SAP Industry Specific Solutions Benefits
With so many SAP Industry Specific Solutions, I thought it might be useful to develop a list of what I consider the key benefits of Industry Specific solutions and as I have received many queries about IS-Mill lately, decided it was as good as any.
All Industry Specific benefits mentioned here are generally applicable to any SAP Industry Specific Solution.
Image Courtesy of Creative Commons. Typical Paper Mill
The Top 10 SAP IS Mill Solution Benefits:
- IS Mill, like many, if not most of the SAP industry specific solutions, such as SAP RE-FX have well organized user groups.
- These industry specific groups provide a platform to exchange ideas and to provide feedback to the SAP development labs as to needed functionality improvements.
- Partners, who also provide industry specific functionality and specialized consulting expertise, such as the iMRO solution from HCL-Axon also benefit from these groups as they can both uncover requirements and let the industry know they have developed a solution roadmap that is much more focused on their specific requirements.
- The industry specific solution roadmap is a huge benefit to specific customers within specific industry clusters.
Why?
They can decide when and or even if they need to wait for the required functionality to be delivered. - Some industries, like the mill industry, actually include characteristics from many not obviously related industries.
It is always a great learning experience for these industries to get together and explain and explore how they operate. - Arriving at a common set of Enterprise Performance Metrics can be facilitated among these industry specific groups.
- Opportunity to network for people with industry specific skillsets, often in short supply and not actively being created within the industry.
- Development of common ‘Best Practices’, which, when loaded in the SAP Solution Manager, can greatly decrease implementation timelines and increase the quality of deployments.
- Cross-pollination between seemingly unrelated industries.
For example, the management of patient beds in a hospital looks much like managing airplane parking spots within a depot maintenance overhaul facility. - Finally, for industries with really complex production planning processes, such as IS Mill, the SAP Industry Specific Solution can be part of a global solution while still maintaining tight integration across the various business units, which actually use numerous distinct Industry Solutions.
Handling Divestitures and Carve-Outs
The last benefit is really one of the key ones from my perspective. Many companies routinely buy companies and divest companies.
This means you need a scalable system which supports the complexities of many types of business entities, all within one corporate parent.
SAP as De Facto Standard IT System
There are numerous side effects that are important when considering a SAP Industry Solution, the most important of which is that in many industries, for example, the Cement Industry, SAP is the de facto standard IT system, and by extension, just about all the processes within the industry will operate the same.
Perform Comparative Benchmarking
This makes it very easy to compare one company to another and to perform benchmarking.
For external investors, this ability to compare like-for-like when making investment decisions as well as for internal management teams to look for areas of potential improvement, is a key reason many investors say the presence or absence of SAP is an investment decision criteria.
For example, Warren Buffet looked favorably upon the BNSF railroad’s SAP implementation when making a decision to acquire it.
As it happens, cargo railroads are very profitable entities, whereas passenger railroads are somewhat less successful at generating a profit.
SAP Best Practices For Oil And Gas Industries
Other industries, such as the Oil & Gas industry, have problems they have been ‘chewing on’ literally since the 1950s. They could save themselves a lot of money by solving the problems and save the environment a lot of greenhouse gas emissions by solving the SCM related problems they have been working.
By bringing together the industry players to work on the common industry problem, they can expand the potential number of solutions out there.
This is one of the major ways the aviation industry has been able to so dramatically improve safety-by sharing knowledge.
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