The other week we learnt that Klaus Tschira has left us way too early, a sad event certainly, but also the chance to remember what a great person Klaus was and what massive contribution he has provided to SAP’s HCM efforts and to a large point the overall HCM industry.
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I had the opportunity to be in a few meetings with Klaus, and all of them were great meetings that attendees left thinking they had more with them after the meeting then before they went into it.
My first meeting with Klaus was when SAP was doing due diligence on the CRM vendor we ended up selling to SAP – Kiefer & Veittinger. We had many meetings with man SAP executives, mainly with Hasso Plattner, a few with Dietmar Hopp but the most interesting was with Klaus. Don’t misunderstand me here – all meetings were great – but the one with Klaus gave us the best understanding of what it would be to be part of the large, large SAP. And Klaus it made very clear that our talents and expertise (in CRM) were key to SAP. At the end of the day it was clear that Dietmar Hopp assembled a very diverse founder team, which in my view is a strong reason for SAP’s long term success, till today.
My next interactions with Klaus was when trying to help my team get the first ‘content shipment’ on top of the brand new BW off the ground. Though tasked with CRM content, Marketing content more specifically – we still wanted to get cost of sales and wanted to get to employee, compensation information etc. And that was our first encounter with the infotypes and the unique nature of the HCM products inside of the SAP R/3 product suite. It was practically impossible to get to the information without a thorough understanding and help by the HCM product team, which at the time was pretty reclusive. So we went through Hasso Plattner (I remember him wishing us ‘Good luck’) to Klaus and what was supposed to be a 2 hour meeting turned out to be many meetings and long hours. Along the way we discovered that Klaus was passionate about object orientation, a huge fan of SmallTalk. And he was curious on how we build the K&V Module library on top of C++. It didn’t make it easier to get to SAP HCM information into SAP CRM, but we were left with a much deeper and better understanding and appreciation why SAP HCM was built like this.
Later when I was working in the Office of the Chairman, for Hasso Plattner and Henning Kagermann, Klaus would only step by so very seldom – but when he stopped by he would usually come and say Hello!, asking what I was working on and how I was doing. Klaus seemed to really care for SAP employees – beyond their work direct work, something you don’t experience with too many executives in the industry. I will never forget when he snuck up on me one day as I was helping the CRM team with screenshots (I still had graphic elements and templates from the time we conceived the ‘tile’ based CRM UI), whispering ‘that looks very good’. He then wanted to bring some UI innovation to the HCM team. But not sure where that ended up.
Ironically my biggest appreciation for what Klaus and the team had built came when I joined Oracle. In many executive sponsorships for e-Business Suite implementations, Payroll was a substantial automation piece and while it worked great for some countries, it did not work so well for others. Extension ad maintenance was hard. Not for the usual payroll challenges of keeping up to speed with legislation, but from an architecture perspective. The problem was that Oracle had conceived a large monolithic payroll engine which at some point would get too complex when running for too many countries. With much curiosity I took a look at the PeopleSoft payroll engine, when Oracle acquired PeopleSoft – same design point, same challenge to go beyond 1x+ countries. In an irony of enterprise software history – the challenge that SAP R/3 suffered from, being too complex and with too many configuration options, was at a smaller level the same for Oracle and PeopleSoft for their respective payroll engines. Oracle corrected this with the Fusion / HCM Cloud payroll – but SAP can still leverage the design from Klaus and team and supports 50+ countries today. And when I spend time at NorthgateArinso (now NGAHR), it was clear that with 2 professionals (granted, who knew what they were doing), you were able to extend the SAP payroll beyond those 50 countries (something Arinso had done historically before, too – in partnership with / for SAP or for their BPO customers).
In the combination of coming from Europe and understanding a multinational world earlier than the competitor’s payroll architect, combined with an admiration and understanding of object orientation, Klaus and team created the infotype system, that still pays millions of employees though the SAP payroll engine (even in the ‘cloud’ era today) – with the needed flexibility to easily extend the system as needed. And we know more payroll challenges are coming towards us – as governments are getting more creative in ways to tax their population, as we face a retirement challenge in most of the first world etc.
So let’s honor Klaus Tschira, not only a HCM Technology giant – but also a great enterprise software executive and simply a nice guy. RIP Klaus, you will be remembered not just for your software work, but much more. But whenever you see, look or hold a SAP created paycheck – you can see Klaus and his teams work in action.
I had the opportunity to be in a few meetings with Klaus, and all of them were great meetings that attendees left thinking they had more with them after the meeting then before they went into it.
My first meeting with Klaus was when SAP was doing due diligence on the CRM vendor we ended up selling to SAP – Kiefer & Veittinger. We had many meetings with man SAP executives, mainly with Hasso Plattner, a few with Dietmar Hopp but the most interesting was with Klaus. Don’t misunderstand me here – all meetings were great – but the one with Klaus gave us the best understanding of what it would be to be part of the large, large SAP. And Klaus it made very clear that our talents and expertise (in CRM) were key to SAP. At the end of the day it was clear that Dietmar Hopp assembled a very diverse founder team, which in my view is a strong reason for SAP’s long term success, till today.
My next interactions with Klaus was when trying to help my team get the first ‘content shipment’ on top of the brand new BW off the ground. Though tasked with CRM content, Marketing content more specifically – we still wanted to get cost of sales and wanted to get to employee, compensation information etc. And that was our first encounter with the infotypes and the unique nature of the HCM products inside of the SAP R/3 product suite. It was practically impossible to get to the information without a thorough understanding and help by the HCM product team, which at the time was pretty reclusive. So we went through Hasso Plattner (I remember him wishing us ‘Good luck’) to Klaus and what was supposed to be a 2 hour meeting turned out to be many meetings and long hours. Along the way we discovered that Klaus was passionate about object orientation, a huge fan of SmallTalk. And he was curious on how we build the K&V Module library on top of C++. It didn’t make it easier to get to SAP HCM information into SAP CRM, but we were left with a much deeper and better understanding and appreciation why SAP HCM was built like this.
Later when I was working in the Office of the Chairman, for Hasso Plattner and Henning Kagermann, Klaus would only step by so very seldom – but when he stopped by he would usually come and say Hello!, asking what I was working on and how I was doing. Klaus seemed to really care for SAP employees – beyond their work direct work, something you don’t experience with too many executives in the industry. I will never forget when he snuck up on me one day as I was helping the CRM team with screenshots (I still had graphic elements and templates from the time we conceived the ‘tile’ based CRM UI), whispering ‘that looks very good’. He then wanted to bring some UI innovation to the HCM team. But not sure where that ended up.
Ironically my biggest appreciation for what Klaus and the team had built came when I joined Oracle. In many executive sponsorships for e-Business Suite implementations, Payroll was a substantial automation piece and while it worked great for some countries, it did not work so well for others. Extension ad maintenance was hard. Not for the usual payroll challenges of keeping up to speed with legislation, but from an architecture perspective. The problem was that Oracle had conceived a large monolithic payroll engine which at some point would get too complex when running for too many countries. With much curiosity I took a look at the PeopleSoft payroll engine, when Oracle acquired PeopleSoft – same design point, same challenge to go beyond 1x+ countries. In an irony of enterprise software history – the challenge that SAP R/3 suffered from, being too complex and with too many configuration options, was at a smaller level the same for Oracle and PeopleSoft for their respective payroll engines. Oracle corrected this with the Fusion / HCM Cloud payroll – but SAP can still leverage the design from Klaus and team and supports 50+ countries today. And when I spend time at NorthgateArinso (now NGAHR), it was clear that with 2 professionals (granted, who knew what they were doing), you were able to extend the SAP payroll beyond those 50 countries (something Arinso had done historically before, too – in partnership with / for SAP or for their BPO customers).
In the combination of coming from Europe and understanding a multinational world earlier than the competitor’s payroll architect, combined with an admiration and understanding of object orientation, Klaus and team created the infotype system, that still pays millions of employees though the SAP payroll engine (even in the ‘cloud’ era today) – with the needed flexibility to easily extend the system as needed. And we know more payroll challenges are coming towards us – as governments are getting more creative in ways to tax their population, as we face a retirement challenge in most of the first world etc.
So let’s honor Klaus Tschira, not only a HCM Technology giant – but also a great enterprise software executive and simply a nice guy. RIP Klaus, you will be remembered not just for your software work, but much more. But whenever you see, look or hold a SAP created paycheck – you can see Klaus and his teams work in action.