Reed: Based on your description, I definitely want to be a consultant, not a contractor, and it sounds like some of these online resources can help with that. As you're getting more involved with the ERP at BPX community, what do you see as the potential of the community and what do the participants, as well as SAP, need to do to reach this potential?

Genez: I think in terms of potential, it's really quite large because, in spite of some of the newness of some of the other SAP applications, the cornerstone of the company has always been ERP. Really, the closer you can get to the transactional system where these business processes are occurring, the closer you're going to get to being that business process expert. I think it's a natural alignment of saying we have business process experts, but we also want to focus on ERP being the flagship transactional system that SAP has.

I also think that there's just no doubt that the dominant trend, at least here in the U.S., has to do with the economy, and everybody is curious how the fourth quarter is going to play out and what SAP software sales are going to pan out to be - what they're going to report. If it does go down at all, history has shown us that customers are not going to go out and adopt something that might be more obtuse, say an eSOA strategy; they're going to focus on their bread and butter, and those are the items that are as close to the business processes as they can get.

That's stuff like voice verification, it's GRIR, it's intercompany reconciliation, it's other functionalities that they've already purchased and they just haven't implemented them yet because it is such a deep application. All of that is in ERP: it's in that dominant application that's really been the cornerstone for the company's success. I think in terms of potential, that's just a lot of attention and market for the ERP at BPX to tap into.

But to get there, as with any other knowledge-based industry, they've got to show some support of that. And when it is knowledge, knowledge becomes currency. If they really want to invest in this per se, then they've really got to get the people that are part of their knowledge constituency: their development team, their solution management team, product management and even SAP consulting. There are platinum consultants that have seen a dozen different interpretations of intercompany reconciliation in a given year, and they know what the best way to do it is. They need to get them involved in that.

As an example, when BI came out - 7.0 came out a couple years ago - during the ramp-up the regional implementation groups, the development RIGs, were heavily involved. The product management teams were all heavily blogged, and if you search on any of those guys' names, you'll get a lot of blogs out there and a lot of threads that they've responded to. But in this area, it's a little bit light: outside of the blog series I mentioned earlier from Thomas Weiss, there's not as many pragmatic experts that seem to be really invested into it. I know that they're out there, I know that they are probably willing to, but I don't know what they're waiting for to get involved.

Maybe they need something more official from SAP, but I think if they really invest in that, they'll get more attention than they can handle. SDN is really taking off, and given the prominence of ERP and no matter what we talk about - Portals or eSOA - SAP customers are running ERP. If they can focus on that, they'll just get more attention than they need.

Reed: Hopefully this podcast is a good next step in building that momentum. While preparing for the podcast, you used the phrase "your network knows more than you do." What do you mean by that, and how does BPX factor into this?

Genez: Like I talked about earlier, about meeting other resources and how valuable they are: no one person, no matter how experienced he is in his area, if you had to aggregate his knowledge versus two or three other consultants, the greater good of the network is always going to know more. There's just too much variation amongst the SAP customer base. Even two international oil and gas companies that are running SAP for 20 years, they do things slightly differently. So, you can't be at all places at the same time. It's such a wide customer base: every country, every language, every currency, every release, every industry - they're all there. So your network will always have seen more and know more than you do.

It makes me think back to when I used to work at Amoco Oil, which is where I got started with SAP. When I went into consulting, I got partnered with a guy who was in his late forties and had been in and out of IT consulting all throughout Canada and the U.S. He was just getting into SAP, and he asked me, "Do you know what the definition of a junior consultant is?" and I said, "No, what is it?" and he said "It's somebody with six months' experience. Now do you know what the definition of a senior consultant is?" I said, "Twelve months' experience?" He said, "No, it's a junior consultant with contacts."

Ever since then, that's always been a cornerstone of my career, and I've seen it as a cornerstone of other people that are successful. You've got to make connections and keep them, and that's where something like ERP@BPX can help out.

Reed: Thanks, Nathan, for those insights into integrating BPX into your consulting work. Elke, before we wrap up, do you have any plans you'd like to share about what's next for ERP@BPX?

Simon-Keller: First of all, thank you very much for having us, Jon and, of course, thanks to Nathan for being here and giving us his feedback about what this network means to him and how it should be improved. We will definitely make sure to leverage his input and try to engage in an active discussion about further developing the community, but also recruiting people who are SAP experts already to start their own blogs. Those people know how customers use SAP ERP; they just have to also express that.

I am grateful to Nathan for stressing that and also, of course, the networking aspect of the community. That is really an important aspect, and if the community has helped him with improving his personal network, it proves that it makes a lot of sense to have it and it also makes me feel confident that the community is on the right track.

As for us, the ERP@BPX team, we just came up with our latest key topics: operational excellence and ERP market trends. We will continue to add more of those, so if you're listening and thinking there is something that really should be included, or if you actually have a topic you want to include, feel free to contact us via our page at BPX.SAP.com. Just click on the Enterprise Resource Planning topic. Other topics we would like to cover in the near future will, of course, be the upcoming release of Enhancement Package 4, so make sure you are following up on that.

I would like to make our contribution to better energy saving and sustainability by encouraging experts to blog about that topic. If there is anything you would like to contribute, just contact us or start your own blog. There are lots of people out there, as Nathan mentioned.

One last thing I also want to mention is that we have been following the TechEd around the globe this year, so community members were able to participate virtually and, for the first time, we also had a speaker, Christian Oehler, who is a thought leader and a real expert about enhancement packages. He has been represented at the Las Vegas, Berlin and the Bangalore community, and he will come to Shanghai in November as well. He is actually blogging on his topics and publishing the Q&A section online, so if there are any questions, they can be published up front and he will surely cover those during the session and follow up in his blog as well.

We are currently looking at bringing more events online, such as SAP Insider or user group meetings. We are learning as things progress, so we are a young community. I know we still have a long way to go, but I believe - and Nathan has proved it just now - that we are on the right track, and we hope that everybody who listens and is interested in becoming a member of the ERP community will sign up at bpx.sap.com. We are always happy to hear your input about what we are doing and how to help us grow and constantly develop because it's really you out there and all the community members and the future community members that are making this community happen.

Reed: Excellent. One point I took from my visits to ERP@BPX is that innovation is not just about cool, new technologies like eSOA, it's also about getting the most out of your core ERP functionality, so hopefully we can pursue these themes at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it I'd like to thank Elke and Nathan for joining us today and, as a reminder, you can sign up for all three of SAP's online communities in one registration process. Or, if you're a member of one, you can easily alter your profile and just check the boxes for the other communities including BPX.

On that note, I'd like to thank our listeners for joining us today for this BPX community podcast and, with that, this is Jon Reed of JonERP.com signing off. We'll see you online soon at bpx.sap.com.