No matter what size company or organization you have, the type of consulting experience you choose will have a huge impact on the results of your SAP solution. For high-speed projects, consultants who have several small or mid-sized SAP project experiences tend to be more well rounded. They are skilled at delivering the more difficult SAP solutions with standard functionality and at a faster pace than their counterparts.
Why Are SAP Consultants with Many Small and Midsized Projects Uniquely Qualified?
The small- and mid-size business segment of SAP implementations use smaller teams, smaller budgets, and tighter timelines. Contrary to popular belief, a small- or mid-sized company’s SAP implementation often has the same process requirements, industry needs, competitive pressures, and other issues that go with doing business. In other words, their business software application requirements are exactly the same as their larger counterparts. However, they must deliver similar or better results than their larger counterparts with fewer resources. Consultants who deliver solutions in this space must know their area of responsibility well because they generally don’t have anyone to fall back on. Additionally, they have to cover the integration touch points and other project activities together with their own module. On larger projects, other groups and numerous other consultants participate in this level of effort.
Consultants who have worked in the small- and mid-sized space don’t have the luxury of the big consulting firms, on their mega projects, where they can specialize in one little component of a module at a time. They don’t have the luxury of massive numbers of people coordinating small, discrete components of an overall effort. Small- and mid-sized SAP implementations often don’t have the resources or budget for large change management and training staffing, separate data conversion groups, separate testing staff, or other key areas of the project.
The consultants with many years of small- and mid-sized business exposure can do in a few hours, or possibly a few days, what takes consultants with less exposure weeks to figure out. Even if it is a bit of a stretch, they have enough background, enough exposure, and enough experience to be able to start immediately with 80% or more of the solution. From there, you simply need to test different settings to ensure you have just the right combination and the process or transaction behaves exactly as you planned.
Small- and mid-sized business consultants are less likely to need excessive custom-coded solutions because they can resolve the same issues with standard functionality and “re-purpose” other functionality for your company’s particular need.
An SAP Project Example of Complex Standard Functionality
I will provide one experience that I had here that made a huge difference in the SAP project result. The SAP experience saved the timeline, stopped the continual circular meetings, and finally moved the process along.
SAP Cross-Company Supply
I was on a very large project that had cross-company supply issues that no one had been able to resolve for about two months when I joined. The company had weekly meetings, and weekly arguments, but no one could agree on the solution. The third-party cross-company supply required one company to take the order, transfer the requirements to a separate company who would actually carry out the delivery, and bill the other company who then billed the end customer and collected the payment. This was also being done in different countries, with different currencies, cross-company pricing markup, and foreign trade. After a few weeks of this dragging on after I arrived on the project as the SD team lead, I knew something had to be done. All of the “Big x” consultants claimed this could not be done without mountains of custom code and that standard SAP would not work. These consultants did not lack years in SAP, or large projects doing SAP. However, they lacked experience in delivering results on a compressed timeline with standard functionality.
The SAP Blueprint was over, and we were still in design on a key set of processes. After several discussions where some argued only custom coding would work, I had enough. I took a couple days to set up and prototype the entire solution. The standard SAP functionality did over 90% of everything that was needed for every process and transaction they needed. After the prototype was set up, and without telling the other consultants who insisted it wouldn’t work (and claimed they wouldn’t support it if it did), I set up a meeting with all of the key stakeholders and the client project manager to demo the new functionality. It was a huge success, and the ridiculous arguments and endless discussions to flow out processes for unneeded custom ABAP solutions finally stopped. The solution was nearly complete with almost all standard functionality. [FN1]
Big SAP Project Experience Effects on Compressed Timeline and Budgets
When you want to complete a compressed timeline project with resources (consultants, managers, coordinators, etc.) who come from big SAP projects, you end up with unnecessary struggles. Their “experience” has conditioned them to believe these types of projects cannot be done. They rely on too many middle layers of coordination/management, they struggle with the intense need for integration coordination, and they undermine attempts to gain momentum because they are not used to the pace.
Large projects often provide the luxury of deferring discrete components of an area to others. They provide big budgets, lots of time, and delivery areas broken down into little tiny “chunks” and then handed off to others. Some (though certainly not all) of these consultants and managers from larger projects are so uncomfortable with the pace and demands that they spend more time making excuses for lack of results and look for others to blame. The idea of delivery “ownership” over an entire area is a foreign concept to them. Some of these consultants from larger implementations are lost without someone managing each tiny aspect of what they do.
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[FN1] In fairness to the other consultants who thought this could only be done through ABAP custom coding, it does require a major amount of setup in SD, MM, FI, and EDI to work correctly. While it is all standard functionality, consultants with experience on very large projects have limited exposure to even their own module of expertise. As a result, the full breadth of this and other functionality has likely not been seen outside of the small- and mid-sized business space. In the small- and mid-sized business space, the consulting teams are smaller and out of necessity more knowledgeable within their module area. Additionally, because of the integration requirements with other modules, they tend to gain greater application exposure to standard functionality options.
