Eursap's Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Vicent Kruse

Ask-the-SAP-Expert – Vicent Kruse.

This month, we feature Vincent Kruse. Vincent has a long history and knowledge of SAP on multiple continents and in varying capacities. His expertise spans development capabilities, digital transformation leadership, SAP partner strategies and an enterprise level technical knowledge, leading to innovation led growth. He has worked for end clients as well as a number of global “big four” consulting practices.

Vincent thanks for taking the time. It's a rare in person meeting which is good as these meetings are normally via Teams. I suppose the first thing to tackle is for people who don't know you, can you give a little bit of a background of who you are what you do?

Currently I’m the Global Head of Consulting at Neptune Software but I’ve always been in the SAP space, for about 22 years now. I started many years ago in South Africa and then from there went across to Accenture. I spent nine years at Accenture and transferred over to the UK from South Africa then moved to Deloitte. Then about three and a half years ago, I moved over to Neptune Software.

What would you say are the formative things that have happened in your career that shaped the way you approach work today?

I think we are probably both of the age of the iPhone coming in and I was still in South Africa when the iPhone was launched and delivering a project for BMW at that point. It was great because you could see a lot of advancement within the motor vehicle industry but then also you had these enormous announcements coming through in the mobile technology space. That really got me interested in how we can drive innovation in the enterprise. And when I moved to SAP, I loved the SAP GUI, especially when you know all the transaction codes - it’s such a useful shortcut. But then came the advent of mobile device mobile apps and my thoughts were always: how can we get mobile into the enterprise? I see that a lot of organizations, even today, are so heavily focused on just staying on the legacy systems and not really having the ambition to move across to mobile. And I think that's what got me really interested in technology. To advance my career within the SAP space and see how we can drive innovation. 

Now, when I look at the SAP space over the last few years, the innovation curve is really steeply inclined. Obviously AI is a big thing but where else do you see the innovation coming from and what do you see when you talk to your customers? What are they interested in? Is it digital supply chain? Is it AI? What do you see the next five years looking like?

There's obviously a lot of hype around AI at the moment and listening to different podcasts online some people are saying that we haven’t even started on the hype yet, and it's still very early days. But a huge gap for me has always been personalization but not just normal personalization but hyper-personalization. And looking at immersive technologies and how can we really focus on the customer. There are a lot of solid business processes within SAP but I don't think many organizations really differentiate their business on core SAP. It's more a question of how they can differentiate around the edges to drive innovation so as to change the way they do business and open up additional revenue streams. And that's really where you start seeing immersive technologies come in and other personalization style technologies. I think AI is a great lever in that to drive that forward and you can gain a lot of insights out of AI. But for me it really needs to come back down to the people and really focusing your business on what is the value that that customer is going to get from your business. And that's how you retain that customer.

I saw a statistic posted during this year’s Sapphire, that said that the number of applications that large organizations over $5 billion ran in 1990 was around 25, whereas now it is over 1000.When you're working with Neptune and your clients how do you see them navigating that in the SAP space? Is there a drive towards consolidation of are you seeing more of a move to a composable ERP landscape there?

There's definitely a move towards composable, especially with all the new platforms and the new tooling coming out. Everybody wants to go “best of breed”. I know SAP and other organizations are driving to get everyone onto their platforms and their estates, but it just makes sense to work in a composable space these days. What is the best tool for you to get value in your organization and for you to deliver value for your customers? And that's where composable comes in. So, conversations we're having are moving in that direction. 

And I don't know if we're going to coin a new term now but thinking of citizen developers, I thought probably a more apt term is citizen ideators or citizen innovators. So you have people that have the ability to conceptualize their ideas and then take those ideas to the IT team, or take them to business and say “would this idea work?” and then IT implements that idea. I think that might also lower the barrier a bit, because if you tell most people in an organization they’re a citizen developer, immediately they might put up guardrails in their own minds: “Well I've got no technical knowledge, I'm not a developer”. But if you're an ideator all you need to do is come up with ideas and this tool helps you visualize those ideas then you could have a completely different paradigm and mindset within the organization.

I'm interested in the fast pace of change and how you balance that stability between adopting new tools like AI and Fiori (not that Fiori is new tool anymore) along with the innovation drive that is pushed by SAP. How do you balance that with the need for stability?

Before you even get to discussing tools with customers, it's more a case of looking at whether they really need to change the whole system. And all these flashy tools that are being promoted – is this really what your business needs? I'm not sure that's a popular message! If you ask SAP, especially coming out of this year’s Sapphire where there were some very flashy tools in the AI sessions. But I'd much rather take a bit more of a pragmatic approach and leave the core business which has been established for many years, stable and look at driving innovation out on the edge. SAP now have the Business Technology Platform (BTP), there is the Neptune platform, that allows you to innovate around the edges as well. And that's where you can test innovation spikes and try different things. You could try out AI within your business, or you could conduct user research on certain topics and use that as your vehicle for change: test it and then if it really works bring that back into the core business. If organisations jump on the bandwagon to change the core, they’re potentially unlocking more problems than is good for them. 

One customer that immediately comes to mind is Lidl. They spent millions of Euros on the SAP implementation and even after all that investment, it wasn't successful, and they pulled the plug.

Do you think then the days of huge monolithic ERP implementations are over?

Not, entirely no. The question is, “What is the business value behind S/4?” When S/4 first launched, the tagline was you can run your business faster. But is that worth a multi-million-dollar project to some customers? Chances are it isn't. So, I've always struggled to understand the business case behind the move to S/4. However, chatting with a friend of mine, she's leading an organization where they just had three acquisitions, and had eight productive European instances or ECC6 instances. And for them the move to S/4 made complete sense because they could consolidate all eight systems into one. They could get all of these disparate business processes under one standard business process that the whole company operates under. And they're paying for one set of licenses as opposed to eight sets of licenses, so it made so much sense for them. And I think their break-even point ended up coming around within the first two years, just because of the ongoing SAP costs for the existing systems.

So, there are definitely scenarios where your large single ERP implementation still makes sense.

You’ve mentioned Neptune a few times. Tell us about Neptune, as they have their own proprietary platform as well, so can you tell us a little bit about that?

Neptune is a rapid application development platform. Ultimately, they're a software company and they provide the tooling for customers to easily and rapidly build out integration connectors to any other system but also build out the applications that they need to delight their customers and employees. It's all API driven, easy to use from no-code through to low-code, all the way into pro-code. One of the great benefits of it is that you can move backwards and forwards through those paradigms as well, whereas on some platforms you might start your journey in no-code and step towards pro-code, but you can never step back. One of the biggest selling points, especially in the SAP market, is that Neptune is 100% aligned to the SAP technology stack. The original co-founders built a tool on the ABAP stack to help ABAP developers accelerate their development. It's now growing, supporting private and public cloud, and moving beyond just SAP into the non-SAP world as well. 

So how does that work with regard to the public cloud then, because obviously you can't do all that development work on the core ABAP platform? Do you have an external service you connect?

There are two versions: the SAP edition and the open edition. The open edition is actually the non-SAP version runs on anything: a virtual machine, on any hyperscaler, in a Docker container. When I joined Neptune, I had a really old Mac at home, and I installed a version of Neptune on the Mac and ran it successfully there. So we'd use that to build some apps at home to play around with, so it’s nice and light but gives you the ability to deploy it anywhere.

Similarly, when I was at Deloitte, I was leading a number of innovation programs looking at our partnerships and we were looking at rethinking the ways of working in different industries, but whenever we would build something we'd build it out in a traditional SDK to bring it to life. While I'd heard of Neptune, I'd never really taken the time to fully understand it . So after I joined Neptune and fully understood what it is capable of, I started to think, “Where have you been in my life?” We should have built everything in Neptune because we could have probably four times the number of applications for a fraction of the cost.

I want to talk about AI. You recently attended an AI evening event. Maybe you can tell us about that? 

Great event! A nice small group was there which is good because you could speak to everyone. It was a “leaders in AI” dinner and different leaders from different companies all got together to talk about AI how they're using AI in their organisations. Answering questions like “Are they seeing any value from it? Are they seeing any risks from AI coming into the organisation? And where do they see the future of AI going?” The evening also looked at what tools each organisation was using, because everyone knows about ChatGPT, but only some people know about other tools depending on the industry. For example, you might know about Clay from a sales perspective or you might know about Blaze from a marketing perspective. But if you're not in those industries you wouldn't have heard of those AI tools. 

When you talk to your customers, what's the uptake of AI like? Are there specific roadblocks that you see again and again to the uptake of AI? Do you think it's been a slow uptake or is it increasing?

It's definitely increasing. In the beginning there was a lot of uncertainty around AI, especially with security concerns regarding the fact that anything you ask ChatGPT or Copilot is insecure, or the concerns around Deepseek or Gemini – the whole world's going to know about it, and definitely don't upload a document because it's going to be public! I don't think that is entirely the reality anymore. For instance, ChatGPT has the enterprise edition which is far more secure and businesses are coming out with business AI solutions that allow you to create local LLMs but then connect to external LLMs for additional information. 

Neptune is doing a lot in the AI space now. Some of the tooling that we're working on right now is taking the concept of a drawing to an app. It’s very heavily based on kind of the Fiori design guidelines, and the concept is that you could draw on a whiteboard during a customer workshop, a visualization of a screen with fields and labels – then photograph it and upload to the platform and a few seconds later you'd have an app that looks like the drawing, which is awesome for prototyping because then you could go from that no-code environment and you could take that straight into low-code and then start adding certain business rules behind it. And the nice thing is that the functionality goes beyond just UI and Fiori design guidelines. You're then getting into the realms of proper consumer grade applications for the business which is very exciting.

How does what you’re doing with AI fit into the recent SAP briefs about AI?

We’re working on some things at the moment which resonate with what Christian Klein at Sapphire mentioned. I don't know, maybe SAP looked at our marketing or we got an early draft of theirs, but Christian mentioned AI for developers and AI for business. Neptune has the exact same thing. Our AI for business is going to general availability in October of this year. The concept revolves around how we bring AI into the business to go beyond the developer paradigm? How do we help organisations unlock those insights and unlock that data to get a good idea as to what is happening within their business and how can they benefit from AI. But a lot of the conversations we're having are still based around security and I think rightfully. Some of the questions customers are asking are “Can I use an external LLM?” or “Do I need to build my own one?” And “if I build my own LLM, what are the limitations?” “Can I run my hardware?” “Do I need anything additional?”

So, there's a lot of conversations around that still.

Looking back on your career now, do you think there was, in the early days, a kind of “aha” moment where you said to yourself “SAP – that’s what I'm going to do for the rest of my career”? Did it work like that or did you just fall into it? 

I kind of fell into it, which seems to be very common. At school I wanted to be a veterinary surgeon. And then coming into the weeks to register for university, I was doing a bit more research and the capital outlay to become a veterinary surgeon is huge, whereas the capital outlay to become a developer is a laptop! So, the first job I got was with Ford Motor Company on an AS400 system. And then just through family friends and family network, I moved on to my first introduction to SAP and really haven't been back since then. And it's been a great technology to be part of and a great community to be part of as well. 

I wanted to talk about the SAP industry from a recruitment and from a consultant's point of view. When you think about the industry currently, if I was somebody just graduating from university with a computer science degree and I just attained an SAP certification track for some kind of functional area, what advice would you give me to get ahead of the curve? This is a question we always like to pose to our experts!

There's always been great value in SAP certifications because it shows you have that knowledge. You and I have both been around long enough to hear a lot of the horror stories where you'd interview someone for a role and then someone with the exact same name would turn up but it wouldn't be the person you interviewed: those guys were farming out their skills to help their friends get jobs! So SAP certifications have a great place there to make sure you are getting someone who has the deep technical knowledge in SAP. 

We normally look at people, when recruiting, who are entrepreneurial, imaginative and creative. Are they thinking beyond anything broader than just what their certification or their education says? So, it's really a question of what else can they bring. So for example, developers need to be full stack developers these days. They need to have some sort of opinion on the architecture being deployed. But then also, they need to understand what is good UI and UX – and that's something that traditionally developers haven't been great at. In summary, organizations are expecting much richer, fuller individuals; the era of finding someone who is hyper focused on one specific topic is almost gone. 

Given that thinking about entrepreneurship and broadening your horizons, what about mentorship? Do you think that's something that people should embrace, and have you gone down that path yourself in your career?

I think mentorship is extremely valuable. You just need to find the right mentor, and you need to be teachable. You could have the best mentor in the world but if you think that you're the bee's knees, you probably aren't going to learn anything from them. So humility is important.

The SAP community isn't that big once you're in it and you spend some time in it and that's what I love about conferences like Sapphire – you just see so many familiar faces. You walk around there and you connect with people you haven’t seen since last year. But it's as if you work together: you just reconnect. The SAP community is so strong, and everyone's always willing to help each other out whether it be with challenges being faced on the customer side or just even looking at career journeys. The community does come together and there are a lot of really, really good mentors in the SAP space.