Convergent IS S/4HANA Case Study

ByPrimary Researcher

Executive Summary

  • This is the Convergent IS S/4HANA, which is part of our research study.
  • We evaluate the accuracy of this case study.

Introduction

Convergent IS is a Canadian implementor of mobile and user interfaces. As of June 30, 2016, they had 35 employees.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

  • This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem. 
  • Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers. 

Convergent IS’s logic to implement S/4HANA is very similar to that of WiPro and other SAP consulting companies on this list. That is, Convergent can resell the implementation experience and explore what it received from its S/4HANA implementation to its customers. It also helps them get their name out in the marketplace.

Some evidence for this is that no S/4HANA implementation has been announced by a consulting company that does non-SAP consulting. If S/4HANA were implemented for its inherent qualities of use, one would expect non-SAP consulting companies to implement S/4HANA. But the opposite is the truth.

  • A 35 person company does not need S/4HANA to run its business. Sustainability issues become apparent as companies below $150 million in revenue often run into maintenance issues as the IT budget is usually insufficient to support such a heavy application like ECC.
  • How will Convergent IS be able to support this application with such a small number of IT resources?

A 35 person consulting business can be run on Quickbooks combined with an HR application and time and expense and invoicing system. And Quickbooks with a SaaS HR application and a SaaS time and expense and invoicing system is a problematic TCO to compete with. We perform consulting at Brightwork Research and Analysis and find a combination of Quickbooks and time and expense and invoicing system to work very well.

However, Convergent IS proposes a different reason for implementing S/4HANA. 

“Chatting with me at last month’s Annual Conference and Sapphire Now in Orlando, Syvertsen explains that Convergent has recently completed the first conversion to SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management 1511, Feature Package Stack (FPS) 01. “We’re delighted to be able to provide that new Fiori experience, the new intuitive analytics, the automatic problem reporting and the improved transaction processing with S/4HANA Enterprise Management to all of our business users,” he says.” – ASUG

In interviews, Convergent IS does not play up the angle of implementing S/4HANA to get more business implementing S/4HANA. However, this was a driver. And on Convergent IS’ website, they promote their ability to implement Fiori, the UI front-end for S/4HANA.

Unsurprisingly, on their website, Convergent IS emphasizes highlighting user interface aspects of S/4HANA. 

“He also encourages peers to involve business users at the start of the S/4HANA project. When you’re looking at modeling those processes [in S/4HANA], bring the business users in,” Syvertsen says.  

“Take full advantage of Fiori and take full advantage of SAP Screen Personas because S/4HANA is all Fiori to the extent that Fiori’s been built so far.” The focus for SAP with S/4HANA over the next one to two years is much less about recreating existing Business Suite transactions in Fiori and much more about redesigning new business functions.

Leveraging the Complexity of S/4HANA?

Convergent IS is a simple entity. It is unclear how much modeling of processes is necessary. We did not “model any processes” when I started using Quickbooks and using the time and expense and invoicing system. Instead, we selected the application that we thought was a good fit, entered our credit card info, and began using the system.

There are very few choices to be made.

You can decide if you want to report your income based upon actual payments or based upon accrual. That is an important decision. However, aside from that decision, the setup of these systems is quite straightforward.

Small consulting businesses don’t have any setup or “configuration” decisions that need to be made.

“SAP Screen Personas and SAP Fiori are going to be your two keys to show your business that this S/4HANA upgrade isn’t just a technical upgrade that meant nothing to them,” Syvertsen says. “It is a genuine evolution and a material leap forward in the user experience and business power of SAP.”

  • Personas are not related to Fiori, and Personas, an earlier attempt by SAP to improve its user interface, is no longer an active product. Therefore the statement that Personas should be used because they will interact with Fiori does not make sense.
  • This is a comment made back on June 30, 2016, but Personas was already an inactive product even at that time. The number of actual Personas implementations is tiny; it is mostly limited to failed proof of concepts.

Overall the quotations from Convergent IS seem to promote the idea of the user interface is quite important. It is difficult to see this as coincidental, that these are the exact services in which Convergent IS specializes.

Convergent IS states that they implemented S/4HANA Enterprise Management 1511, but they do not claim implementation functionality beyond Finance. I will refer readers again to the article The Problem with Consulting Company S/4HANA Case Studies.

This S/4HANA implementation went live in March 2016.

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Conclusion

Convergent IS’s never had any reason to implement S/4HANA. The case study is not believable. Convergent IS can be live on S/4HANA, but it was not to benefit from the application. Convergent IS is most likely merely using their S/4HANA system more for demos and to convince their prospects that they should hire Convergent IS to use them to implement S/4HANA.

This article is part of The S/4HANA Implementation Study. Please see that study for the overall conclusions.