How do you get your experts with negative stance for new things / innovations to HANA

Question

We have over 50 ABAP developer (senior experts). Primarily we develop in the old core module (SD, MM, FI, CO, HR, PP, CS, IH, PS) on ERP systems / business suite.
We have three groups of developer:
Group 1: They can’t await to work on new architectures – they’re open for all and have fun to work as a pioneer and dig in the deep of the system
Group 2: For this developer it’s all the same – for this people it’s not a problem to go to a other architectures
Group 3: They have no interest
to work in new architectures
to spend time to learn new things
they are very closed for new things
they have for all topics bad statements
I am part of the group 1. In my opinion in the IT it’s normal to spend much time at new topics in free time to keep up to date. New topics / innovative things make the developer job very exciting. For me it’s regular process – and that’s my own passion .
Since two month we have our own HANA system in our data centre as play field :-) (business suite on SAP HANA). I’ve some colleagues who made the HANA certification – and we made the first steps in our system. For group 1 and group 2 everything is okay and they’ve fun .
We have problems with the group 3. They find every hair in the soup – they spend very much time to search arguments against HANA. That’s our “negative group” . We copied our SAP System to a new system and made a technical migration. Now they compare the SAP System, which is based on an oracle datebase, with the new SAP System which is based on a HANA System. They go through the standard ERP process (offer / order / purchase order / goods movements / delivery / MM invoice / SD invoice / material master data / customer master data / vendor master data / conditions / financial bookings / etc.). They main argument is, that they can’t see a grow up of the performance / the added value of the invest / etc. Our other problem is that the group of this people have experience over 20 years in ABAP developing – and their opinion have a high weight. The other arguments: IBM and oracle are working on similar architectures – and we can hold on on the open sqlsyntax / on the present coding.
Have you similar problems to get the acceptance of group 3?
Have you tips / tricks for us?
Have you ideas for catching the group 3?
What standard components are really optimized for HANA?
In which standard components can we see a really performance grow up?
There are standard use cases to see the differences?
Which data volume do we need in the data model to see the differences?
What can we do to take the group 3 with us?
How can we open the group 3 for innovations?

Answer 1

Hi,
Please find my reply below.
1. Have you similar problems to get the acceptance of group 3?
In IT world we have similar groups. Only results help this group3. I would suggest showcasing on results.
2. Have you tips / tricks for us?
As you mentioned in your email, you already have HANA System to play with. So I would suggest looking at high performance transactions like MRP run and FICO Month-end Close.
3. Have you ideas for catching the group 3?
SAP has few use cases. Take-up these use cases build data models and use in ERP.
4. What standard components are really optimized for HANA?
Recently in our organization we replaced database from DB2 with HANA. Now our SAP ECC is running on HANA. Straight away we have seen 30% of performance improvement in all the transactions. SAP is providing optimized SAP Transactions and there is significant performance improvement and SAP Road Map clearly talks about providing more optimized SAP Transactions on top of HANA to its customers.
We tried to push some of our high performance code to DB layer by creating the Data Models and using those views in SAP ABAP Programs or Transactions. This gave us significant performance improvement.
Please refer to below document. This has list of standard optimized transactions.
Link
5. In which standard components can we see a really performance grow up?
This blog throws light on following high performance transactions.
Link
6. There are standard use cases to see the differences?
Use Case
7. Which data volume do we need in the data model to see the differences?
MRP run transaction has huge performance issue you can work on MRP Run data model.
8. What can we do to take the group 3 with us?
Only Proof of Concepts (POC) results will help to take this group.
9. How can we open the group 3 for innovations?
As per your email, I feel group 3 is most demotivated group. I would suggest to talk to each individual and understand there areas of interest and try to put them in their areas of interest. As per my experience this will give good results.
-VJ.