SAP User Competency: The Joke is on Us

A number of my former colleagues have long labored selling SAP end user training courses. The value of their courseware is huge but that value is chronically rejected. Years ago, in a study of 120 firms in the installed base, two of my questions were: 1. Who in your firm is responsible for SAP end user competency? 2. Who in your firm controls the budget for SAP end user training? When responses were expressed in bar charts, the bars for “Don’t Know” and “No One” towered over the others (IT director, HR director, VP of ERP, CIO, et al).

Some years ago, I wrote a brief article entitled “Shop Till You Drop at the ERP Mall”. It was inspired by research, both primary and direct, into the ERP installed base (SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle). The research revealed that, after Go-Live, a large percentage of firms tended to buy more applications software to the detriment of stabilizing their existing ERP platform through business process improvements, end user training, data synchronization, and the like. In short, rather than addressing the problems listed in the table above, they merely up the ante.

There is one solution that is by fair the most effective and also the rarest. Train your users. Not only prior to Go-Live but continually thereafter.

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.

The joke is on us.

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. Addressing a budget shortfall at the expense of subsequent user competence is a poor trade-off and is usually followed with 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 your SAP business process fulfillment, you will have undermined the entire investment.

Wise firms cultivate a culture in which the efficient deployment of SAP applications is constantly reviewed and refined. It is probable that your firm spent 5% or less of its implementation budget on end user training. It is equally probable that you have no formal budget whatsoever for ongoing training.

Excerpted from The SAP Green Book, Thrive After Go-Live (due September 15, 2009)

Best Kept Secret: itelligence SAP Support

A large amount of my time over the past eight years has been dedicated to analyzing the capabilities and performance of SAP service providers. While presenting their “wares” during analyst briefings, a distressingly high percentage of these providers have stated that their firm “is one of the best kept secrets in the industry.” These words have often provided an early signal that the firm just isn’t that special.

One of the key instructions when I worked at META Group was to be vendor neutral if not vendor hostile. Our CEO and founder, Dale Kutnick, was often heard to exclaim: “the vendors all suck.” I would venture that, during my time there, META Group was the analyst research firm that was the toughest on vendors seeking to kiss our analyst rings. My point here is that I do not easily praise an SAP service provider. Indeed, most of those I have analyzed fall far short of expectations, most especially in the realm of post-implementation support services.

In late 2004, a client threw a lot of money my way to shortlist acquisition targets to buck up its SAP support services. Two of us scoured North America for likely candidates and came up with very little. Today, if you simply scan web sites, you will find literally hundreds of firms that claim to provide such services but very few of them actually have full-time staff, repeatable delivery and billing methods, or client references. If you retain them, they tend to put together a posse of bench-staff and contract consultants, thus eroding any chance of high quality delivery.

In this context, I am pleased to have a found a firm that is truly one of the best kept secrets in the realm of SAP support services: itelligence. I had the pleasure of spending a day with their leadership this past week and, mirabile dictu, found something I’ve been seeking for some time. I was already aware of itelligence in regard to their systems integration capabilities as they are one of the few solid second-tier firms in the North American SAP consulting eco-system. However, the quality and span of their support services was an eye-opener.

Itelligence has been active in support services since 2001. They now have a base of 80 help desk staff in Cincinnati and back-up groups in Chicago and Poland. It is largely a rookie-free group and, unlike most of their competitors, itelligence can provide a roster including photos and thumbnail resumes of their staff. The pricing is transparent and the delivery model is flexible and sensible. While many firms degrade service levels by over-deploying the remote/offshore mix, itelligence leverages its Poland staff with moderation. I was most impressed with the depth of experience, both industry and SAP skills, arrayed across a huge room and organized into process groups.

I am a firm believer in the outsourcing option for SAP support and have a new white paper on the subject, “We Do It Themselves: Outsourcing SAP Applications Support”, that can be obtained here: http://www.michaeldoane.com/SAP%20Research.html

It is excerpted and adapted from The SAP Green Book, Thrive After Go-Live which will be available in mid-September, 2009.

I urge you to check out this white paper and, if you are in the market for dependable SAP support, you can shortlist itelligence with confidence.

SAP Implementation Projects: Still Crazy After All These Years – Part 2

In a previous post, I pointed out my discovery of an anonymous blogger who is providing a blow-by-blow of his firm’s painful SAP implementation. (SAP: Loathe It or Ignore It, You Can’t Like It http://sapmesideways.blogspot.com/. )

Since that post, I have had some e-mail contact with the writer, who has agreed to my re-use of our correspondence.

The most striking comment of his was this:

“I don’t know if the SAP project methodology is being used as I have nothing to gauge our experiences against; however, over the past 2 years, I have read a number of items by experienced SAP consultants, and I suspect that they are not applying it correctly, if at all.”
My reply:
“…if they were using a methodology, you would definitely know it. Outside of IBM and Accenture, all certified partners MUST adhere to SAP’s ASAP methodology, sometimes referred to (recently) as Focus ASAP. Most of these partners add some of their secret sauce to the core SAP methodology. I am willing to bet that if you look at this firm’s proposal of services to you that they make a big deal about their methodology.”

The blog was started in January of 2009, so over an eight month period our correspondent is not sure whether or not a methodology is being followed. While this may seem “crazy”, it is unfortunately a more widespread (mal)practice than the systems integrators will admit.

When clients search for SAP consulting help, they are looking for a) specific expertise (business process design, configuration, and technical) and b) a proven project method or methodology by which all necessary project activities are navigated. My research since 2001, both in the field and through extensive survey work, reveals that the leading SAP systems integration firms routinely fail to adhere to their own methodologies.

They claim to have best practices repositories that are referenced in the course of business blueprint but clients report a high incidence of white-boarding. They claim to that their proven methodologies result in on-time, on-budget implementations and yet SAP implementations are still routinely late and over-budget. (I actually blame this aspect on clients who just as routinely establish wildly optimistic budgets and time-frames).

Failures to actually leverage promised assets are not limited to the Usual Suspects. Our anonymous correspondent had this to say about his firm’s SI partner:

“My main beef is with the consultants (what you would call the system integrators I think) – they are a mid sized company and it appears they have not previously implemented in the specific sector which my company operates in. They are an SAP gold partner, but I’m not sure what value that has – in my opinion they do nothing to enhance the reputation of SAP, the company or the product.

Although we had one person for a few months that was very experienced in SAP implementation (some 15+ years), most of the people seem to be very new to the role, less than 2 years. We have had so many different consultants, that I have actually lost track of the number (almost 60, I now believe, where they originally proposed just 4). They have failed to meet a single target on the deadline, or on the budget and in many areas have not met all of the requirements of the business. “

Individually, clients should do a better job of holding their systems integrators’ feet to the fire. Collectively, only SAP itself can directly address these failures and they can do so through the leverage of third-party project quality assurance as well as by leveraging more pressure on all systems integration partners, be they gold, silver, or bronze.

Ray Wang Leaving Forrester

I worked for the analyst firm META Group from 2001 to 2005. One of our hallmarks was that we were not only vendor-neutral but occasionally vendor hostile. The tone was set by our founder, Dale Kutnick, who hand-edited every article that was posted. If he scrawled a large “VW” across the front page of a submitted article, you knew it was toast. “VW” meant “vendor whore”.

In my four and a half years as an analyst, covering ERP software and services, I received a lot of booty from vendors, including forty-four very expensive pens, countless leather notebooks and bags, many Flash drives, an iPod, and seats at sporting matches. Since this was the case for all of the analysts, you can imagine that some heads were positively turned.

In the salad years of IT advisory firms (1996 to 2001), there were a number of “stars”, all of whom shared one key characteristic: they were tough but fair in their articulate scrutiny of the software and services vendors and thus provided their clients with knowledgeable and trusted input.

Gartner’s acquisition of META Group in 2005 continued a trend of market consolidation that started early in the millennium with the disappearance of Giga, the Horowitz Group, Yankee, and others. This led to the formation of several smaller and more specialized analyst firms (http://www.tekrati.com/ is an excellent source) and the pool of analyst “stars” at the few remaining firms (Gartner, IDC, and Forrester) has considerably diminished. Ray’s departure from Forrester continues this trend.

Ray is not loved by all the vendors and that’s to his credit. Wise vendors have sought his objective advisory but even more so, in his years at Forrester, he has staked out a strong position as a client advocate, most notably in spearheading the Enterprise Software Licensee's Bill of Rights (http://snipurl.com/pb64z).

We all trust that Ray will continue with his excellent blog, A Software Insider’s Point of View (http://blog.softwareinsider.org/) and that his client advocacy will still shine brightly.

For more tributes to Ray from other analysts, see Dennis Howlett, Frank Scavo, and Josh Greenbaum. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=1167, Frank Scavo (http://fscavo.blogspot.com/)
and Josh Greenbaum (http://ematters.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/hey-ray-dont-be-a-stranger/).