The heads ofSAPuser groups from around the world
are to meet the enterprise software supplier's senior management
in Boston in December in a bid to influence its product
strategy.
This will be the first time that all the groups, representing
more than 400,000 end-users, have met in one place. The goal is to
present a global voice from all users, covering what businesses
want from
SAP.
Glynn Lowth, chairman of the SAP UK and Ireland User Group, said
it was difficult for a single user group to influence the supplier,
but together the groups represented a large number of businesses.
"We will work with other user groups to influence planning," he
said.
The agenda for the meeting has not been set, but Lowth said he
wanted improvements in SAP's support in the UK.
Lowth was concerned that since SAP UK was mainly a sales and
marketing operation, SAP's support function was not being managed
out of the UK. As a result, user groups needed to speak to SAP's
international headquarters to influence its development.
Lowth has begun collaborating with user groups in France, Spain,
Germany and Holland to speak to SAP with a single voice on
support.
He expects the groups to focus on influencing SAP's overall
product strategy, rather than asking for new functions and features
to be added to the supplier's software.
Sixty seven per cent of SAP users are still running the older
version 4.6 of the software, and 8% are running the unsupported SAP
3.1i, a survey of 277 users has revealed.
The research was conducted by the SAP UK and Ireland User Group
ahead of its annual conference at the end of November.
User group chairman Glynn Lowth said some businesses could not
justify spending hundreds of thousands of pounds upgrading.
Instead, they would prefer to pay SAP maintenance, or £1,000 per
day to fix problems on unsupported products.
no rush to upgrade SAP