“Let’s face it. After going live with our SAP system, your life will be hell for at least 3 months”, says the demotivational speaker to its audience. Instant silence fills the room. People glare at each other. Some wonder whether this is all a joke and anticipate a killing punch line. But unfortunately there is no more reassuring soothing propaganda to ease the pain.
Does it sound familiar or is just pure fiction for you? Either way, you better do whatever you can to avoid this to happen (again). It just takes away the joy you could experience whilst implementing SAP. The team spirit and sense of achievement against adversity is what you will remember afterwards. In most cases you even romanticise these periods of hard labour, reciting which person preferred which type of pizza to be delivered at night.
Just make sure that you are surrounded by talented people who pull their weight and you will be ok.
SAP implementations normally get green lighted by multinational companies to take advantage of a unified way of working. At least that ideology would be the most logical to achieve a Return on Investment [ROI], as SAP is certainly not a cheap ERP solution. It is a shame that there are so many stories that implementing SAP could be a time consuming and money wasting effort. Too often you hear that SAP go-live dates are delayed or else forced upon an organisation when there are still many issues unresolved.
Would it be time to learn from the mistakes made in the past and to aim to reduce the SAP implementation lead time drastically by embracing the functionality that is already available in the standard system?
In order to bust the myth that SAP implementations take forever before you can reap the benefits, it may be useful to identify first which pitfalls should be avoided.
At first there is this issue of BUSINESS INTEGRATION, the supposedly Holy Grail for the sponsors. Their objective for choosing an Enterprise Resource Planning [ERP] system is to ensure that there is only one source for data for all departments within the company. Achieving this milestone would turn data into information. And also our demanding customers and suppliers demand information. But it requires a clear focus on what data is important. Sacrifices have to be made else you fall in the trap that is called COMPLEXITY.
Then we also need to handle a CONTINUOUSLY CHANGING SOCIETY. While people tend to agree that knowledge acquired today would be obsolete in a few years time, this perception would also apply to the expectations regarding customer service triggering the need for innovation to keep a competitive advantage. Although we instantly know what happens thousands of miles away from our home, change does not happen on a global scale. You can aim for a global approach for your business processes, but CULTURAL DIFFERENCES will remain and ignoring those could diminish your local market share quickly.
Potentially the most challenging hurdle would be ACCEPTANCE by the users of the system. Often SAP replaces stand-alone custom made applications. What happens when employees realise that their local autonomy gets threatened by a global system? You will find that RESISTANCE TO CHANGE will emerge in many initiative but counterproductive ways. The management team may see the overall benefits for the company, for most individual users it would be first a few steps back before moving forward.
So how to avoid the danger zone when COMPLEXITY, CULTURAL DIFFERENCES and RESISTANCE TO CHANGE seems to cast a shadow over the glorious horizon?
Of course this is a question for which well defined answer can be turned into a best seller book that is read by many and then shamelessly ignored after flicking the final page. My preference is to keep it all more organic by means of a podcast that focuses on keeping the debate alive. Personal experiences of joy and despair are the most valuable lessons. I believe that sharing knowledge and offering an overview of best practices in an entertaining way will allow our voices to be heard by many.
Soon I will start this podcast. It will be called SANDBOX TYCOON and aims to blow away the myth that implementing Supply Chain Management business processes in a SAP ECC system would take many months to complete. My bold statement is that you could implement a robust template in matter of days instead of months. In the meanwhile it is possible to find out to what extend standard SAP ECC software is equipped to offer best practice solutions. In the end it could be a great method to allow SAP users and consultants to prepare for certification.
My request to you is to let me know what Supply Chain Management related functionality in SAP ECC is fundamentally essential in order to persuade new emerging multinational companies to consider SAP ECC as a viable solution for their business.
Just add a comment below and I gladly use it as preparation for my first podcast episode.
Thanks in advance,
Isard Haasakker.
