Basis Technologies launches Klario to help automate SAP change management

SAP change management is a challenge in most organizations, and it’s an area that Basis Technologies currently serves with its Intelligent Change Management products.

Executing a change is one thing, but first you have to determine the right change to execute, said Basis Chief Product Officer George Apostolakis. That, he said, was the genesis of Klario, an AI-powered platform to help SAP Cloud Application Life Cycle Management (ALM) customers define, evaluate, and select change solutions.

“SAP has the integrated toolkits, offering their tools, and amazing [third party] tools out there, including our own, that are focusing exclusively on how you control the execution of change,” he said, “But the problem is that you don’t only have to execute efficiently. You have to execute the right thing.”

Klario, launched Wednesday at the SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando, Florida, looks at the business requirements for a change, takes data from sanitized, aggregated insights from SAP implementations across industries, and proposes options to help fulfill those requirements.

Basis Technologies has been working with SAP’s Application Life Cycle Management team for over eight months on the problem of change delivery, Apostolakis said.

Until now, added David Lees, Basis Technologies chief technology officer (CTO), the company has primarily focused on executing changes, assuming that the process to select the correct change is complete. “With Klario,” he said, “we’re going further upstream, and that’s because this kind of technology is so central to businesses. It’s getting more and more critical to execute the right change efficiently, so that [customers] can deliver more change at the pace the business needs.”

Klario helps organizations remove their technology blinkers, Lees said, so they won’t just keep doing what they’ve always done, and will consider potentially better ways to achieve their goals.

It also addresses other problems, noted Robert Kramer, VP & principal analyst, Enterprise Data, ERP & SCM, at Moor Insights & Strategy.

“Klario tackles a common problem in SAP environments: uncertainty around how to plan and manage change,” he said. “By using lessons from real SAP projects, it gives teams a clearer picture of what’s worked before and how to approach similar challenges. This is especially helpful for organizations moving to S/4HANA or modernizing older systems, where poor planning can lead to delays and added costs. Klario also supports SAP’s direction with Cloud ALM and modular design, helping teams work within existing governance processes while evaluating risks, timelines, and tradeoffs. For companies that don’t have deep in-house SAP expertise, it can help fill that gap and provide more confidence in making change decisions.”

How it works

Customers enter their requirements into the product in plain English, and the product will come back with questions to clarify the request, said Apostolakis. Once the user agrees on its understanding, Klario identifies options for the change from the data pool and presents them to the user.

“The system at no point makes its own decisions without the user having actually validated the next action,” Apostolakis said. “This is key, because one of the big problems with AI is trust, and rightly so.”

Once the options are identified, the user can ask Klario questions, do further research, or query the database again. When they are satisfied with the selected option, the system does a quick check of its feasibility at a high level, checking that the customer’s implementation is, for example, on the right release of SAP, and that the necessary skills are likely to be in-house. It flags any gaps to be considered in the planning. Then the user can select “Create blueprints,” which will generate the project tasks and other necessary items in Cloud ALM.

Lees said that Klario can also offer a reality check when a customer receives a proposal from a system integrator. “It puts a little bit more of the control back into the hands of the customer,” he said.

However, Kramer noted, Klario doesn’t offer a solution to all of the issues around change.

“Klario is a great tool for planning,” he said, but “Issues like user resistance, misaligned priorities, skill shortages, and lack of clear communication still need to be addressed internally.”

The tool can guide decisions, he said, but it doesn’t execute them: “Its recommendations are only as useful as the organization’s ability to act on them. Additionally, because the tool relies on general patterns, the fit for each customer’s specific situation may vary. Klario is a helpful planning aid, but organizations will still need strong internal coordination and leadership to succeed.”