2014 European CWG Conference Summary

The CWG Conference in Europe was held in a new venue: the Pentahotel in Leipzig. Leipzig with about 540,000 inhabitants is located about 90 miles southwest of Berlin, and has been a major center for trade and culture for centuries. You may want to take a glance at the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leipzig

The Pentahotel turned out to start with a surprise: one would literally check-in at the bar with several mirror balls and lounge-style electronic music in the background. For those used to the rather pompous design of the Hilton’s and Marriot’s of the world, this must have been like a juvenating culture shock.

As usual, the conference started on Sunday evening with a Meet & Greet right next to that very same bar/reception, and while enjoying the excellent food and chatting with well-known members of the configuration family, the attendees could register for the conference starting next day.

The conference schedule had to be changed last minute as Peter Zencke had to cancel his keynote speech. After warm welcome worlds from our past-president Scott Perdue and the general CWG introduction from the current president Bernhard Teltscher, Bernhard and Marin helped the audience to understand the acronyms (VC – IPC – SSC) and how they are positioned in the SAP universe. Steve Lenz then revealed the development roadmap for the SSC which will also become the configuration engine to be integrated in SAP hybris, the multi-channel platform from SAP which was presented by Karsten Hartmann. We also had two customer presentations on the first day: Bernd Kulhanek from MAN showed how they manage product variants with SAP product structure management (PSM) and Thomas Islinger from Krones provided insight into their very complex configuration models for bottling lines. Last, but not least Henrik Andersen spoke about configuration lifecycle management in the automotive industry.

Day 2 had 19 sessions in three parallel tracks: SAP updates, Best Practices and Partner presentations. To be fair, I do not want to mention any particular sessions here – there was a lot of great stuff. Instead, I encourage every reader to check out the document share on this portal (especially track 1 J). However, as Robert said in his address: reading the slides is not the same as hearing the content at the conference – not to speak about all the rest such as workshops, coffee break discussions and so on.

On Tuesday night, Configit generously sponsored a dinner event. After a sightseeing tour by bus showing some city highlights we had dinner at the historical “Auerbachs Keller”.

Day 3 had the general assembly again and started with the raffle and the group picture.

Then SAP again presented news from development: Petra Meyer revealing SAP’s plan for VC on HANA – en enormous low level MRP-run acceleration and real-time analytics. Don presented an updated overview of the CPQ (Configure, Price, and Quote) market. I had the pleasure to show recent updates of the IPC and PMEVC.

The conference ended with a very lively Q&A question round where topics like restrictable cstics, debugging procedures, technology buzzwords and many more were discussed.

A big thank you to our sponsors (Gold: treorbis, inmind, Configit) who helped to offer the conference at a very reasonable price. 

Last but not least the unvarnished truth: At the CWG conference, you are likely to learn a lot about configuration and meet a lot of smart people, and sometimes you might even have fun. But don’t go there if you are looking to get picked up…..