"Attendance means Influence…"

2012 European CWG Conference Summary

  

This year’s 2012 European Berlin CWG Conference, "Attendance Means Influence" was kicked off with another well-attended "Meet and Greet" session on Sunday evening sponsored by the CWG. 

And back to the roots, our first European Conference was set up in 2000 in Berlin.  And returning to this beautiful city proved to be very attractive for our participants.

This conference had 142 members in attendance amongst whom we continue to see a high percentage of SAP customers. 

Bill Dorow of IBM, our past president, served as the emcee this year and did a great job of keeping our conference schedule on track and the attendees informed on conference logistics and activities.

The conference program and all the Berlin Conference presentations are available to CWG members either from the list of all presentations or on the document share. This year, we started providing a conference app for Android and iOS, to enable members to compile, review, and rate their preferred conference agenda. This was the first time to provide this kind of app for our attendees, and based on the surveys, the acceptance was quite good.

The first day of the conference, which was a general session day, contained many presentations related to the theme of "Attendance Means Influence," including a key note address,“Configuration 2012-2015 Theory, Market Practice and Outlook ” by Henrik Reif Andersen, CEO of Configit.  Also included were presentations by SAP highlighting new functionality and roadmaps, including their new focused business solution related to “Solution Sales Configuration” and customer and partner presentations by Sybit and Phoenix Contact GmbH & Co. KG, along with “CWG/ASUG Influence Council Update” by Steve Schneider, who made the trip to Europe from the USA.

The second day was our standard multi-track day where we had presentations divided across three main tracks: SAP Updates and Influencing, Best Practices, and Partner Solutions.  It is often hard to decide which presentation to attend when there are many worthwhile presentations happening in parallel. This conference had a special focus in the Best Practice track to have presentations focused on the “testing scope” and “modeling topics”.  And I can assume that especially for first time attendees, sometimes it was hard to follow.

For the final and third day, everyone was back together in the general session assembly.  Robert Eramo welcomed everyone to the final day of the conference, then demonstrated his skills with Excel by randomly (we think) selecting the winners of the door prizes. This year’s prizes included a highly desired headphone, iPod Nano, Barry Walton Photos, and SAP Variant Configuration books provided by eSpline. We then had our group photo taken in our CWG shirts which you can download and view (Full-Size 4 Mb or Large 1Mb).  

We had some very good general audience presentations by Steelcase, Dr. Wüpping Consulting GmbH, SAM Electronic GmbH and eSpline LCCC/ConfigAir LCC .  As always, the conference ended with an “ask the experts” open discussion.  Based on our surveys, this is one of the main benefits people say you get by coming to CWG conference - to get answers to specific problems.  Many attendees stayed for this session, and it was a very interactive session with many good questions and responses from the experts.

Conference attendees were encouraged to fill out a conference survey and close to 50% of attendees responded. Even though we did have some technical glitches to start the conference, the overall feedback for the conference was very positive. 

We also want to thank our gold sponsors for supporting us at the Berlin CWG Conference

                                       

                       

 

 

In addition to the silver sponsors

                           

            

 

And last but not least to our administrative support

               

             

 

 

Some attendee comments from the survey

• “This was my first time to the overseas spring conference. The conference was an awesome experience”.
• “Appreciate the road map and vision sessions since they provide some vision that we can bring back to our companies”
• “For the overall package of the conference I will give 10 from 10 points! Keep at it! I hope to see you soon.”
• “Follow up the native speaker was sometimes real hard”
• “Overall experience was excellent”
• “The conference itself was excellent, location is great, lunch was good (but not as excellent or great as conference and location...).”
• “seems that we did not meet all expectation especially from new at tendencies”
• “It was a pleasure to be here and join the folks.”
• “I expected to get more presentations on issues of the VC”
• “I liked the conference very much. Best conference I ever had. Good organization, very nice attendees and board members.”