Trips to Germany
This week, I headed back to Germany – Heidelberg and Walldorf specifically – again to speak and participate in SAP’s Commodity Management Forum. I had been to Essen just a couple of weeks previously for E-World. Living in Brno, I find it a bit difficult to get to places like Essen and Heidelberg honestly. I have to drive to Prague or Vienna and then fly to Dusseldorf or Frankfurt and then train to the final destination. When all said and done, about 8 to 10 hours of travel and wait time. So, I thought I would do it differently and I took the overnight sleeper to E-World and drove to SAP! More of that later.
I was the first speaker at SAP setting the scene for the one and a half day session. The topic of my presentation was essentially the vast and accelerating changes we are experiencing across the commodities space. It seemed to go down well. This was the 5th SAP Commodities Management meeting I had attended out of six all told and each time, it has grown. This year was no exception with over 100 people attending. Many from SAP customers. SAP Commodity Management is doing very well it seems and SAP has added much of the ‘CTRM’ functionality that it once missed and even partnered with Lacima for advanced risk analytics. When you add in all of the other things that a software company the size of SAP can do like its AI/ML, blockchain capabilities and its UI work, availability as a cloud or on premises (or mix of both), model companies and so on (to be discussed in more detail next week), and it is all rather an impressive leap into the commodities space for them. I learned about where SAP is taking the products, what users like Cargill have so far achieved with it and a lot more besides. The demonstrations were equally informative.
As usual, I met a whole host of new contacts and old colleagues. Some I had not seen in over 15-years from the US so it was truly a pleasure to have an opportunity to catch up with them.
Meanwhile, as often seems to happen when I’m on a trip, there was quite a bit of news this week from a variety of players. Brady, Inotech and IOWArocks all put out news but the steady beat of Coronavirus and its impacts on economies, equities and commodities continued to be the main news item of the week.
So the drive to Heidelberg had been smooth and uneventful. I covered 699km in around 7 hours. The trip back however, was not. Traffic jams in Germany gave way to blinding snow storms and wind around Plzen. Then, I made matters worse by opting to cut across the Czech Republic rather than sticking to the motorway via Prague. Initially, I was happy with my choice but then as darkness fell and the snow started to fall faster and faster, I realized my strategic error. There was no one on these small and winding roads and I could barely see through the falling snow. The road was also beginning to become lost in a sea of white. By the time I reached Telč, I was thinking hotel room. However, as luck would have it, the snow stopped at that point and I had a clear run home arriving after a 14 hour trip.
In retrospect, the train was far better….
Keep in touch and sign up to our Newsletter
