Are You a SAP Customer
Whether you’ve owned your SAP system for 30 years, like many railroads, or are brand new to the world of SAP and haven’t even started your SAP implementation, you most likely would like to know how to be a better SAP customer. What should your goals be as regards being a better SAP Customer:
- Constantly increasing Return on Your SAP Investment
- Ensure your SAP investment is aligned with your corporate strategy
- Increase the deployed footprint of your SAP system
Achieving these 3 primary goals requires that you employ a variety of integrated ‘Best Practices’, no matter where you are at in your SAP customer lifecycle:
SAP Customer Best Practice Recommendations:
- Ensure your SAP project has a solid Business Case both during the initial selection process and as you own it.
- Revise this business case annually using solid Value Engineering principles
- During your SOW negotiations, focus far more on ensuring that the quality of the SAP consultants is the key consideration, not the price.
- Establish your SAP Steering Committee prior to starting your SAP implementation.
- Conduct ASAP Implementation Methodology now known as SAP Activate training for them and continue it throughout the lifecycle of your project.
- Follow SAP’s recommendations as to hardware sizing, system landscapes, and upgrades.
- On your initial implementation, kill all unnecessary enhancements. Park them for later. Focus on your go live.
- Make Change Management a key focus area. Do not skimp on it.
- Limit or eliminate other major projects if at all possible.
- Don’t try to do it all in one go. Much less risky to establish a baseline system, and then plan on rollouts.
Most of these recommendations are very straightforward pieces of advice. However, some are probably a little different than you have been told in the past. The third goal, increasing your SAP deployed business process footprint, will actually rise to become the most difficult aspect of being a better SAP customer.
Why?
It goes back to change management.
What You Need to Know About SAP Change Management
The basic change management process of unfreeze, make the change, and refreeze it, means that after you have successfully gone live, if you want to do a secondary rollout, especially if it effects brand new areas of the business, you are going to have to work much harder on the unfreeze part.
For example, if you originally only did a Sales and Distribution (SAP SD) implementation but now are rolling out the full SAP CRM (Customer Relationship Management) product module, you will, especially if you are doing the marketing aspect of it, start to affect a completely new area of your company, i.e., the marketing department, which may not have even been affected during the initial core roll-out.
They may never have operated in an integrated fashion before, meaning their software and procedures, especially among the creative types, were largely stand-alone. They most likely operated multiple channels of marketing communication, including web, social media, mobile and e-mail, and even print, but now, they will have a whole new set of tools, requiring them to participate effectively in something we call the Sales, Marketing, & Operations Planning (SM&OP) process, as opposed to the traditional S&OP process (Sales & Operations Planning).
SAP Brings a New Way of Doing Business To Your Organization
SAP does not replace those creative tools, but the new way of doing business means there will be a lot of unfreezing (read resistance to change) as well as deep impact on the cost analysis capabilities of the system.
What does this mean?
A focus on marketing results. The Best SAP Customers not only implement the new tool, they implement an entirely new integrated approach to marketing, a marketing strategy that takes full advantage of the tool. Want additional SAP Project Management tips learned from 'in the trenches'? Grab yours today by clicking the button.
Have you got any other useful tips?
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