Companies of different sizes that implement
SAP enterprise resource planning systems to improve business
efficiency reveal surprising similarities.
We recently looked at two implementations: a £180m revenue
organisation with 2,300 employees and 14 locations in North
America, and the other a £2.6bn business headquartered in China,
with 70 plants worldwide, hundreds of sales/service centres, and
more than 20,000 employees.
The implementations were based on blueprints of globally
standard processes, and both organisations created core teams of
business experts, participants from IT, and their implementation
partners.
Both firms opted for a phased implementation. It started with a
pilot site that was manufacturing centric and more limited in scope
and complexity than other locations. This provided an opportunity
to use an environment with lower risk should they encounter
problems. It also provided a process for learning and refining
prior to moving to larger and more complex locations.
Although the pilot sites went live successfully, the overall
complexity and advanced abilities of SAP's products were
underestimated, as was the level of resources required for problem
resolution.
In each case, no matter how well the teams thought they
understood the system regarding transaction flows, role mapping,
job design, and detail functions, putting the technology into
action at the pilot site was the ultimate learning curve.
Significantly, no source code customisations were required in
either case. Enhancements were limited to forms, reports,
workflows, and user exit extensions - nothing that would impede or
over complicate future upgrades. This is a common trend in
organisations using SAP. By virtue of not customising the system,
upgrades are fairly painless.
The trade-off? The initial investments in time and resources to
configure SAP can be higher than investments required for smaller
ERP systems. Over time, however, smaller systems tend to become
heavily customised or integrated to other products in a
non-standardised fashion, creating a situation that is costly to
upgrade.
The £180m manufacturer invested heavily in all levels of
training across each of its departments. Despite this initiative,
some employees still did not understand the new processes and
transaction flow once SAP went live.
The £2.6bn manufacturer felt the approach to training the core
team should be flexible, with provisions made for different
schedules and conflicting priorities. The team needed to be
adequately trained before beginning the blueprinting phase.
For its SAP project, the £180m manufacturer assigned a dedicated
team of 12 members, which included a full-time project manager and
HR lead. The company also employed a consulting firm primarily for
knowledge transfer.
For the roll-out itself, the ASAP methodology was followed
closely, and Info Pak from RWD was incorporated for creation and
storage of all documentation, training materials, and content
related to the project. SAP Version 4.7 was implemented, using
preconfigured templates for industrial companies.
It took 10 months between project kick-off and the pilot site
going live on a full suite of modules, including Finance,
Manufacturing, Sales and Distribution, Warehousing, Configurator,
BW, and Portals. The internal business experts were also now
experts at configuration, handling most changes required to the
system themselves.
The £2.6bn manufacturer took a different path, creating an
extensive core team to lead the business transformation, with the
SAP deployment as part of that effort. The business experts were
pulled out of IT, HR and other departments. To support the system
long term, super-users were identified at each site.
The firm employed a system integrator, but levels of
satisfaction have not lived up to initial expectations. The
anticipated arsenal of project management and implementation tools
was sorely lacking.
The service provider took the initial lead in managing the
project, conducting the piloting and testing, but the business team
did not feel they were getting the added value they expected and
took back overall control of the project. The system integrator
became a source of technical and product knowledge.
This is not uncommon. Other industrial businesses have indicated
difficulty finding consultants with good SAP skills, especially on
more recent releases and modules.
So whatever ERP system you are implementing, and whatever
service is enlisted to assist with the process, there is a common
set of phased activities that need to be completed to ensure a
successful implementation.
Jane Barrett is an analyst with AMR Research. This article
was co-written with Simon Jacobson
Lessons learned from SAP implementations
- Allow sufficient time after the pilot goes live to refine
processes. Continue learning SAP products to resolve issues and
prepare for the next phase.
- Segregate responsibilities to ensure that conflicting
priorities or unnecessary tasks do not cause costly delays. Certain
business processes may not be relevant until later in the
project.
- Change management is a big issue. People will always resist and
have conflicting initiatives, including those dedicated to the
project. Get people to focus on data clean-up and conversion.
- Master data management is equally daunting. Cleansing the data,
creating new data and technically migrating the data to SAP should
not be underestimated.
- Complete the global blueprint before starting the pilot and be
mindful of how resources are allocated. Do not complete the global
blueprint while implementing the pilot site. In AMR's study, the
£2.6bn firm tried doing the two things at once and ran into
unnecessary angst and shifting of priorities. It also indicted
that, with hindsight, the team should have considered implementing
Finance and HR globally first. Being able to segment SAP
functionality and decide how best to deploy it is
critical.
Source: AMR Research
Jane Barrett's research paper in full
SAP skills gap squeezes projects
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