SAP Contract Requirements for a Center of Expertise

By |July 2nd, 2012|

  Most, if not all, of new SAP contracts and agreements contain provisions that require customers to create a “Center of Expertise” (or CoE). This is a customer’s, and SAP’s, first line of maintenance support. The CoE terms and conditions define a great aspiration that your organization will support “efficient implementation, innovation, operation and quality of business processes and systems” based on the Phase 6 RUN SAP ASAP Methodology. Good luck with all that! Returning to realistic [...]

There is Life after the SAP Go Live

By |June 25th, 2012|

One of the areas that academic literature, consulting firms, and most system integrators rarely address is the organizational acceptance, full use, and assimilation of the SAP package. To the extent the system integrators or consulting firms do mention post production support, they generally only do so in the context of managed services or outsourcing. They do little to help companies develop a thriving production environment with your own resources. One of the biggest problems I see anywhere i [...]

The SAP User Experience

By |April 9th, 2012|

Over a decade ago SAP embarked on a journey to revamp their outdated user interface.  Enter "nJoy" SAP with all of the new "N" transactions.  But it has been over a decade now and other than some nice refinements to the GUI not much has changed.  A decade in the technology space is like a century in other areas.  Isn't it time to take a hard look at the application suite again? So you have the cute "Netweaver Business Client" but there hasn't been a lot done to chan [...]

Organizational Change Management Inside the SAP IT Support Organization

By |April 2nd, 2012|

The last few weeks have focused on the path for IT leaders to become strategic business partners. Academic research shows that to gain Sustained Business Value from SAP Business Software, you must focus technology implementation efforts on business benefits. This includes using metrics to determine if business goals were achieved by the software implementation effort. Achieving Business Value from SAP Investment was about case studies that evaluated organizations with a business benefits approa [...]

Phase 6 RUN SAP ASAP Methodology

By |March 26th, 2012|

Anyone who has been around SAP for any period of time is reasonably familiar with the SAP ASAP Methodology.  In fact I rarely see sales presentation materials from many system integrators which do not at least mention it.  Even some of the bigger integrators with custom methodologies may reference it in passing and show the SAP Implementation Roadmap to demonstrate how their methodology has some similarity to it, or supplements some of the few gaps that may remain.  In a prev [...]

SAP Enabled Business Transformation for IT Leadership

By |March 12th, 2012|

Continuing the Journey to the Business-Converged SAP Center of Excellence After many years researching and living through IT and business convergence for IT leadership, I ran into a study that brought more clarity to the key dividing concepts. Some interesting approaches and maturity models are available for senior executives, but little direction for the delivery organization (for detailed development, see 3 Development Phases for SAP Center of Excellence Maturity). CIO magazine established a [...]