Pre-Sales Engineer

Fairly accurate, though humorously over the top illustration of the relationship between sales and pre sales engineers. 

She doesn't have to be bilingual though, so I think she may have it easier than many. 

WTF is ERP (Entreprise Resource Planning)

Getting to grips with the nomenclature of Enterprise Resource Planning (for SAP at present but possibly ORACLE later ) is quite a laugh. Everything has really bland geek names that are best exemplified by the original name of SAP and the current meaning of the name.

SAP was System Analysis and Program Development but is now Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing.

Both of them are so memorable right? 

Anyway the video above is a good presentation of what ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning is all about. Pop it in the player and learn if you like.

McClaren & SAP

I'm working closely with SAP specialists (and also my villa rental mates plus a few others) these days, so you can imagine there's a lot to keep up with and I'm a very busy boy.

I'm focusing on the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) side of SAP so there's a huge amount of subcategories to drill down into from HR to CRM, Business Intelligence and so forth. On the surface it's quite a boring subject unless you're into big live data but the more we examine how big business works the more clear it is that software and cloud solution data add a foundation of stability to global businesses and their short, medium and long term aims.

Now don't misunderstand me. 

I'd prefer to be a hunter gatherer growing my own food and so forth but group stability is a huge factor in figuring out where the human race wants to collectively go. I would go back to a smaller populated planet, that's more in tune with a nature style of living, but 99.999% of the planet don't see what I see as a vision of potential. This doesn't mean I reject the use of antibiotics for those binary heads who can only process two polarized ideologies at a time.

I'm an evangelist for the power of socialised media and communication agility. The only thing that has begun to sort out the planetary mess we're in (from my perspective) is the internet and its ability to work, play, interact and shape the future from a desk, tablet or coming soon wearable technology.

In any case this video of McLaren Group's partnership with SAP is a taster of how racing drivers are tapping into the supply chain management (SCM) expertise of (for example) hospitals, through enterprise resource planning suites. Real time analysis of a Formula One business while it's racing on the track isn't so boring when there is instant feedback into their business intelligence repercussions and implementation of both instantaneous and future decision making.

It's about time the human race had a plan. We've been scared of the future for too long.