Yesterday we hosted an SAP Experience Day/LiveCompare 2.2 Launch Part at the Westonbirt Arboretum.  Despite the forecast for rain, the weather held long enough for everyone to get out and enjoy this beautiful location.

Inside the Great Oak Hall, we had presentations from AMR, SAP, DataConsulting, British American Tobacco and, of course, IntelliCorp.  The audience was mix of current customers, partners and organizations that are actively looking at our products.

Derek Prior, AMR shared with us the results of a number of surveys highlighting the magnitude of change that an SAP customer experiences on a yearly basis.  He also showed that organizations with established CoEs implementing good processes supported by great tools had the best experience and lowest overall TCO.  He was also kind enough to relay the good things he's heard about our products from customers.  Thanks Derek!

Mike Longden, SAP, who'd just hot-footed it from SAP's own World Tour the day before, brought everyone up-to-date on the SAP software stack and how Enhancement Packs will simplify the deployment of new functionality.  News to me was the fact that with Enhancement Pack 3, you can bind this in automatically as part of an ECC 6 upgrade.

Michael Peet, British American Tobacco showed he's using LiveCompare to support an "evidenced-based" system of internal audit.  SAP, LiveCompare, and ACL work hand-in-hand to reduce the effort of running an audit and the information produced gets greater visibility in the business.  Asked by Derek whether BAT had seen an improvement in business practice, Michael said definitely.  Interestingly, the publication of the country-by-country performance has created a 'competition' to improve.

Robin Clough, DataConsulting, talked about using LiveCompare as a platform for continuous auditing.  IntelliCorp ships a number of audit templates with LiveCompare but we recognize that specialist skills are required to take this to the level of supporting continuous audit.  Robin and the team at DataConsulting are working to build just such a system of templates.  Watch this space.

Richard Hurst and I spent time relaying experience from established customers like Nalco, P&G and Hershey's.  We also ran through the new functionality in LiveCompare 2.2.  Richard's demo was a new one for us that showed how LiveModel and LiveCompare can work together to understand what's changing and the impact of change at the technical (LiveCompare) and busines process (LiveModel) levels.  I expect we'll be using this approach a lot more.

All the presentations may be downloaded from here.

In honour of the location we ran a photography competition at lunch time with Derek Prior from AMR as our judge.  Derek judged that Michael Peet, British American Tobacco had shown great originality with this shot:

I can see this picture fronting SAP's drive towards a carbon-neutral business.

I can't thank Derek, Mike, Robin and especially Michael enough for the effort they put in to creating their engaging presentations.

Special thanks to Emma Dowey and Jenny Isaac for organizing the seminar.

A great day was had by one and all.