An Interview with Hana Součková (SAP) and Jan Kratochvil (Aimtec): The Cloud Is Changing the Rules

• SAP S/4HANA
• Interview

Artificial intelligence, fast projects and a return to the clean core. What does tomorrow’s digitalisation look like according to SAP? “We’re a hub interconnecting business and technology. It’s our partners who polish every project until it’s flawless,” says Hana Součková, Managing Director of SAP Czech Republic. Together with Aimtec’s Jan Kratochvil, she discusses how data is shaping manufacturing’s future, why the cloud is more than cost savings and how much it means to have a reliable partner.

---

Aimtec is among the organisers of Trends in Automotive Logistics, while for several years SAP has been its main partner. The last TAL bore the tagline “Digital. Future-Proof?” – do you believe that for a company to be future-proof, it's enough to be digital, or does it also take something more?

Součková: People often assume, “Once we go digital, everything will be perfect.” But let’s back up a bit. Why did smart software arise in the first place? The goal was to streamline repeated, routine tasks. These processes were to be entrusted to applications that would learn to do them for us. That lets us introduce these processes into systems in an understandable, repeatable and verifiable way. In manufacturing, where every second counts during picking or process optimisation, we’re talking about enormous financial impacts.

Kratochvil: For digitalisation to truly work well, employees need to be prepared for this process. In manufacturing firms, the people are as important as the technology and software, if not more so. After all, we often encounter nearly flawless software, and yet people who don’t know how to use the tools remain the weakest link.

---

2027 marks a milestone for SAP. Firms still on the “old” SAP will need to migrate to S/4HANA, and they’re also weighing the cloud versus their on-premise systems. What do you see as the biggest advantages of the SAP S/4HANA (public) cloud?

Součková: Software is not a competitive advantage in itself. It’s a means to help companies achieve this advantage. But it solves nothing on its own. It’s been a long time since the world resembled what we knew ten or fifteen years ago. We’ve seen fundamental political, security, economic and energy changes – and now artificial intelligence is entering the fray.

If companies want to stay competitive, they can’t keep riding in a “vehicle” that’s twenty years old. They also can’t keep thinking that installing modern touch controls in a car like that will make it drive like new. Without a modern, flexible foundation that can work with the latest technologies, there’s no point in speaking about innovations. SAP S/4HANA answers the needs of the next fifteen to twenty years, from JIT manufacturing and flexible planning to responses to market fluctuations.

Kratochvil: One crucial benefit of the cloud is its scalability – especially when a customer acquires a new project and needs to improve its IT performance. We see this at companies that have moved to HANA but are running it on-premise. When they go to expand their production, for example with new lines, their system starts to need more memory. Then they’re forced to address a hardware shortfall in their data centre. In a cloud environment, you can easily increase performance practically right away.

Součková: If we want medium-sized enterprises to have access to the same modern technologies as the largest corporations, which can build extensive data centres and operate robust infrastructure, it’s precisely the cloud that can help them achieve this. It lets them harness the latest technologies and scalable services without the need for major starting investments.

Data security is a key topic for every set of IT infrastructure. In your opinion, what distinguishes security approaches between cloud and on-premise environments in the context of SAP solutions?

Součková: For a long time now, SAP has been designed to be auditable and to comply with every requirement, including the GDPR and other regulations regarding work with data.

Our world today is characterised by rising cyberattacks. And yet roughly eighty percent of all incidents come from human error. Someone opens a malicious email or makes a mistake in data handling. But when you have experts who have been trained regularly to prevent such situations, the danger drops significantly.

If, on the contrary, you have a single IT worker who must take care of infrastructure, desktops and end users too, the risk of an error is far greater. Therefore, the cloud brings not just savings and scalability, but also higher security. Additionally, today’s recovery plans activate within minutes – which is key, because any halt in production is itself a crisis.

---

Is it still difficult to convince customers to move to the cloud, or is the situation changing?

Kratochvil: From where I stand it’s getting easier and easier. The trend today is clearly established, and customers are beginning to think differently. They are aware that the cloud is the future and there’s really no other option.

Our first cloud customer was a Japanese company, even though in that part of the world, firms traditionally prefer full control over their data and run their own servers right on the shop floor. While even just two years ago it was unthinkable, for many customers, to give up on their own servers, today even the most conservative ones are slowly re-evaluating.

What’s the decisive factor for major changes in production, and where do you now see the greatest opportunities?

Součková: There’s always complex decision-making behind every change in production. Replacing a production line is a major step – then if you add in new software, which must be hooked up with manufacturing, machinery and logistics, you see why firms look for solutions that will last fifteen years or more – not three or four. New technologies are bringing scenarios that can’t be predicted with traditional methods, and which also demand enormous computing capacity.

Kratochvil: One trend in recent years has been data collection. Machines began to be connected; presses started gathering temperatures, pressures and other manufacturing process data. But evaluation lagged behind all this. Once you’ve moved all that data into a centralised data warehouse, you become able to automate this processing. This brings the opportunity to work with data truly effectively and get real added value out of it.

---

The large volume of data opens up entirely new approaches to metrics and company management. How can this change be put to use?

Součková: It’s great, in my view, how you can begin to drill down through an enterprise’s individual layers. You start with orders, but thanks to data you make it all the way to specific shifts, their efficiency and other parameters.

In the past, performance triggers tended to be horizontal; one person watched the machinery, another measured work productivity, but working past individual views to cut across orders, products or shifts was complicated. That’s changing now. Recently I was speaking with a manufacturing firm that began to newly evaluate the quality of materials throughout an order. Based on this, they retroactively evaluate suppliers – which ones supply materials that lead to less waste or lower scrap rates?

And that’s just the thing. The vertical, the comprehensive view across processes, is starting to shine much more than siloed snapshots. That view can’t be calculated on the hardware a typical mid-sized firm can afford. Here you can see the value that flows from the cloud, analytics and all the tools that make it possible to process it.

Looking back at the 20-year partnership between Aimtec and SAP, where do you see its greatest benefit? What do you find most important in this partnership?

Kratochvil: The biggest benefit of cooperation between SAP and Aimtec is the synergy between SAP’s innovations and our consultants’ deep expertise: they usually work from direct experience – they know the field of industry, they understand the business and they know manufacturing processes inside out. Together, we bring both modern tools and the ability to use them effectively in a customer’s specific business.

Součková: If I were to compare it a bit to the automotive environment, here’s how I see it: even the best mechanic simply can’t build the world’s fastest F1 without support from a strong development team. And things are just like that in our case too.

SAP amounts to a research and development hub – it offers tools, technologies and innovations. Partners like Aimtec are the skilled hands able to polish every project in detail so that customers truly get the very best: the fastest “F1” in the market.

---

Share article