Many years ago, I was on a long call with a Gateway technician helping me to save my hard drive. While various operations were running, she regaled me with stories, either lived or recounted by others, of strange help desk calls. The client whose foot-pedal didn’t work (it was the mouse). The client whose cup holder was broken (the CD tray). The client who only got a black screen (the video wasn’t plugged in). And finally, everyone’s favorite: the client who for the life of him could not find the Any key.
The hour I spent with the Gateway technician cost my company nothing nor were the aforementioned callers charged for their queries because none of us were using in-house help desk. For those of you with an in-house SAP help desk, we have to ask the question: how much of your time is spent explaining that a mouse is not a foot pedal and a CD tray is not a cup holder?
On many occasions, I have had the fascinating task of assessing a client’s SAP help desk statistics. Call volume, average call time, average resolution time, and the like are invariably categorized but I have yet to see the category “mindless waste of time” so I have no statistical handle on the frequency of such calls in an SAP environment.
However, there has been one simple trend to every help desk analysis I have ever been a part of and that is the very high percentage of calls that relate to “end user training”. That is to say, calls that would not be necessary if end users were properly trained and supported.
This “revelation” came to me back in 2002 when I was a speaker at a searchSAP event in London. There were more than 300 attendees and I asked them to raise their hands if they’d had SAP for three or more years. Nearly all hands went up. I then asked them to keep their hands up if, in the past year, they had provided their end user base any formal refresher training. All hands went down. After a few seconds, everyone burst into embarrassed laughter.
On average, clients invest only 4% to 5% of their implementation budget on training of which about 50% is dedicated to the end users with the rest going to the internal project team and to executive awareness. Worse, since end user training is the penultimate step before go-live and both budgets and schedules are stretched thin, many clients cheap out and provide foreshortened training. There is no justification for this and the failure to adequately train users is often relegated to a hopeful “they’ll sort it all out” attitude.
The result is that users are hesitant, slow, unaware of their role in fulfilling a business process, and perhaps resentful. Since they are at the source of actual SAP performance, the entire investment is undermined. If they can’t find the Any key, they will call your help desk. And what will be said?
Past research about SAP user competency yielded this great nugget: in response to two questions:
1) Who in your firm is responsible for ongoing end user competency?
2) Who is your firm has budget for ongoing end user competency?
By far, the most frequent answers were a) Don’t Know and b) No One. No other reply, either for Human Resources, SAP managers, business managers, or process managers was higher than 5%.
Parallel research asked SAP managers what next steps they planned to take to further their SAP maturity. Overwhelming response: buy more applications software.
And another round of Any keys.
Adapted from excerpts of The SAP Green Book: Weathering the Global Fiscal Crisis with SAP. Michael Doane 2009, all rights reserved.
SAP Searchlight Michael Doane
Monday, March 30, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Business Process Orphanship
In a recent post, Dennis Howlett (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/) extends upon my call to SAP to rationalize its maintenance fee policy and he rightly raises the subject of how Centers of Excellence, tied to certification, should lead to preferred terms with SAP.
This is a fairly huge subject that I have been dealing with since 2001 and there will be further posts in this regard. For the moment, let’s concentrate upon what I have observed is the greatest impediment to sustaining a viable Center of Excellence and the reason that so many of them turn into Centers of Mediocrity.
The notion of business process was popularized in the mid-1990’s by the bestseller Reengineering the Corporation by James Champy and Michael Hammer. Like most revolutionary ideas, it led to mass confusion and set up a power curve for every SAP implementation that followed. We all know about the SAP learning curve. The power curve is kicked off by the learning curve as when departmental heads in a vertical environment are told that the organizational will heretofore “flatten” and become horizontal. The “lesson” is that department heads no longer call all the shots in their domains and are required to blend into business processes. Turf wars inevitably proliferate.
The measure of a power curve is revealed in the time it takes for your firm to make decisions relative to the business processes to be adopted either as part of an SAP implementation or in response to business need or opportunity. If there has been knowledgeable management commitment from the outset, this curve is shortened.
The duration of this curve is determined by the levels of unity, management, and communications of a firm, as well as by the quality of preparation during the runway phase to major process changes.
At the heart of business process change is, or should be, the business process owners whose key responsibility is to assess and monitor process performance and metrics with a focus upon continuous process improvement.
Only about fifteen years have passed since this concept was introduced into the business world and it is still difficult for many companies to shift an organizational mindset away from discrete vertical departments (marketing-sales-production-billing) into fully operational and horizontal business process units. Therefore, the role of business process ownership is only partially baked into the business conscience and fulfilling that role can be perilous.
Since most business processes cross departmental boundaries, their “owners” are often at odds with department heads with turf issues. Without a clear charter and authority from on high, a business process owner is constantly buffeted by resistance to process change. The result is an inability to improve business processes beyond the tinkering stage which does not result in any appreciable business benefit. In such a situation, business process ownership is business process orphanship.
Back when I was first researching best practices for post-implementation SAP, I had the good fortune to work with Jack Childs of SAP America whose task in life was supporting the major North American SAP accounts and whose insight into client efforts was invaluable. In 2003, Mr. Childs administered an informal poll regarding the role of a business process owner and found that the shelf-life was only two years. Reasons for this short shelf life were unsurprising: high stress, low authority, inability to succeed.
If you do not invest good business process owners with proper executive support, you should not bother building an SAP Center of Excellence. Of all the roles included, it is the most vital.
For more, check out Jon Reed's piece: http://www.jonerp.com/content/view/209/1/
This is a fairly huge subject that I have been dealing with since 2001 and there will be further posts in this regard. For the moment, let’s concentrate upon what I have observed is the greatest impediment to sustaining a viable Center of Excellence and the reason that so many of them turn into Centers of Mediocrity.
The notion of business process was popularized in the mid-1990’s by the bestseller Reengineering the Corporation by James Champy and Michael Hammer. Like most revolutionary ideas, it led to mass confusion and set up a power curve for every SAP implementation that followed. We all know about the SAP learning curve. The power curve is kicked off by the learning curve as when departmental heads in a vertical environment are told that the organizational will heretofore “flatten” and become horizontal. The “lesson” is that department heads no longer call all the shots in their domains and are required to blend into business processes. Turf wars inevitably proliferate.
The measure of a power curve is revealed in the time it takes for your firm to make decisions relative to the business processes to be adopted either as part of an SAP implementation or in response to business need or opportunity. If there has been knowledgeable management commitment from the outset, this curve is shortened.
The duration of this curve is determined by the levels of unity, management, and communications of a firm, as well as by the quality of preparation during the runway phase to major process changes.
At the heart of business process change is, or should be, the business process owners whose key responsibility is to assess and monitor process performance and metrics with a focus upon continuous process improvement.
Only about fifteen years have passed since this concept was introduced into the business world and it is still difficult for many companies to shift an organizational mindset away from discrete vertical departments (marketing-sales-production-billing) into fully operational and horizontal business process units. Therefore, the role of business process ownership is only partially baked into the business conscience and fulfilling that role can be perilous.
Since most business processes cross departmental boundaries, their “owners” are often at odds with department heads with turf issues. Without a clear charter and authority from on high, a business process owner is constantly buffeted by resistance to process change. The result is an inability to improve business processes beyond the tinkering stage which does not result in any appreciable business benefit. In such a situation, business process ownership is business process orphanship.
Back when I was first researching best practices for post-implementation SAP, I had the good fortune to work with Jack Childs of SAP America whose task in life was supporting the major North American SAP accounts and whose insight into client efforts was invaluable. In 2003, Mr. Childs administered an informal poll regarding the role of a business process owner and found that the shelf-life was only two years. Reasons for this short shelf life were unsurprising: high stress, low authority, inability to succeed.
If you do not invest good business process owners with proper executive support, you should not bother building an SAP Center of Excellence. Of all the roles included, it is the most vital.
For more, check out Jon Reed's piece: http://www.jonerp.com/content/view/209/1/
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
SAP: Stop Chopping Off the Tallest Heads to Make Everyone Equal
Since SAP raised its monthly maintenance fees from 17% of license base to 22%, the reaction has been predictably sour, and all the worse because nothing new is coming back to clients in return. Not improved maintenance support or an easier-to-deploy Solution Manager or, as suggested by Josh Greenbaum (http://ematters.wordpress.com/), some sort of return credit for future software purchases.
Josh is not the only SAP industry analyst to aggressively weigh in on SAP’s smugness regarding the rate hike. Jon Reed (www.jonerp.com), Dennis Howlett (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/) and others have contributed some amusing-even-as-it hurts observations. Ray Wang of Forrester (http://blog.softwareinsider.org/) has recently revived “The Enterprise Software Licensee Bill of Rights”) partly in response to this move.
Forrester, Gartner, and other analyst firms have recently come out with solid advice to clients about how to reduce maintenance costs and I advise you to check these out.
In parallel, I would like to propose to SAP that they revive an older program by which clients could again qualify for a maintenance fee reduction by demonstrating a high level of autonomy (and a consequent reduced maintenance burden for SAP). Clearly, SAP’s maintenance burden varies from client to client so why should they uniformly pay at the same rate?
The old program that was phased out some years ago was admittedly applied somewhat haphazardly. The gist of it was that clients who could demonstrate the existence of an internal “SAP Competence Center” received a reduction from 17% to 15%. The demonstration did not have to include the existence of a physical center; organizational attributes and assets were examined and satisfaction of a multi-page “SAP Competency” checklist got you in.
Currently, one nub of this issue is the status, cost, and usability of Solution Manager. When it was initially announced, SAP touted it (as it still does today) as the “… application management solution facilitates technical support for distributed systems – with functionality that covers all key aspects of solution deployment, operation, and continuous improvement.”
Behind the scenes, it was also intended to reduce the maintenance burden carried by SAP. Therefore, doesn’t it stand to reason that a client with a fully functioning Solution Manager is less of a burden on SAP maintenance staff than a client without it?
Doesn’t it also stand to reason that clients with the following attributes should be given a break?
Outsourced help desk – reduces the volume of annoyance calls to SAP through improved routing and service
High level or outsourced Basis administration – idem
Internal Center of Excellence with a strong focus on user competency and robust functionality
High level of participation in ASUG or ASUG-like client-to-client support and sharing of best practices
Full compliance with SAP upgrade policy (it is obvious that a 4.7 client is more of a burden than a 6.0 client)
In the SAP client base, as in the U.S. financial community, some firms are playing within reasonable boundaries and others are a shameless mess. Short of instituting an as-you-go maintenance fee (dream on), SAP should strongly consider rewarding its best and most disciplined clients with some sort of break. Clients, ask your SAP rep about this and see if you get a better answer than those given the analysts.
Josh is not the only SAP industry analyst to aggressively weigh in on SAP’s smugness regarding the rate hike. Jon Reed (www.jonerp.com), Dennis Howlett (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/) and others have contributed some amusing-even-as-it hurts observations. Ray Wang of Forrester (http://blog.softwareinsider.org/) has recently revived “The Enterprise Software Licensee Bill of Rights”) partly in response to this move.
Forrester, Gartner, and other analyst firms have recently come out with solid advice to clients about how to reduce maintenance costs and I advise you to check these out.
In parallel, I would like to propose to SAP that they revive an older program by which clients could again qualify for a maintenance fee reduction by demonstrating a high level of autonomy (and a consequent reduced maintenance burden for SAP). Clearly, SAP’s maintenance burden varies from client to client so why should they uniformly pay at the same rate?
The old program that was phased out some years ago was admittedly applied somewhat haphazardly. The gist of it was that clients who could demonstrate the existence of an internal “SAP Competence Center” received a reduction from 17% to 15%. The demonstration did not have to include the existence of a physical center; organizational attributes and assets were examined and satisfaction of a multi-page “SAP Competency” checklist got you in.
Currently, one nub of this issue is the status, cost, and usability of Solution Manager. When it was initially announced, SAP touted it (as it still does today) as the “… application management solution facilitates technical support for distributed systems – with functionality that covers all key aspects of solution deployment, operation, and continuous improvement.”
Behind the scenes, it was also intended to reduce the maintenance burden carried by SAP. Therefore, doesn’t it stand to reason that a client with a fully functioning Solution Manager is less of a burden on SAP maintenance staff than a client without it?
Doesn’t it also stand to reason that clients with the following attributes should be given a break?
Outsourced help desk – reduces the volume of annoyance calls to SAP through improved routing and service
High level or outsourced Basis administration – idem
Internal Center of Excellence with a strong focus on user competency and robust functionality
High level of participation in ASUG or ASUG-like client-to-client support and sharing of best practices
Full compliance with SAP upgrade policy (it is obvious that a 4.7 client is more of a burden than a 6.0 client)
In the SAP client base, as in the U.S. financial community, some firms are playing within reasonable boundaries and others are a shameless mess. Short of instituting an as-you-go maintenance fee (dream on), SAP should strongly consider rewarding its best and most disciplined clients with some sort of break. Clients, ask your SAP rep about this and see if you get a better answer than those given the analysts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)