Where Does SAP Offshore Development Make Sense?

By |October 10th, 2011|

If you are capable of providing detailed design specs without any deviation or thought required, offshore development is a great option. The instant your SAP design requires a measure of experience and insight to make judgment calls, or to look for data or processing that is not explicitly spelled out in detail, you are headed for huge hidden costs. The level of detailed spec design work by SAP functional consultants merely shifts the development time and costs to the higher-priced resources th [...]

Hidden SAP Offshore Development Costs

By |October 3rd, 2011|

My experience with SAP offshore developers is that no matter how detailed your spec, their lack of experience with standard SAP transactions and functionality prevents them from properly testing their own creations. Their results are more than just full of bugs; oftentimes, the system crashes when attempting to do even basic testing. Repeat testing by expensive functional resources happens so frequently and consumes so much hidden time from parallel project activities that entire project timeli [...]

SAP ERP Project Failures Lessons Learned and Mini Case Studies 2

By |December 20th, 2010|

The following SAP ERP project failures cover the importance of testing, change management, training, senior management involvement, scope management, and quality of the consultants provided by ERP implementation vendors. With the exception of the inept, incompetent, or otherwise unqualified “con”sultants provided by some system integrators, you should note that these failure overviews illustrate many of the points made by Steve Phillips in the post on Software Consulting Firms and Clients Myths [...]

SAP ERP Project Failure Lessons Learned and Mini Case Studies 1

By |December 13th, 2010|

  The following SAP project failures are the first three of what we will review over the next few weeks. The SAP project failures we will review are high-profile examples with significant lessons to be learned. In nearly every case where the SAP implementation actually occurred, within one to two years after the troubled go-live, the SAP software itself was reasonably well-received and the business generally satisfied.   ================= One interesting feature of the SAP project fai [...]

Toward an SAP Center of Excellence or SAP Competency Center – PART 3

By |July 28th, 2010|

Part 3 of 3 Stages and Components of the SAP Center of Excellence To wrap up this series, we will take a brief look at the post go-live or production support environment. One academic study I reviewed on ERP project success factors defined the three production stages of Acceptance, Routinization, and Infusion (see The Top 5 ERP Success Factors by Project Stage from 22 Critical Success Factors). These three terms fit the requirements for SAP production system stages as you move toward an SAP Cen [...]