Sri Lanka SAP User Group launched to help technology eruption

German-based System Analyses and Programme networking systems (SAP) launched its Sri Lanka SAP User Group (SLSUG) recently to provide its members with the necessary resources and tools to maximise return on SAP investment thus strengthening the country’s SAP community.

SAP India President and Managing Director Deb Deep Sengupta at a media briefing held at the Taj Samudra Hotel in Colombo, recently said, “With more than 300,000 customers globally today SAP has been in the business of providing technology to customers, governments and not-for-profit organisations across the globe for more than 40 years. Asia has been a very big opportunity for SAP during the last 25 years which is emerging more significantly with the global macro changes. The uniqueness in Asia is that most companies are well diversified in terms of portfolio, fast growing family owned companies and lots of large state owned enterprises for overall development and infrastructure.”

SAP has been in Sri Lanka since 2000. While the number of customers has significantly grown in Sri Lanka over the last couple of years, he said this is the appropriate moment to have the user group which will facilitate not just networking, but help technology eruption and also network with the global communities. SAP has user groups in North America, Germany, India and Australia. “In every major region or market which we operate we have a very large user group. The purpose of the user group is three- fold; networking, role in helping skill building, developing be deployed to help accelerate business productivity. "SAP offers supreme integration tools for basic business processes," he said.

SAP solutions bring together preconfigured business processes and implementation services to accelerate time to value - all the while helping customers leverage business experiences. "The inno- of local skills and resources, entrepreneurship development and helping advise public policy making bodies in terms of how technology can be erupted. Most importantly SAP has evolved by taking feedback from the user groups for product development improvement and for future investments,” added Mr. Sengupta.

SLSUG Chairperson, Ramesh Shanmuganathan stressed that it is imperative for Sri Lanka to be connected and network. “Today we are talking about (a) digital ecosystem, (a) digital world, transportation, financial and logistics hub; it’s a very remote chance (that we have) if we don’t up our gains in terms of digital technology,” he noted.

“With a global player like SAP and with the solutions we have, the ecosystem expands. SAP has much more bandwidth in terms of reach and scale as well,” he added.

He also noted that the Singapore government has gone 100 per cent open data whereas the Sri Lankan government is still in a closed loop. With the Right to Information Act being passed in the parliament recently, the next step would be to adopt an open data policy and acknowledge things like e-invoicing, electronic transaction processing, electronic payments which are a huge influence for Sri Lankan companies to get into the digital world. Today credit card penetration is about one million in Sri Lanka with which you cannot talk about digital commerce. “You need to ensure that payment instruments are available to everyone,” he added. vating and driving high value for our customers has attracted many local firms to SAP and some Sri Lankan firms have been using SAP for over a decade."

Mr. Sengupta added that users and new users of SAP in Sri Lanka have seen 20 - 30 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) during the last few years.