sap Archives - Amick Brown

Get to Know Amick Brown! Meet Arun Sullia

Karen Gildea — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 17:31:14 +0000

SPOTLIGHT – Arun Sullia, Partner and Principal Consultant

As a Partner and Principal Consultant at Amick Brown, Arun is responsible for business development, maintaining trusted relationships with customers and providing solutions and direction. Arun served as a Solution Architect at AT&T and then Accenture with a focus on SAP ERP, Data Analytics and Technology Architecture. Arun joined Amick Brown to lead its first ever project and has since then worked with our partner companies helping to win and execute work for Amick Brown. Arun, along with the other Amick Brown partners, has been successfully working on the expansion of Amick Brown’s business into the public sector and the Cloud domain. He is also responsible for establishing and overseeing Amick Brown’s subsidiary, Amick Brown India.

Arun has all-around experience in the IT industry across functional and technical domains throughout his 24-year career. He has experience in functional areas such as Finance, Supply Chain, Human Resources and Real Estate providing support in Architecture, Strategy, Vendor Selection and ERP and Analytics Solutions. He has performed various roles covering the entire software development lifecycle and numerous technologies from the development and management of complex technology landscapes to the nitty gritty troubleshooting of technical issues.

Arun has been an avid hiker since his college days and continues even now with many hiking and backpacking trips. In 2019 he has done several hikes in the California Sierras including the feat of climbing Mount Whitney in one day. He has a keen interest in history, economics and the financial markets. He also likes to spend time on sports, cooking, winemaking and music. He is a hobby guitarist and enjoys playing rock, blues and jam music.

Arun lives in San Ramon, California, with his wife of 18 years and two children who are also budding musicians.

Follow Amick Brown at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/amick-brown-llc

Connect to Arun through Arun’s LinkedIn Profile. We hope to hear from you.

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Get to Know Amick Brown! Meet Karen Gildea

Karen Gildea — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 19:10:43 +0000

SPOTLIGHT – Karen Gildea, Co-Founder and Managing Partner

Karen is an Amick Brown Co-Founder and Managing Partner. She has long history in IT, serving both in technical and leadership roles. She spent 26 years supporting various technologies at AT&T. Karen’s last 10 years there was spent as a Senior Technical Director where she lead a team tasked with building the enterprise SAP BI solution at AT&T—a solution which served the company’s human resources, procurement, legal, network, finance, and real estate organizations and had a diverse end-user population of more than 400,000.

In 2010, after an outsource of the AT&T SAP application to a large consulting company, Karen shifted her focus and with her business partner Anitha Brown, started Amick Brown LLC, an IT consulting and staffing company. The company, while still a small business, is enjoying steady growth and has been listed on the San Francisco Business Times Top 100 Woman Owned Businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area list since 2013.

Karen’s role at Amick Brown focuses on the internal business functions of the company and the teams supporting Human Resources, Accounting, Marketing, Legal and Finance. She is a member of the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) and has earned her SHRM certified HR Professional certification (SHRM-CP) which enables her to stay abreast of HR developments and ensures Amick Brown adheres to all Labor laws and regulations. Karen ensures that business functions are running smoothly and efficiently so Amick Brown’s primary focus can remain on how to best serve both Amick Brown’s client’s and employee’s needs.

Karen lives in Livermore, California with her husband of 37 years. She has three grown children and one “almost 3” year old grandson whom she adores. She loves spending time with friends and family and spends as much time as possible at Lake Oroville, California where the family maintains a small houseboat.

Follow Amick Brown at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/amick-brown-llc

Connect to Karen through Karen’s LinkedIn Profile. Say hello, she would love to hear from you!

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What if Beethoven and Mozart Invented Their Own Notation System

amick.brown — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 11:01:57 +0000

Anita Gibbings, Senior Director BI Product Marketing , SAP

To appreciate how semantic notation can impact your business, take a step back for a moment and imagine if every composer from Mozart to Beethoven used a different notation system. How would conductors and musicians interpret the music in a moment without standardized notation? What if engineers didn’t have a standardized notation system? Most likely they wouldn’t be able to communicate vast amounts of information clearly and quickly.

Yet in business, there is an overabundance of ways to layout out corporate reports and dashboards. And even within a single company, you will find forecast data or averages defined and displayed differently. But with pattern recognition, you can immediately understand the context of that information. This is the essence of a standard notation system, which brings clearer, data-driven insights and faster visualization turnaround.

Communicate Vast Amounts of Data-Driven Insights with Clearer, More Aligned Messages

Executives can digest and act on visual data faster when it is always laid out the same: forecast, averages, historical and all metrics always looks the same and are in the same layout. People learn quickly to recognize patterns, and this is helpful to interpreting volumes of data. Critical to good business decision-making is the ability to portray very dense amounts of information, while maintaining clarity. This is vital when extrapolating multiple metrics for data to understand how it relates to the business.

A visualization that shows a percentage breakdown of revenue into products is, in itself, not very useful. To act and make better decisions, you need to understand how revenue has changed over time and to compare it to other product lines, the budget, profit margin, and market share. Also, executives spend less time trying to align the data into one version of the truth when all metrics are calculated and portrayed using the same standards across all business units. Having a standard notation system in your business can help you foster data-driven culture and alignment for better decision making.

Faster and Improved Visualization of Analysis and Insights

Although content creators spend less time inventing their own system and layout, they still follow guidelines. In speaking with people who have adopted international business communications standards (IBCS), they found, for example, that the average time to create dashboard dropped three-fold. Through standard notation systems, they shortened implementation times and improved the outcome of their analytics investments.

Don’t Start from Scratch – These Are Best Practices

One of the best-developed, semantic notation systems – which was only chosen by the SAP Executive Board back in 2011 – is based on an open source project called International Business Communications Standards. Anyone can join the association and benefit from years of thought leadership and best practices developed over decades. Plus, the community is included in the evolution of these standards.

Register for the Standards Course

OpenSAP allows you to learn anywhere, anytime and on any device with free courses open to the public.

This blog orignially appeared on the D!gitalist Magazine by SAP and SAP Business Objects Analytics blog has been republished with permission.

AmickBrown.com

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I Think We Need a GRC Tool. Where Do We Start?

amick.brown — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 13:44:09 +0000

by Thomas Frenehard, SAP GRC Solution Management

I’m not going to say that I have this question every Monday morning, but it does pop up rather more often than I would have expected. This is especially the case when risk, compliance or audit departments ask their IT counterparts to send them a list of suitable governance, risk and compliance (GRC) vendors but fail to really explain what they need.In essence, the request to their mind is pretty simple—just get me the list and rankings published by “[…] and […]” ( fill-in-the- blank spaces with your favourite analyst companies). That should do the trick.

This is usually what triggers the question above, with the IT department reaching out asking for a discussion on what is a GRC solution to ensure that they only source relevant options to present to their internal clients.

As mentioned by my colleague Jan Gardiner a few weeks ago (GRC ≠ Access Authorization Management), for us at SAP, the GRC portfolio is a combination of more than 10 solutions.

As a result, before even going further into any discussion, my answer is always the same, ”Well, what do you need to do?” I could spend hours explaining and illustrating the benefits of a full internal control solution, but if the original request comes from the audit team who is looking for a tool to help them support their risk-based auditing process, I’m not sure it’ll be of much use.

What’s the Requirement?

So first things first—define the need. Easier said than done of course, but it will be the foundation for everything. In case the requiring team doesn’t have a predefined idea of what exactly it is they need in terms of detailed requirements, you can always reach internally and see what is already available and being used (tools, spreadsheets, shared drives,).

Even if you then decide that none are the right option, this will still give you a good idea of what people are using today and for what purpose. And if you push your investigation further and interview the key users, they might even tell you what they currently lack. This is essential as it may lead to needs or pain points that are beyond the ones initially expressed.

Prepare for Today but Plan for Tomorrow

Now that you know the requirements, define where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow (or the day after). And keep in mind that a tool will never solve all your problems at once but it can bring new ones if expectations aren’t managed properly.

Using the information you collected above, work on a roadmap—what would be the first features needed today to facilitate work life, and what is,at the moment, a “nice to have” but that you know will be important in the future.

With this in mind, start prioritizing so that the tool selected will be able to answer the immediate requirements, but also accompany the company as it evolves.

Leave Tabula Rasa to Aristotle!

Your company already has a wealth of risk registers, control libraries, audit repositories, and so on.

This is the “GRC memory” of your company and you certainly don’t want to get rid of it.

Collect as much as you can and then work with the business owners to review the data—define what should be carried forward, what is redundant and can be let go, and so forth.

And for what you decide is worth keeping, ensure that it’s complete and well documented. This way, not only will you embark on a new tool, but you will also have secured the consistency of the imported data. No need to have a Formula 1 car if you don’t have the right fuel, right?

Of course, I have over simplified the process, but for a short blog that was my intent. But I hope this has still given you some food for thought for the next time your business owners call saying, “We need a GRC tool, what do you suggest?”

I look forward to reading your thoughts and comments either on this blog or on Twitter @TFrenehard

AmickBrown.com

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In the New Digital Economy, Everything Can Be Digitized and Tracked : Now What?

amick.brown — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 11:04:04 +0000

by Pierre Leroux, Director, Predictive Analytics Product Marketing

Welcome to a world where digital reigns supreme. Remember when the Internet was more of a ‘push’ network? Today, it underpins how most people and businesses conduct transactions – providing peer-to-peer connections where every single interaction can be tracked.

Enterprises are still not taking full advantage. With hundreds of millions of people connected, it’s possible for them to connect their suppliers with their customers and their payment systems, and reach the holy grail of seamlessly engaging in commerce, where a transaction can be tracked from purchase, to order received, to manufacturing, through to shipment— all in real time. It’s clear that end-to-end digitization delivers enormous potential, but it has yet to be fully tapped by most companies.

In the latest #askSAP Analytics Innovations Community Webcast, Reimagine Predictive Analytics for the Digital Enterprise, attendees were given an introduction to SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics, along with some key use cases. The presentation covered native in-memory predictive analytics, deploying predictive analytics on Big Data, and how to bring predictive insight to Business Intelligence (BI).

The live, interactive call was moderated by SAP Mentor Greg Myers and featured expert speakers Ashish Morzaria, Global GTM Director, Advanced Analytics, and Richard Mooney, Lead Product Manager for Advanced Analytics.

The speakers noted that companies used to become leaders in their industries by establishing an unbeatable brand or by having a supply chain that was more efficient than anyone else’s. While this is still relevant in the digital economy, companies now have to think about how they can turn this new digital economy to their advantage. One of the keys is turning the digital economy’s key driver —the data— to their advantage.

Companies embracing digital transformation are outperforming those who aren’t. With predictive analytics, these companies can use historical data to predict behaviors or outcomes, answer “what-if” questions, and ensure employees have what they need to make optimized decisions. They can fully leverage customer relationships with better insight, and make meaningful sense of Big Data.

One big question delved into during the call: How can companies personalize each interaction across all channels and turn each one into an advantage? The answer: By getting a complete digital picture of their customers and applying predictive analytics to sharpen their marketing focus, optimize their spend, redefine key marketing activities, and offer product recommendations tailored to customers across different channels.

Real-World Customer Stories

The call also focused on some real-world examples of customers achieving value by using and embedding predictive analytics in their decisions and operations, including Cox Cable, Monext, M-Bank, and Mobilink.

These companies have been able to improve performance across thousands of processes and decisions, and also create new products, services, and business models. They’ve squeezed more efficiencies and margins from their production assets, processes, networks, and people.

One key takeaway is the importance of using algorithms, as they provide insights that can make a business process more profitable or competitive, and spotlight new ways of doing business and new opportunities for growth.

The speakers also presented a very detailed customer case study on Harris Logic. The company is using SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics for automated analytics and rapid prototyping of their models. They execute models into SAP HANA for real-time predictions using a native, logistical regression model. This approach is allowing for the identification of key predictors that more heavily influence a behavioral health outcome.

Learn More

Lots of food for thought. See what questions people were asking during the webcast and get all of the answers here. Check out the complete presentation, and continue to post your questions and watch for dates for our upcoming webcast in the series via Twitter using #askSAP.

AmickBrown.com

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ASUG Northern California Chapter Meeting

Ashith Bolar — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 21:27:16 +0000

Amick Brown a sponsor of ASUG Northern California Chapter Meeting on August 18, 2016 in Milpitas, California

Aug-18, 2016

Amick Brown attended and was a chapter meeting sponsor at the ASUG Northern California Chapter meeting on August 18, 2016. In addition to making new connections, sharing information and learning at the various sessions, we raffled off a Star Wars BB8 robot. Winner was Gautier Vasseur, Vice President Marketing at Trufa, Inc. and continuing studies Instructor at Stanford University.

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Why SAP HANA and Spark for Big Data Predictive Analytics

amick.brown — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 13:13:51 +0000

By David Jonker,

Sr Director SAP Big Data Product Marketing, Technology & Innovation Platform

Big Data offers analysts and data scientists the opportunity to build more sophisticated and more accurate predictive models than before, but without the right data environment, it’s not easy. It requires an in-memory architecture that supports thousands of columns and billions of rows and a predictive analytics tool that can harness that architecture, such as SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics.

Twentieth-century technology is insufficient. Blame it on the disk. Back in the 1980s, database engineers saw a world where memory was extremely expensive. Just one terabyte of RAM cost over $100 million US dollars. Today, we can get it for less than $5,000 US dollars. So, vendors built database architectures centered on the disk.

In a Big Data world, the disk is simply too slow. Consider this: reading 1 petabyte of data off a disk sequentially – i.e. no seeking, just end-to-end straight off the disk – takes 58 days using the fastest hard disk available today (according to the Tom’s Hardware website). SSD definitely speeds things up: two days with the fastest SSD RAID. It’ll cost millions to buy, though.

In many ways, Big Data is a real-time data access problem. That’s precisely why innovators are developing new ways to store and process data, all in an effort to get around the hard disk bottleneck. All of the approaches, in essence, minimize the bottleneck in order to improve response time.

Distributed Computing

Distributed computing spreads a lot of data across many disks that can all be read simultaneously. Hadoop builds on the concept of distributed computing, but opens up the platform to handle any data set with any arbitrarily designed algorithm. To overcome the disk, the Hadoop community built Apache Spark, which provides a distributed data processing architecture, like Hadoop HDFS, that operates in-memory across commodity hardware.

Columnar Databases

Like distributed databases and Hadoop, columnar databases optimize data storage architecture in order to reduce the amount of data read off any one disk. It does this by grouping related attributes, or columns, together. The assumption is that most analytical queries only use a subset of columns, so you should only access data related to those specific columns. They also highly compress the data, further reducing the number of bits read off disk.

In-Memory Databases

In-memory databases take it to a whole new level by removing the disk from the equation altogether. It leverages the power of today’s processors to read and analyze data at a raw speed that’s 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than reading data off the disk. In some cases, customers have experienced performance gains of 100,000 times faster. How?

– Compress the data with in-memory columnar data stores

– Move the data accessed most often into L1 caches on the chip

That’s why we are so bullish about in-memory and the SAP HANA platform for Big Data. That’s not to say disk solutions don’t have a role to play. But…at the core you want an in-memory system that can run algorithms where your data is. No moving the data to the algorithms, that doesn’t work in a Big Data world. Instead, move the core algorithms into the data system.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics is the right tool for business analysts and data scientists to build predictive models from Big Data. First and foremost, it can analyze data inside SAP HANA and Apache Spark. There’s no need to transfer data out of these environments for processing. Rather, the SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics processing engine can run inside these tools – dramatically improving performance.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics is also able to analyze exceptionally wide datasets. In fact, you can have up 15,000 columns in a dataset, while other tools support only a few hundred to 1,000 columns at most. This ensures that your predictive models provide the greatest level of accuracy possible.

Big Data is radically altering our world. It’s a game changer. For those who grab hold of it, you have an opportunity to propel your business forward – and the surest way forward is with SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics running on SAP HANA or Apache Spark. It is the best combination for building predictive models on Big Data, whether you’re a business analyst or data scientist.

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Detailed Cost Planning in SAP and Excel

amick.brown — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 16:00:24 +0000

Contributed by Gunnar Steindorrson , Kern Americas

In our previous Blog , Get a Reporting and Analytics Planning Edge with Allevo , we gave a short overview of our powerful product that give significant value when working with SAP and Excel for planning.

As you know, effective cost planning in SAP can present some challenges.

For one, standard SAP does not support driver-based costing, nor does the system provide an easy way to include non-SAP data (production or sales plan forecasts, for instance) into planning. Do you have side calculations – things like travel, consulting expenses, training costs, etc. – that you would like to include in your planning? Good luck with that.

Unless you’re using Allevo that is. Our solution tackles all of these challenges – and much more – with ease.

Better yet, with Allevo you work in your familiar, easy-to-use Excel environment, using your own templates, but are fully integrated with SAP.

So, if you’re tired of not having real-time access to your vital planning data, frustrated by cumbersome workarounds, and annoyed with working in a system that doesn’t support the way you want to work, give us a call. You’ll be glad you did.

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SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA – Let’s Start at the Beginning

amick.brown — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 17:41:34 +0000

by Ashith Bolar, Director AmBr Labs, Amick Brown

Every week at Amick Brown, we are questioned about HANA There is a lot of confusion in the market with the multiple options. As well, there are many questions about timing and business application. You have asked, so we will start a series of HANA articles to address your questions.

SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, shortened to SAP S/4HANA, is a big strategic play from SAP. Here is why you need to take heed.

The new SAP S/4HANA is supposed to replace the SAP Business Suite (formerly R/3) over the next few years. This announcement and the launch of the software lay a roadmap for SAP in the coming years.

What led to this launch?

SAP is a leader in ERP worldwide. However, in the recent past, a new trend is taking over in the business world. Cloud-based software services also known as Software-as-a-Service. SAP has SaaS components to it, but its main business model has been selling software the old way: software installed at the customers’ premise.

Other cloud companies have been slowly chipping away at SAP’s market share. And this is SAP’s answer.

Name

The R in R/3 stood for real-time. The S in the S/4 stands for Simple. This is the big idea. SAP is planning on simplifying the ERP system with this release.

Database

While SAP R/3 Business Suite ran on any database, S/4 runs exclusively on HANA. SAP has spent considerable financial resources and effort on building up the in-memory database over the past few years. SAP HANA has tremendous performance advantages compared to the older disk-based database solutions. This large-scale change has enabled SAP to dramatically simplify both the data-model as well as the user-experience.

One significant aspect of HANA is that it is an in-memory appliance. This means data-access times (disk read/writes) are not an issue anymore, allowing developers to focus more on business logic than performance. This lends itself to the other motivation for S/4 – simplicity.

The Cloud

SAP S/4HANA is mostly a movement of SAP’s premier software from customer premise to the cloud. However, on-premise solutions will still be available. SAP offers 3 options:

Public Cloud – Completely managed by SAP. Multi-tenancy shared by all public cloud customers
Private Cloud – Partially managed by SAP. Exclusive database per customer.
On-Premise – Software installed on client’s hardware. Client pays for user-licenses.

Software

SAP S/4HANA will allow customization to S/4HANA on the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). This means ABAP developers will get to continue to use their skills. If you don’t know OO, it is a good time to learn it.

Let’s admit it, SAP R/3 has not been known for its stellar user-experience. UI on SAP R/3 has been clunky, rigid and unwelcoming. But the S/4HANA user-interface will be based on SAP’s Fiori UX platform. SAP Fiori, launched earlier in 2014, gives the software a new look-and-feel. The fact it does not have licensing cost should make it attractive to customers with an existing SAP installation.

Conclusion

Co-founder, Hasso Plattner said “If this doesn’t work, we’re dead. Flat-out dead.” This may be just Hasso Plattner being the passionate visionary that he is. But this indeed is a huge launch from SAP, one whose initial roll out is expected to be 3-5 years, and customer transitions lasting more 10 years.

The story on S/4 HANA continues here. Watch this space and Follow Amick Brown on LinkedIn

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ASUG Pacific Northwest Chapter Meeting

Karen Gildea — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 16:18:41 +0000

ASUG Pacific Northwest Chapter Meeting

Jun-16, 2016

Amick Brown to present at the Pacific Northwest Chapter Meeting in Vancouver, Washington

Why all the excitement? As new technologies emerge, the lines between IT and business are becoming blurred, demanding new cross-functional skills and collaboration to fuel enterprise-wide success. And Digital Transformation waits for no one. Just keeping pace means you may be falling behind. That’s why attending this conference is important to your future success. After all, amazing things happen when business and technology join forces!

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