Here we go again. Jon Reed, Dennis Howlett, Martin Gillet, Michael Koch, and Leonardo Di Araujo, collectively known as the Certification 5, have posted a 55-page, somewhat discoordinated white paper exploring the need to vastly upgrade the SAP consulta...
Continuing on the theme from a previous post about getting SAP expertise, do you need SAP Technicians or Experts? I want to take some time to review an academic study about gaining SAP ROI and reducing your SAP TCO. The study points out the type of SAP project team expertise to gain ROI and competitive advantage from your ERP project. If you want real return, real results, and real benefits, then you need real skill (see e.g. Screening and Interview Methods to Find the Right Consultant – Part 2 [...]
A number of important considerations in an SAP reimplementation do not exist for a technical upgrade. As a result, the upfront planning and evaluation time will be more involved. For example you need to consider any organization structure changes. How will any new organization structure items map to old ones? Then you need to analyze how to handle old master data if the organization structure changes are so significant that they require a whole new master data paradigm. If you have done a lot o [...]
Through the good graces of my long-time associate Jon Reed (www.jonerp.com), I recently discovered a blog that covers the life of an SAP project: SAP: Loathe It or Ignore It, You Can’t Like It http://sapmesideways.blogspot.com/.Shortly thereafter, De...
“If the software functionality does not do what we need it to do, nothing else really matters.” Back in the 1980’s, IT department preferences or mandates for specific proprietary mainframe technologies drove many ERP software decisions. They focused on the technologies the IT department could (or would) support, not the mainframe software that best satisfied business needs. Later in the 1990’s, the mainframe vs. open system (client/server) wars caused many to take a blind leap of faith into ope [...]
Part 3 of 3 Stages and Components of the SAP Center of Excellence To wrap up this series, we will take a brief look at the post go-live or production support environment. One academic study I reviewed on ERP project success factors defined the three production stages of Acceptance, Routinization, and Infusion (see The Top 5 ERP Success Factors by Project Stage from 22 Critical Success Factors). These three terms fit the requirements for SAP production system stages as you move toward an SAP Cen [...]
