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 [...]

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 [...]

ERP vs. ERP II vs. ERP III Future Enterprise Applications

By |May 31st, 2010|

ERP I, ERP II, & ERP III Abstract ERP applications integrate enterprise operations within and across enterprise legal entities, or company codes. ERP ii (or ERP 2) applications extend supply functionality to external enterprises (generally vendor-affiliated companies or enterprises) to reduce cost, improve supply chain efficiency, and perform collaborative innovation. ERP iii (or ERP 3) enterprises go to the next level as they integrate the ERP and ERP ii functionality to include customers [...]

Striving for a Customer Focused Approach to Innovation 3 of 3

By |April 5th, 2010|

In the first two parts of this series, we looked at the current innovation paradigm. That paradigm consists mostly of two primary approaches: namely incremental innovation that looks more like continuous improvement, and a free-for-all that is more like chaos. We also looked at a third approach to innovation: leveraging existing marketing infrastructure to produce a future state narrative. That narrative acts as a future state blueprint for product or service development to move toward. Innovat [...]

ERP III – Is the Integration of Collaboration the Future of Enterprise Applications

By |February 11th, 2010|

When I was at Grant Thornton in the late 1990's, and then later when the management consulting organization was sold to Hitachi, I worked on a comprehensive knowledge management model (which I will refer to later in this article). The model can be applied to integrating collaboration tools into any enterprise application. Carefully structured and planned integration of collaboration tools can produce great results. However, integration is a challenge. Many social media types aim to tie collabor [...]

Opportunities for SAP Innovation

By |September 19th, 2009|

What if someone like me -- an independent consultant -- came along and said “SAP, I’ve got some really great ideas on how you can dramatically change the application for far greater success in the marketplace”? What if this change make the application more useful, and would not cost that much in developer time or resources? What if this change could be done almost completely with pre-existing functions, functionality, and code that SAP already has but has not done a good job themselves of integ [...]