SAP IT Convergence is About Business Focused Integration

By |August 15th, 2011|

Enterprise SAP IT organizations pose a problem as they are focused on SAP and IT. They lose sight of their purpose, which is to promote the broader objectives of the enterprise. An SAP-centered IT organization's whole existence is about ensuring business benefit, focusing on enterprise goals, strategies, and objectives. Somewhere between the SAP sales cycle and the SAP go-live, the concept of business benefit gets lost and is never found again. By the time you go live with the SAP application, [...]

SAP Consulting Services for Business Results and ROI

By |August 8th, 2011|

The previous post took a hard look at the types of consulting services you need for a high-speed SAP project (see SAP Consultants for High Speed SAP Projects). Consultants who work on SAP projects in the small- and mid-sized business space develop excellent breadth of SAP experience across an entire area. This week, we will look at the other side of that coin: consultant skills from large, long-term type SAP projects and what their experience provides. Consultants on the larger, longer-term SAP [...]

Steering Committee Governance for an SAP Center of Excellence

By |July 11th, 2011|

This post is based on information from my ASUG presentation in Atlanta: Beyond Technology Alignment – Building a Center of Excellence (http://bit.ly/jJefxP). ------------------------- At the intersection of business and IT, you have convergence. At the place of convergence is where the Center of Excellence exists. ------------------------- One of the key SAP project success factors is to use a steering committee made up of key business stakeholders. They can meet once a week or once a month, bu [...]

3 Keys to Reduce SAP TCO & Move to SAP ROI

By |June 26th, 2011|

I only have a couple more posts in my series on overcoming vendor sales tactics, so I wanted to provide a brief distraction and look at a few key areas for SAP organizations to move to excellence. This post focuses on some of the considerations for SAP Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and SAP Return on Investment (ROI). One key to achieving SAP ROI is through convergence or integration of the SAP staff into the business. I have started down this path as part of a follow-up to the recent ASUG Atlan [...]

Overcome SAP-ERP System Integrator Sales Tactics 6

By |June 13th, 2011|

This week’s post in the series deals more directly with the software selection rather than vendor selections. As we move toward the completion of this series, we need to consider a few more issues. Picking the wrong ERP business software package can be one of the factors that contribute to ERP project failure. Aside from evaluating the product fit to your business processes, you also need to carefully consider hardware, third-party software, development tools, scalability, and other factors tha [...]

Do You Know When To Do SAP Custom Development?

By |April 11th, 2011|

Use SAP Best Business Practices For Commodity Processes But More Carefully Evaluate Competitive Processes The debate and discussion around SAP best business practices usually assumes an “either-or” mindset. Either you use the SAP best business practices as they are, or you abandon them (for more background on SAP's "Best Business Practices," see What are SAP Best Business Practices Anyway). Several commentators suggest you should not do a software vendor’s “best practices” because you adopt the [...]