At a time when business travel is often one of the first items on the budget chopping block, the programs run by The Eventful Group continue to draw more and more attendees. Last week’s SAP-Centric EAM conference—three days of sessions, networking and education on SAP enterprise asset management—drew 409 attendees, as well as the entire EAM solution team from SAP. The Eventful Group, whose North American offices are based in Syracuse, NY, also holds programs in Australia and South Africa.

What’s the secret? Simple. Steve Sinkoff, Eventful Group’s managing director, Americas, is plugged in to his communities, which include, among others, EAM, utilities, and oil and gas. Programs such as the one in California last week are meticulously researched through focus groups prior to the event and attendee feedback during it. Presentations are practical and customer-led. But the real jewels, as attendee Bill Towsley of Suncor Energy put it, are in the strength of the attendees’ experience. In just one conversation with a fellow attendee, “half of your woes have been solved,” he said.

In this interview, Sinkoff talks about The Eventful Group, the need for and advent of its SAP training sessions, and also lends his view of the biggest issues facing EAM professionals today.

ASUGNEWS.com: How can SAP professionals justify the expense of travel and education today?

Steve Sinkoff: It’s interesting. What we’re seeing is a real changing of the guard. About 32 companies out of the 132 that are at our program this year are new companies. That’s an incredibly exciting thing.  A lot of those companies are looking at SAP, considering the solutions for EAM and others. With our crowd getting a bit younger and less experienced, it’s critically important that organizations involve their employees in programs like ours.

At the end of the day, the issues they’re trying to solve are so complex, and why not invest in learning from other people’s experiences? It’s really a coaching, mentoring type of environment.

ASUGNEWS.com: In that vein, The Eventful Group has started offering SAP training sessions as well. Can you tell me more?

Steve Sinkoff: One of the trends we see is that organizations are struggling with training their people. The success of the implementation has a little bit to do with the system integrator, but it is really about how you trained your people. If you could make it systemic to your organization, from the top to the bottom, and really get them to understand the business process and the solutions, and train them to use the system, guess what: You’re going to have a successful implementation.

People want training, and there aren’t many places to get it. Through our focus groups, we learn the key areas in which they’re looking for help. We’ve brought in some experts and formulated some training programs. They’re deep-dive, two-day programs (with experienced consultants). You have access to an SAP system where you can actually see it happening and work with it.

ASUGNEWS.com: Talk to me about some of the topics that are important in the EAM community this year.

Steve Sinkoff: I can draw on data from 15 years of focus groups—we do the same research and methodology in all locations.

The phenomenal thing is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re here, or there, or anywhere, or whether you’re from the paper industry, the chemical industry or the oil and gas or any of the asset intensive industries, they all have very similar issues.  Organizations struggle with understanding how to leverage the EAM solutions they already have, planning and scheduling, usability, reliability, master data, maintenance plans, KPI’s and access to information.  There are no surprises here, just the fundamental things companies and the solution providers need to do better.

Another key issue in the enterprise asset management space is that managers straddle the challenge of communicating with the executive leadership, engineering and the shop-floor at the same time.  The issue is that they speak different languages.   Engineers speak in engineering speak, executives in share-holder value and the shop floor wants to operate efficiently, and effectively and doesn’t understand the complexities of the business.  The reality is that they are all trying to do the exact same thing – achieve the business goals, but none understands the others’ language and the EAM professional is stuck trying to connect the dots and fit the puzzle pieces together.

Those directors and manager levels really have to learn about communication; it’s one of the biggest issues. I know how to talk to the operations people, but I don’t know how to talk to the executives, and I have to understand how to bridge that gap. Very few [organizations] have a VP of maintenance, yet most organizations spend about 30 percent of revenue on maintenance.

ASUGNews.com: Are there potential collaboration opportunities for ASUG and The Eventful Group? And how could that benefit members of each community?

Steve Sinkoff: ASUG and The Eventful Group have a huge opportunity to give major benefit to the communities we support with the collaboration of our efforts.  With the ASUG reach and our deep community connection, we can assist customers on many levels across many industries.  Our efforts are very complementary and have the similar goal of helping users make better decisions.  We both want to make a difference in the lives of our communities, so the collaboration is a natural. 

Photos by Gregg Le Blanc

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1 Comment for SAP EAM Trend Talk with Steve Sinkoff of The Eventful Group

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Interesting post.

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