“Our Software is Stable”: The SAP Maturity Gap

SAP Discovers the Installed Base: How “Standing Still” is No Longer the Goal


After firms go live with SAP, the collective attitude is a mixture of relief (“we are in!”), surprise (“we are?”), and disappointment (“not quite”). The result is a period of denial in which the general presumption, lasting roughly one year, is that that all will be well once the installation is simply stabilized.

For more firms, realization occurs in the second year after Go-Live as the shake-out continues with no end in sight.

While in the course of the implementation project, your firm may well have targeted business benefit in a “to be” vision but within one year or more of seeking stabilization, you will have a) lost business & IT alignment as the business stakeholders have wandered away and b) re-trenched into an IT only support of existing systems leading to some incremental benefit but not the “business engine” your sponsors had in mind.

While this state of affairs may seem lamentable, things often get worse. Upon reaching a stable state, a high percentage of clients simply cruise from there, content to stand perfectly still after so many months or years of reeling. No dramatic leaps in business process efficiency, little or no measurement of business KPI’s: very little steps for very little feet.

Until recent years, SAP itself seemed to encourage such behavior. Shortly after we reached Y2K, the most help they could offer to the installed base was the SAP Competency Center which was largely about the software and not at all about business process improvement. This program was later rebranded to Customer Care Center but was, in essence, still the same old competency center. By 2005, SAP claimed more than 50,000 customers worldwide and, by my observation, the vast majority of them were seeking the “stand still” state.

Today, SAP clearly recognizes the importance of moving beyond this state. Value Engineering is about five years old and, despite some over-engineering (hey, it’s SAP, folks), is providing insight into how SAP can be a business-improvement engine. SAP has also moved beyond Customer Care Center into Centers of Expertise which go a long way further in addressing business issues in addition to the traditional SAP software-centric concerns. Even more welcome, SAP has created a consulting organization separate from SAP Consulting that is dedicated to the installed base: Business Transformation Services. While the maturity of this new entity remains variable, the fact that SAP recognizes the need for it is both significant and promising. Such an organization is dedicated to helping clients help themselves. The “usual suspect” systems integrators do not regularly or openly provide such services, fearful that they will cut into application management outsourcing revenues.

(Note: SAP does not offer application management outsourcing. This is commendable –and in great contrast to Oracle- in that SAP recognizes that strong client leadership of the SAP destiny is preferable to being stuck in an SAP SI nanny-state.)

Moving Forward (But in What Direction?)

Forward progress with an SAP installation can take many directions and I find that clients are often internally at odds in regard to “next steps”. With the depth and breadth of SAP scope and functionality, there are a myriad of options and a high populace of user demand, ranging from C level to end user. As Chris Barendregt, Chief Information Officer of Fonterra put it: " We’ve had plenty of great advice on how to get the most out of our SAP solution since Go Live, a lot of which unfortunately got lost in the noise and sheer volume of ideas.” (my italics).

For a number of years, I have helped clients to gain focus upon:

Business/IT Alignment: An IT organization is intended to drive business results and an effective application center of excellence; therefore, it must also be staffed by business personnel. Most firms fail to maintain this alignment due to a reliance on pre-ERP practices in which the IT group alone managed application evolution.

Enterprise Applications: The state of the applications (software, functionality, reliability, and interoperability) will have an impact on staff members’ ability to impact change (business process improvement). Unstable applications will consume both IT and business resources with support tasks.

Value Management: Value should be measured at the key performance indicator level and results should be the key drivers to business process improvements. Without value management, business staff will not adequately support a Center of Excellence.

End users: These are the people who actually run the business processes delivered by the enterprise applications. Their level of competence, preferably driven by a continuous training program, will have a direct effect on business process performance and a firm’s ability to absorb continuous change. Most firms have failed in this regard due to a reliance on end-user training practices that fail to address the extended life-span of enterprise applications and thus do not include continuous training.

In order to help clients address “the noise and the volume”, I will be joining SAP in a three webinar campaign that I urge you to attend.

Assess Your SAP Maturity
1:00 p.m. ET/Noon CT/11:00 a.m. MT/10:00 a.m. PT
Tuesday November 2nd 2010

Gaining Measurable Value with SAP
1:00 p.m. ET/Noon CT/11:00 a.m. MT/10:00 a.m. PT
Tuesday November 16th 2010

Optimize Operations and Leverage the Customer Center of Excellence (CoE)
1:00 p.m. ET/Noon CT/11:00 a.m. MT/10:00 a.m. PT
Tuesday November 30th 2010

For more info:

http://www.insiderlearningnetwork.com/sapservices/blog/2010/10/20/assess_the_maturity_of_your_sap_implementation

To register:

http://fm.sap.com/images/WhiteRhino/consulting_webcast/lp_tw.html

Central to this campaign is the offer of a “First Time Free” SAP Maturity Assessment. This assessment will be fully described throughout the series. For more information and/or to register, please visit http://www.3vsolutions.com/  and go to “assessments”. A 20-page overview of the web-based program can be downloaded from there.

See also:

http://sapsearchlight.blogspot.com/2010/07/sap-end-user-maturity-assessments-beta.html

http://sapsearchlight.blogspot.com/2010/06/center-of-excellence-taking-center.html