ABOUT THE FOUNDER

Now on Your Side of the Table.

30+ years across the SAP ecosystem. Every major platform shift from R/3 to S/4HANA Cloud. 20 years managing partners across 4 continents. Now helping partners navigate the shift that changes everything — AI.

THE STORY

From CeBIT 1992 to the AI Tsunami

1992

In 1992, I was working for a software vendor in Germany when I walked into CeBIT in Hannover and saw what would become SAP R/3. It was the first ERP system with a proper graphical user interface — no more white or red characters on a black screen. I saw the light. I had to join the movement. By January 1993, I landed in Canada as a logistics consultant implementing R/3 for Fortune 1000 companies — MM, SD, PP, WMS. Best business decision I ever made.

1996

After a few intense years in consulting and presales, implementing R/3 across Canada, I started to get frustrated with the reporting complexity. So in 1996, I sent a memo to SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner with five ideas to simplify R/3. I expected it to disappear into the void. Instead, Hasso called me back in Montreal to talk about them. That memo led to an invitation to lead the Americas Product Planning team in 1997 — and set the trajectory for everything that followed.

2000s

From 2000 onward, my career shifted toward sales and partner management — first in Canada, then globally. When SAP launched its first SaaS ERP offering, Business ByDesign, my team designed the SAP SaaS Partner Program and specifically how resell and co-sell of SaaS would work — models that became the foundation for all of SAP’s cloud offerings. As part of the BYD launch, I interviewed around 40 partners across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, trying to understand why some would take 800 days to deliver R/3 on a manufacturing scope when others would do it in 250. Those learnings became the foundation of the IP I am now building into TransformERP.AI.

2016 — 2024

By 2016 I was working on the launch of S/4HANA Public Cloud — later named GROW with SAP — running the global go-to-market with Accenture, Deloitte, PwC, and EY. Implementation effort was not where we expected it to be, so in 2024 we ran another round of partner interviews. It was then that I heard a Japanese and a Turkish partner describe how they had started using AI for technical tasks like writing test scripts and generating code. The large language models were just starting. Nowhere near what they can do today. But enough — for me — to pay attention.

The Pattern

Over the past 30+ years, our industry has lived through major waves: the shift from mainframe to client-server, the rise of the internet, the move from on-premise licensing to SaaS. I helped partners navigate each one. But what we are experiencing now is not another wave. This is a tsunami.

2024

In late 2024, I made my second-best business decision. I left. Not to retire, but to enjoy freedom again. Freedom from PowerPoints and QBRs. Freedom to explore what AI was actually becoming.

I started exploring AI through the local AI Labs in Strasbourg, then took courses with MIT, the UK’s MMC, India’s Outskill, and many other providers. That is when I realised the sheer power of these tools. AI is now at such an inflection point that it gives us ways to fix complexity and scale at much lower cost. It was time to get back in the game — to help partners drastically increase the productivity of their sales and delivery teams, and reduce delivery effort. That is now my mission with TransformERP.AI.

"This is not about adding stronger legs to the caterpillar. This is about metamorphosis into the butterfly. And that is the journey I am here to help you through. After all, flying is so much more fun than crawling"

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BEYOND THE WORK

The Person Behind the Practice

Today I eat and apply GenAI daily. It comes with frustrations, but there is not a day where I am not amazed at what these tools can do — building a board-level deck in minutes with Gamma, using Claude for anything that needs deep thinking and strategic pressure-testing, and Gemini for anything where Google’s ecosystem adds an edge.

I live in Strasbourg — a city where French and Germanic cultures meet, where I studied before the SAP world pulled me in, and where my wife, our three children, and I returned in 2012. My wife is a food engineer who has been running SAP projects for almost thirty years.

We are parents of three young adults and grandparents now. On weekends, I help serve warm meals to people in need with a local NGO. We are also building a new house near the old family barn, with three of my 7 siblings just across the street, and my mother — at 85 — still looking after her chickens on the other side.

In my years at SAP, every decision came down to two criteria — in that order: the customer has to win, and the partner has to make margin. SAP's revenues were always a derivative of those two. Now with AI, we can do serious work on all three.

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