Series on SAP Competency Center or SAP Center of Excellence

By |July 21st, 2010|

  THREE-PART SERIES ON DEVELOPING AN SAP CENTER OF EXCELLENCE. You probably already knew that a "Competency center" is focused on SAP application support such as help desk functions, system stabilization, troubleshooting, etc. But did you know that a true "Center of Excellence" is focused on the business and business drivers? The key goal of a "Center of Excellence" is to integrate not just the application, but the application support staff into the business. Business Transformation from [...]

A New SAP Implementation Methodology and Implementation Steps

By |June 28th, 2010|

Studies have shown that projected benefits in business cases for IT investments and actual value achieved face a critical disconnect, because so many firms focus on going live with a project rather than its value delivery. An SAP/ASUG best-practice survey on capturing the projected benefits of an IT project found that 73% of companies do not quantitatively measure value post-implementation (SAP Executive Insight Series, pg. 7, 2009). Critical business benefits for an SAP project require taking [...]

Change Management Strategies and Knowledge Transfer Processes for a Successful SAP Project 1

By |June 24th, 2010|

Why SAP Process Understanding, Troubleshooting Ability, and Knowledge Transfer Techniques Are Missing in SAP or ERP Projects Because an ERP system such as SAP has a single database or a single instance of data, a full process chain of dependencies is developed. Every organizational function becomes dependent on the process steps before and after it, no matter what department or area is responsible (Kallinikos, 2004). Because of these dependencies, a data error is no longer contained in a single [...]

Lower SAP Application Support Costs – TCO – by Reducing Custom Solutions

By |June 21st, 2010|

Previously I explained the two primary types of implementations-- with SAP or any other ERP package, you will do business process engineering or software engineering. The differences in these two types of implementation approaches will have a major impact on your total cost of ownership (TCO) and your long-term application lifecycle costs. ------------------------------- Software Engineering or Business Process Engineering? https://www.iitrun.com/sap-implementation-focus-software-engineering-or [...]

SAP Implementation Partner or Company Selection Criteria

By |June 5th, 2010|

Project success depends on an implementation partner's ability to ensure business transformation occurs. Can the SAP implementation partner or company deliver business process engineering together WITH the new system? Or, as with so many of them, do they just install systems and call that an implementation? Lately, I have been focused on developing a solid and repeatable ERP software and vendor selection process. While reviewing the academic literature and reflecting on my time working with SAP [...]