SAP ROI — Enterprise Architecture & Business Solutions

Part of the frustration with the failure of results in SAP implementations is the “hangover” from the Y2K effect.  At that time businesses everywhere simply wanted to install ERP systems to take care of the looming potential “crisis” over the millennial changeover.  The real promise of SAP was lost in the Y2K chaos.  After Y2K, the brief downturn in demand for ERP systems along with the tech bubble burst in the stock market created additional pressure.  The idea of delivering SAP implementations “better, faster, and cheaper” together with business benefit was lost in the confusion.  

Because so many custom systems had been developed from the era when disk space and memory were incredibly expensive, nearly all programs were written with 2 digit designations for the year.  The fear was that as we approached the year 2000, those same systems might read that date as 1900, have a different day of the week assigned, or not know how to handle the 2 digit date at all.  As a result there was a massive rush to implement ERP systems to manage this issue and to replace legacy systems with “off the shelf” software.  

ERP and SAP, Better, Faster, Cheaper but What About Business Benefit and Business Focus?

Leading up to Y2K the demand for replacement of these legacy systems with new ERP systems was so strong it lead to an almost exclusive focus on implementing SAP projects “better, faster, and cheaper.”  Certainly this is not a bad thing, but business alignment and business drivers got lost in the fog of technical system replacements.  Rather than doing system implementations that were focused on genuine business drivers nearly all ERP systems were installed as technical system replacements rather than being implemented for business benefit.

After Y2K, there was a continued emphasis by vendors and companies everywhere to implement and automate current business processes because that is the sales model (and competency) they had developed.  That sales model worked, presentations, approaches, methodologies, implementation tools, consulting training and prep, everything was centered around the Y2K “get it in” model. Projects focused only on existing business operations and on replacing existing IT systems.  Implementation methodologies and techniques for “better, faster, cheaper” implementations were developed to support these “quick hit” IT system replacements.

While every project should be delivered on time and on budget, the focus on only current business processes fails to address the forward looking nature of business.  Even to this day businesses implementing SAP still fail to see the system as any other kind of a capital asset where you build a business case with both a current state justification and a future state justification as well.  The current state is nothing more than the “on time, on budget” back office operational project requirements while the future state looks at business strategy and builds those into the application as well.  What do you want SAP to help you with in the future?

ERP Technicians Replace Systems – Consultants Use ERP to Transform Business

SAP projects fail to deliver for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with the software itself.  SAP projects that focus almost exclusively on “back office” processes or “operational excellence” find that they use lagging indicators.  These are important for evaluating current company health, and today’s (or yesterday’s, last months, etc.) indicators of marketplace performance, but these lagging indicators will not produce world class results most C-level executives are now looking for from SAP. [FN1] 

Today the marketplace still wants the “better, faster, cheaper” model of delivery, but now CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs are insisting that the application software must do more.  It must deliver something more meaningful. It must deliver strategy and forward looking business benefit.

Leading or Lagging Indicators? 

SAP projects, whether they are new implementations, upgrades, or re-implementations should begin with strategy, goals, and KPIs. In developing goals, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and performance metrics there are generally two types of measurement categories–, leading indicators and lagging indicators.  Leading and lagging indicators refer to “timing of cash flows within a corporation.”  [FN2] 

In the past, lagging and leading indicators have been applied almost exclusively to economic output, not necessarily to that of business, but the impact of business on economies. 

Recently, with the rise of the use of KPIs as a method to help drive business goals and strategy, the idea of leading and lagging indicators has been applied to business. In the context of economics, Wikipedia defines these indicators as:

Lagging Indicator  

A lagging indicator is an economic indicator that reacts slowly to economic changes, and therefore has little predictive value. Generally these types of indicators follow an event; they are historical in nature. For example, in a performance measuring system, profit earned by a business is a lagging indicator as it reflects a historical performance; similarly, improved customer satisfaction is the result of initiatives taken in the past. [FN3]

Leading Indicator 

[L]eading indicators are key economic variables… used to predict a new phase of the business cycle. A leading indicator is one that changes before the economy does. [FN4]

The Future of SAP – Strategic Implementation 

To finally realize business benefit from SAP, to achieve that elusive ROI and begin to make a difference in the way your company works, you must change the way you approach your implementation.  [FN5]

The Y2K days of any consultant who could learn to make system settings on the fly to support all those implementations are over.  With them, the thousands upon thousands of application “technicians” who got their start in SAP when the demand was so high may not be able to deliver in today’s tremendously competitive market. After all, now that the Y2K scare is long past, businesses everywhere are beginning to ask the really important questions of “how do we make this huge investment actually provide a return?”

The type of vendor and consultant you employ must have business and application experience.  Today more than ever it is critical to ensure you find the right resources and then do some up front planning and prep work yourself. 

Long before your implementation or upgrade project starts the implementation focus must change. 

While it is great to focus on process improvement, and that is critical in today’s market, it is no longer enough to win in today’s marketplace.  All of your competitors are working process improvement so it will not differentiate you in today’s market.  Does that mean you can ignore it?  Of course not, it still has to be done, but it must be done together with a serious strategy focus to your SAP implementation or upgrade.

Start by looking out at your competitive landscape, where are your company’s strengths and weaknesses in comparison to your competitors?  Are there areas in comparison to them that you are not executing particularly well?  Should you then focus on those processes to improve your competitive position?  In the areas you are doing well against your competition, should you emphasize those?  Are there market opportunities you are missing, or are there gaps in your product portfolio that partnering with another firm might help to fill the gap in?  Is your company large enough that you can change the vendor dynamic for certain key products or services by outright purchasing, or possibly underwriting new competitive vendors to ensure better products and services at better prices?

How do you use SAP to enable all of these processes you’ve just answered these questions to?  How do you develop the key goals and KPIs to meet the new market challenges out there in today’s competitive landscape?  What SAP reports or tools will be needed to support your leading indicators?  What KPIs should you focus on first?

There are many more mountains of additional things you can do to use SAP to achieve genuine business benefit, find that “elusive” ROI and make a real difference in the marketplace.  But to get there take the first step to changing your implementation approach–, start by defining the business reason for your implementation or upgrade before you even begin. [FN6]

[FN1]  Using SAP to improve Revenue and Profitability
http://www.r3now.com/using-sap-to-improve-revenue-and-profitability

[FN2] Bloomberg Glossary, http://www.bloomberg.com/invest//glossary/bfglosl.htm (retrieved 9/21/2009)

[FN3] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagging_indicator (retrieved 9/21/2009)

[FN4] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_indicator (retrieved 9/21/2009)

[FN5] SAP as a Change Enabler
http://www.r3now.com/sap-as-a-change-enabler

[FN6]  Change How You Look at SAP to create ROI
http://www.r3now.com/change-how-you-look-at-sap-to-create-roi

Related Posts:

• Using SAP to Improve Revenue and Profitability
• Tactics, Strategy, ROI, TCO and Realizing Business Benefit from SAP
• Competitive Pressures and Value Propositions, Is Lean the Answer?
• The Real Reason Executive Participation Creates IT Project Success
• Where do you Start with SAP Return on Investment or SAP ROI?

For years CIOs have been under pressure to help cut costs, improve operational efficiencies, and automate the enterprise; CIOs implementing SAP have largely been effective at streamlining the back-office. They’ve also succeeded at optimizing the extended supply chain because SAP is well-suited to supporting execution activities, and therefore have been a good fit for reducing costs. However, times are changing.

 To successfully move IT and SAP in the direction of revenue and profitability growth it is important to understand where technology fits into the puzzle–, technology is not magic. When SAP is considered in its proper context as a “change enabler” or “change lever” rather than a “change driver” it is easier to understand how and where it can properly fit into a revenue and profitability context. In other words, technology works best when the rules, metrics, criteria, and the means to acquire, process, or analyze information which supports revenue and profitability are understood and defined. Organizations take on large projects like SAP or any other ERP system to achieve several business benefits, often those might include:

* Revenue growth
* Profit margins
* Customer acquisition and retention
* Sales conversion
* Customer profitability
* Product / product line profitability
* Incentive programs and monitoring
* Market penetration / market share
* Marketing program performance
* “Smart” growth (i.e. “good” customers vs. “bad” customers)
* Time to market

And even though these are the expectations companies have for their ERP or SAP implementation, upgrade, or other applications they rarely achieve these goals because they are looking at the application and technology investment in the wrong way.  They are looking at the technology as if somehow it will cause these things to happen rather than providing the key insights and information that management needs to enable them to happen.  Even though that is not said, when companies invest millions in SAP that is the underlying assumption that somehow the technology will just “cause” revenue and profitability increases.

For example, no amount of technology is going to make your sales people sell more if they are paid on salary, without commissions, and do not have objective sales targets and other performance measures. This comes back to the old adage of “what gets measured gets done” and it is no different with the sales force. However, depending on how you structure your sales and marketing programs SAP contains a number of tools, reports, resources, and other data analysis methods as well as bolt-ons like CRM to facilitate a change in sales and marketing programs and strategies.

In other words ERP, SAP, CRM, APO, BI, and all of the other technology tools must be driven by business needs, and to provide key information relevant to business decisions and processes to ensure success.  And even though that seems self-evident it is still not occurring even to this day at many organizations who implement these technologies.  They often start out with that ideal, however they usually get caught up in the technology and lose sight of the business drivers. 

Since doing SAP project work since 1994 I can only recall a couple of projects where the client spelled out the business drivers, and then communicated and reinforced them to the project team and the larger organization throughout the project.  If the project team performing the implementation does not know the underlying business drivers, or the reasons for the investment, how will they build those expectations into the technology?

What are the CIO and SAP Roles in Revenue and Profitability?

It is healthy that C-Level sponsors are beginning to press IT in the direction of supporting revenue growth and profitability, however, SAP by its nature is part of the execution processing and post-execution analysis process. This is where the expectation of driving revenue and profitability with SAP has to be decoupled from corporate planning and execution. The business side of the equation must be defined first, this supports the business case which in turn drives the technology in the direction of enabling necessary change.

The senior management discussions for the this global ERP system must be focused on what information and processes the organization needs to make the right management decisions, to be more competitive, to focus on the wider marketplace.

In many implementations the reason SAP works to reduce costs is because the reductions are based primarily on improving and integrating operational and accounting execution activities. Using SAP to drive revenue and profitability growth requires building another layer of data collection, data analysis, “tools,” and processes on top of the operational data that is processed. To work correctly this new revenue and sales support layer must be built on well defined sales and marketing programs and strategies that are then converted into processes with clear performance metrics and KPIs. A focus on process improvement, business process automation, efficiency gains, cycle-time reductions, and other business process management related issues is not enough.

Sales and marketing must do their part in integrating their strategies into clearer plans, programs, metrics, KPIs, and other measurable criteria that can then be executed on with IT / SAP supporting these processes. ERP systems like SAP do not exist in a vacuum; they are dependent on data from plans, strategies, and historical analysis based on some concrete or perceived KPIs and business metrics. Until a company’s customer touch points (sales, marketing, customer service, shipping, etc.) are able to provide quantifiable plans, goals, metrics, and KPIs for what is important, it is difficult for SAP initiatives to directly affect revenue and profit.

I’ll bet many C-level executives in SAP shops didn’t know that the ERP application contains standard functionality to integrate sales planning, sales forecasting, marketing expenditures, and product or service execution with financial budgeting and multiple dimensions of profitability. For example, over the years I’ve worked on clients that have used one or more of the following methods from standard or enhanced SAP functionality (and there are many, many more possibilities):

· Points loyalty program (ERP pricing and SIS or CRM)
· Trade Promotions Programs (CRM, bolt-on, or custom ERP app)
· Marketing Effectiveness (CRM, custom reporting, BI/BW)
· e-sales with catalogs and configurable products (R3 Internet Sales or CRM – they use the same backend)
· Sales or Marketing program budgeting (ERP CO and internal orders with SD user exits)
· Sales forecast to actual (ERP Sales and Operations planning, CRM, BI/BW)
· Order templates (Generic quotes as templates, ERP, R3 Internet sales, CRM)
· Potential Planning (customer potential buying and planning against marketing plan – ERP, CRM)
· Ticklers, Marketing, Sales activities and campaigns (limited ERP functionality or with CRM)
· Customer churn (standard ERP functionality, custom report, BI/BW, or CRM)
· Customer $$ sales growth, month over month, year over year (SAP ERP functionality, custom report, BI/BW, or CRM)
· Order frequency trends (standard SAP functionality, custom report, or with CRM)
· Upselling, cross-selling, product allocation, substitutions, free goods (standard SAP ERP functionality).
· Web based reports and mobile device sales support (ERP mobile device functionality or CRM)
· Commissions and incentives (SAP ERP functionality or CRM).

One of the things the companies that have implemented these solutions and others had in common was there were already reasonably well defined sales and marketing processes and programs in place. As a result, the SAP technology was used as a change lever to enhance and improve those existing processes and programs to achieve a measure of revenue growth, profitability, and competitive advantage.

Where to begin with a business and market centered approach to SAP?

1. Develop your longer term business plans, define marketing and competitive pressures along with current and future value proposition(s).
2. Define the business strategies to support them.
3. Determine the goals that support those strategies.
4. Derive your KPIs for those goals. To be successful these KPIs must include both lagging indicators (financial) and leading indicators (pointing to growth).
5. From those metrics and KPIs determine which business processes and departments will be affected, sales, customer service, shipping, marketing, etc.
6. Define the necessary reports that will be needed to report on those goals and KPIs. These reports should use both leading and lagging indicators.
7. Operationalize the strategy by defining the processes that will support them.
8. Assign responsibility for the reporting requirements to the proper department heads.
9. Create an internal progress communication process.
10. Implement the necessary technology solution(s) to support the new paradigm (SAP BI, SAP CRM, SAP ERP functionality, etc.)

By following these steps you will see business centered results that are enabled or empowered by technology, not the other way around. Below are some examples of key ideas for defining strategy, processes, and technology to help with revenue growth and profitability. While in no way comprehensive the following outline provides some steps to begin on this journey. Some type of plan or steps to produce metrics which can be turned into an IT and CIO supported system strategy for revenue and profitability growth are listed.

1. Senior executive sponsorship is needed to drive integration of sales, marketing, and customer service processes. Many of them can be very difficult to “pin down” on key measures for sales and marketing drivers. Without C-level direction here it will be difficult at best to achieve and impossible at worst.

2. Set clear expectations of cooperation between those processes which “touch” the customer.

3. Determine how baselines and benchmarks for KPIs will be determined. The best baselines, benchmarks, metrics, and KPIs will require interdepartmental support. Some of the KPIs, though not all, should be outside of the silo. For example, some of the KPIs should cross over sales and marketing together. Some should cross over sales and customer service, or shipping, etc. The more the KPIs are structured within a silo the more possibility there is for finger-pointing and deflection. It has to be everyone’s job to promote revenue and profitability.

4. Senior level sales and marketing managers must set specific KPI’s, strategies, and plans around customer “touch points” as they relate to revenue generation and profitability. For example:
  a. What processes or sales functions require your sales force to be in the office rather than in the field? How can these be automated or delivered remotely?
     i. Web based?
     ii. Hand held?
     iii. E-delivery through automated e-mail notices or text messages?
  b. What are important new markets and how do you conduct pilots or rollouts to new markets?
     i. Do you have preferred customers as partners who would be willing to cooperate and “pilot” new product or market rollouts?
  c. What about new products?
     i. Do you know what your concept to engineering to market to customer cycle times are?
     ii. Where are the bottlenecks in each of these sub-processes?
     iii. How can they be streamlined?

5. How will you measure customer retention, customer loyalty, and most of all, conversion of retained or loyal customers to actual sales? (after all, what difference does it make if you have retained and loyal customers if they don’t buy more of your products, or pay for premium services or products?)
  a. Do you have (or need) some type of metrics around defining “good” customers (high revenue or sales compared to the cost of doing business) vs. “bad” customers (low revenue or sales compared to the cost of doing business).
  b. How do you measure customer “churn” or attrition of “good” customers?
  c. How do you measure sales growth into the existing customer base?
     i. How do you segment or stratify that data, by product line, by geography, or by customer sales volume?
  d. How do you target new customer acquisition?
     i. In spite of what some salesmen may say, companies do not sell “everything” to “everyone,” so what are your target markets?
     ii. What are your key criteria to focus your sales efforts on your target markets?
     iii. Where are your “invest” opportunities for sales growth and how do you measure the effectiveness of that investment?
     iv. How do you integrate marketing, sales, and customer service into customer acquisition?

6. Define processes and reporting points for each of the key customer “touch” points, whether it is sales, marketing, service and support, or new product / new market entry.

7. What is your strategy for getting company knowledge about products or services closer to the customer?
  a. Are you tracking service or repair trends?
     i. Do you have standard defect codes or service delivery categories?
     ii. Do you have a solution database?
  b. How is engineering, R&D, or new product development integrated into the sales, marketing, and support feedback cycle?

8. What tools do you need to capture customer intelligence based on contacts, visits, and other information traditionally maintained in CRM systems?

9. What external data sources and information do you need for customer acquisition?

These and many, many more questions must be answered within your sales, marketing, and customer service organizations to drive strategies, plans, programs, and ERP investment opportunities for increasing revenue and profitability.

Once you define your revenue and growth plans and strategies, determine the key metric for how performance will be measured by developing a set of KPIs. From this set of KPIs, and from the plans and strategies that are developed, take the time to prioritize them based on a simple cost / benefit analysis. What costs the least (in terms of time, cash, resources, etc.) and has the biggest payback? Depending on your business, you may weight some of the cost factors differently, but try to keep the priority process as objective and clear as possible by creating some type of scoring protocol. Using some type of objective method to prioritize will help to keep the politics, personalities, and emotion out of the process. The approach may not produce a perfect result, but it will be focused on results rather than personalities.

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Please see the article on Screening Methods to Find the Right SAP Consultant. This type of process analysis, business strategy, and help with development of the best possible plans for implementing your SAP solution is exactly why SAP consultants with real experience are necessary.

Related Posts:

• Tactics, Strategy, ROI, TCO and Realizing Business Benefit from SAP
• Competitive Pressures and Value Propositions, Is Lean the Answer?
• The Real Reason Executive Participation Creates IT Project Success
• SAP as a Change Enabler
• Where do you Start with SAP Return on Investment or SAP ROI?