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, Dennis Howlett posted about this blog "Your Implementations are Killing Us" http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=1075 and the next morning I received a frantic e-mail from a friend at SAP lamenting its posting. So I guess this blogger is gaining some buzz.
I take exception with the title of the SAP blog as I have seen countless clients who actually do like SAP. All the same, I find it a curious and worthwhile contribution. The writer maintains complete anonymity throughout. No profile or mention of his name, his company’s, the implementation partner’s identity. Mum. While this is largely understandable as a matter of the blogger’s self-protection, it also degrades the effect. All the same, the twenty-seven postings since January, 2009 vividly describe the mind-numbing frustrations, side-shows, and cul-de-sacs that a poorly-run implementation can engender.
The appearance of this blog is in parallel to some serious SAP head scratching on the subject of bad implementations. At the end of the day, when an SAP implementation project goes wrong, it is the joint fault (in varying measures) of the client and the systems integrator but it is usually SAP that gets the PR black eye.
I have been involved in SAP implementation work since 1995 and the balance of my book The New SAP Blue Book, A Concise Business Guide to the World of SAP provides guidance for the best practices for implementation. The book first appeared in 1998 and has been revised seven times as better practices continue to emerge. During this same time-period, I have done a considerable amount of primary research with more than 1500 clients reporting upon their SAP experiences and the performance of their SAP systems integrator.
SAP does not deserve the full black-eye for failed implementations. In my esteem, however, SAP does a poor job of policing its SAP partners. The 1500 clients reported upon the field performance of all of the leading integrators (Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, et al) and the following provider failures were chronically noted in regard to deficient project process (in order of importance):
Poor scope/resource management
Lack of adherence to methodology: all the systems integrators have sophisticated methodologies and tools; they just don’t use them consistently (if at all);
Ineffective partner management.
In this research, clients cited who they considered responsible for various issue. They tabbed themselves the guilty party for:
Over-engineered and difficult to use results
Insufficient post-implementation planning
Lack of client ownership.
What SAP Can Do to Address Implementation Issues
All the systems integrators, including SAP Consulting, regularly tout their client satisfaction ratings. When you scratch the surface, these ratings tend to be childish and generalized buckets for entire projects of Very Satisfied, Satisfied, and Not Satisfied. The first reaction is to ask who is satisfied, what are they satisfied with, and when were they satisfied. Many clients I have spoken to who claimed that they were satisfied added that the whole project was a bumpy nerve-wracking mess but they were finally satisfied that it was over.
In this light, SAP needs to finally recognize that implementation services are every bit as much about consulting as about software. While tools such as Solution Manager are excellent for tracking software issues, project issues relative to consulting, governance, etc. are not tracked. SAP should be working more closely with its largest implementation partners to create a client-satisfaction tracking that continually addresses from an SI perspective
Business/IT Alignment
Governance & Control
Human Capital Management
Technology, Tools & Process
Service Delivery & Operations
Short of this, SAP should create and cultivate a network of objective, third-party quality assurance units (not SAP, not SAP implementation partners) to accomplish this tracking. When such a QA unit exists, life is better for both the client and the systems integrator as in many cases the QA group can point out to clients where they are going wrong. Again, each of the systems integrators have their own internal quality assurance but it is seldom demonstrably objective. By the same token, such QA should not be undertaken by SAP.
Quality assurance can add 1% to 2% to an overall implementation budget while resulting in a 10% to 30% savings in over-all implementation costs (primarily by fending off budget over-runs).
Value to Clients of Third Party Implementation Project Quality Assurance:
Cost containment, derived from progress monitoring
Time adherence, resulting from continuous (phase to phase) monitoring as well as scope management
Vision/benefits realization: assuring that the project will deliver the intended business value
Reduced administrative and strategic burden; fewer client/SI meetings for the purpose of progress reporting, issues management, and the like
Objective advisory as to what other services or support functions might be appropriate and desirable.
Quality assurance reporting would be most effective if it is directed to the client, to SAP, and to the systems integration partner.
In the field, I find that systems integrators initially balk at the inclusion of third party quality assurance on the premise that it will act as an audit of only their performance. Once they understand that the quality assurance role also focuses on client performance and SAP performance, the activity yields positive results.
It should be noted that the SAP/SI partner dynamic is not the same for all partners. Clearly, IBM and Accenture are not as malleable as a small partner such as Capgemini or any number of boutiques. However, it is evident that scrolling a third-party quality assurance activity into any SAP implementation will benefit all three parties (client, SI, and SAP).
It is probably too late for our anonymous blogger. I look forward to when he fills out his satisfaction rating.
SAP Searchlight Michael Doane
Monday, July 27, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
The Deeper Green: SAP Sustainability
While “green” may connote money, it has come to connote environmental issues all the more. The two subjects are not mutually exclusive.
As Joshua Greenbaum wrote in his blog “Enterprise Matters” (http://ematters.wordpress.com/)
“SAP’s customers, according to SAP, produce 1/6 of the world’s carbon emissions … That means that anything SAP can do to support sustainability, efficiency, and other green concepts could have a profound effect on its customers, and therefore a significant quantity of the world’s emissions. And, as one of the main goals of SAP’s sustainability initiative is to build software solutions that can lower these emissions, and support more efficient and responsible use of other scarce resources like water, enterprise software companies like SAP can indeed become leaders in these efforts.”
In the late 1970’s I worked on a Control Data mainframe for the City of St. Paul, Minnesota. The mainframe was a few miles away and we had our printouts delivered twice a day. One of my key responsibilities was running demographics data for urban planning with a powerful (at the time) software called Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Once or twice a week, I would receive a request for a new extract and after entering the parameters I would receive a twenty to thirty page report.
I was only a novice when it came to the full SPSS package and one morning I made the mistake of checking one extra box that provided a third dimension to the report. Early that afternoon the delivery man wheeled in a five foot high printout. This 10,000 page report was obviously unusable for anything other than a bonfire but it was summertime and I was not inclined. The next day I instituted paper recycling for St. Paul’s Citywide Data Processing.
Today, such an effort would fall under the heading of “Sustainability”. In SAP terminology, sustainability addresses environmental, health, and safety issues. At the risk of getting lost amid a flurry of potential avenues in search of sustainability, I advise that you focus upon core potential within the SAP installed base, namely energy and resource conservation, health and safety, and common sense. Investing in sustainability in these areas is the right thing to do and it should be a given a high priority, not only in altruistic terms but also because it will improve the health of your enterprise.
For the moment, sustainability in the context of SAP is a maturing movement. In March of 2009, SAP announced plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions down to its year-2000 levels by the year 2020. In support of this initiative as well as client-based initiatives, they named Peter Graf, a longtime SAP honcho, as its first sustainability officer. To date, there is not a lot of detail in regard to “how to” but common sense leads us right back to the starting point of Key Performance Indicators.
Ratio of Recycled Waste to Discarded Waste would have worked for me at the City of St. Paul.
An SAP prospect recently told me that transportation management at his firm consisted of a ball point pen and a notepad. Given that his firm spent $5M a year on transport, it is obvious that basic transport management would save them money (I estimated at least $1.5M). In sustainability terms, it would also have reduced carbon emissions. As KPI’s go, we could comfortably settle on Miles per Ton or simply the Cost of Truck Fuel. The firm has other problems since it is in the chicken industry. My prospect could quote the hatch rate, a somewhat crucial KPI for this industry, but he also claimed that safety issues were a great concern, though he did not quote any KPIs in that regard.
My advice is to embed sustainability issues into business process redesign, most especially where the KPIs, like those just mentioned, fairly shout to be addressed. This is not a PR subject unless you have actually done something. If you settle into the standard compliance and reporting elixir offered up by the former Big 4, you may improve compliance and reporting marks without improving the environment at all. However, if you have vastly reduced waste through recycling, reduced carbon emissions through more efficient transport management or manufacturing, or increased plant safety levels, you will have PR gold as well as my admiration.
As Joshua Greenbaum wrote in his blog “Enterprise Matters” (http://ematters.wordpress.com/)
“SAP’s customers, according to SAP, produce 1/6 of the world’s carbon emissions … That means that anything SAP can do to support sustainability, efficiency, and other green concepts could have a profound effect on its customers, and therefore a significant quantity of the world’s emissions. And, as one of the main goals of SAP’s sustainability initiative is to build software solutions that can lower these emissions, and support more efficient and responsible use of other scarce resources like water, enterprise software companies like SAP can indeed become leaders in these efforts.”
In the late 1970’s I worked on a Control Data mainframe for the City of St. Paul, Minnesota. The mainframe was a few miles away and we had our printouts delivered twice a day. One of my key responsibilities was running demographics data for urban planning with a powerful (at the time) software called Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Once or twice a week, I would receive a request for a new extract and after entering the parameters I would receive a twenty to thirty page report.
I was only a novice when it came to the full SPSS package and one morning I made the mistake of checking one extra box that provided a third dimension to the report. Early that afternoon the delivery man wheeled in a five foot high printout. This 10,000 page report was obviously unusable for anything other than a bonfire but it was summertime and I was not inclined. The next day I instituted paper recycling for St. Paul’s Citywide Data Processing.
Today, such an effort would fall under the heading of “Sustainability”. In SAP terminology, sustainability addresses environmental, health, and safety issues. At the risk of getting lost amid a flurry of potential avenues in search of sustainability, I advise that you focus upon core potential within the SAP installed base, namely energy and resource conservation, health and safety, and common sense. Investing in sustainability in these areas is the right thing to do and it should be a given a high priority, not only in altruistic terms but also because it will improve the health of your enterprise.
For the moment, sustainability in the context of SAP is a maturing movement. In March of 2009, SAP announced plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions down to its year-2000 levels by the year 2020. In support of this initiative as well as client-based initiatives, they named Peter Graf, a longtime SAP honcho, as its first sustainability officer. To date, there is not a lot of detail in regard to “how to” but common sense leads us right back to the starting point of Key Performance Indicators.
Ratio of Recycled Waste to Discarded Waste would have worked for me at the City of St. Paul.
An SAP prospect recently told me that transportation management at his firm consisted of a ball point pen and a notepad. Given that his firm spent $5M a year on transport, it is obvious that basic transport management would save them money (I estimated at least $1.5M). In sustainability terms, it would also have reduced carbon emissions. As KPI’s go, we could comfortably settle on Miles per Ton or simply the Cost of Truck Fuel. The firm has other problems since it is in the chicken industry. My prospect could quote the hatch rate, a somewhat crucial KPI for this industry, but he also claimed that safety issues were a great concern, though he did not quote any KPIs in that regard.
My advice is to embed sustainability issues into business process redesign, most especially where the KPIs, like those just mentioned, fairly shout to be addressed. This is not a PR subject unless you have actually done something. If you settle into the standard compliance and reporting elixir offered up by the former Big 4, you may improve compliance and reporting marks without improving the environment at all. However, if you have vastly reduced waste through recycling, reduced carbon emissions through more efficient transport management or manufacturing, or increased plant safety levels, you will have PR gold as well as my admiration.
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