation capabilities previously referenced.

And secondly, how does your company collaborate with SAP to ensure optimal compatibility and performance of your automation tools?

We are a longstanding SAP partner; all of our solutions are SAP certified (including for RISE and S/4 Private Cloud) and we have a close working relationship with the SAP CloudALM team.

Thinking of SAP S/4HANA, which innovations do you think are the most exciting?

I love that HANA enables real-time reporting in bringing together OLTP and OLAP. In addition, I’m excited to see SAPs focus on Business AI and the use cases they are enabling with such contextual understanding and data access.

You must be a very busy man! How do you balance the technical demands of your role with personal interests or hobbies?

Balance is important and I love the lifestyle, supported by being based on the Costa del Sol, including the option to play padel which appears to be gaining popularity globally. Travel is an inevitable aspect of my role, but it gives me the opportunity to connect face to face with colleagues, customers, partners and friends.

What’s your go-to activity to unwind after a long day of tackling SAP challenges?

I enjoy reading, watching TV and spending time with my family. For my sins, I support Newcastle United, and mostly enjoy watching them play!

A bit of fun now to get the grey matter working! If you were stranded on a desert island, which SAP module would you want with you, and how would you use it to escape?

Can I use MM to order in supplies to allow me to survive on the island while I plan my escape? Or could I cheat and use Concur to arrange a boat to come collect me and help me escape?

And the question we always ask our interviewees – if you had some advice for aspiring SAP consultants in today’s marketplace, what would it be?

I like Justin Trudeau’s statement “Change is Faster than Ever, but Will Never Again Be This Slow” – I think that’s no truer than in the world of SAP. It’s important to stay current and relevant. Always look to see what’s new and how things can be improved, and enjoy the ride in the next five years – it’s going to be exciting!

David Lees talked to Jon Simmonds