Last week I attended the US based SAP GRC conference for the eighth year in a row and this year it was back to where it all started for us, Orlando Florida.
It was a great opportunity to catch up with our US based SAP colleagues and customers and I was joined by three members of our US team and a couple of our team in the UK who were speaking at the conference. The team at SAP Insider put on another well organised event and co-hosting it with the SAP Financials event, I felt, worked really well as everybody had an interest of some sort in GRC.
The event was again well attended and it was a fantastic opportunity to hear from US customers how they are leveraging their SAP GRC tools.
The highlights for us this year were:
1. The official launch of SAP GRC Audit Management on HANA.
Audit Management is the latest addition to SAP’s GRC focused solutions. The solution is focused on helping companies manage the audit cycle. The solution is still evolving and with a HANA back end its future roadmap is sure to include some very interesting audit analytics capabilities.
2. More customers leveraging Process Controls.
At this year’s event we noted more customers with experience of SAP GRC Process Controls in their environments. This led to a lot more detailed discussions around the capabilities and potential use cases of the product and it was great to explore ideas with these customers.
It was encouraging to hear that our customers are still at the leading edge in terms of getting benefits from process controls.
3. Increased uptake of HANA in the US customer base.
We noted that the take up of HANA was significantly more prevalent amongst US based customers than we have found to be the case in Europe to date. This is a very positive development as it indicates a shift towards this technology amongst the SAP customer base generally.
HANA offers a lot of exciting possibilities in the GRC space and we are looking forward to helping more customers to harness this technology.
4. Increasing interest in SAP GRC Risk Management.
Having successfully implemented Access and Process Controls we are finding more and more customers turning to the Risk management module. This is an area we have put significant focus on over the past two years having developed a Rapid Deployment Solution (RDS) with significant enhancements over and above the SAP standard solution.
We met with a number of customers on this topic in Orlando and are looking forward to helping more customers to utilise this product.
5. Increased product integration across AC, PC and RM.
Many customers we spoke to at the event were interested in how they can make their usage of GRC more efficient and improve their GRC processes by further integrating the GRC components. We had several discussions around options for sharing risks across AC, PC and RM and around how best to integrate the products to take a more holistic approach.
This is something that we have been seeing more in our own customer base and its encouraging to see other SAP GRC users looking to maximise the return on their GRC investment.
It was great to be back in Orlando and we are already looking ahead to next year which may well be back in Vegas (TBC). For those who were not able to join us at the US conference the good news is that this year's European event is only a few weeks away and will be held at a new venue in Nice, France. We will be there again, with our speakers repeating their sessions in addition to some other content we have been asked to provide. If you’re interested in attending the Nice event please let us know – as exhibitors we are able to offer you a customer discount.
Hopefully we will see you there!
