A highly placed Gartner researcher put his finger on a crucial problem with South African SAP implementations on the first day of the HP/SAP Tech-Ed conference in the Drakensberg on the weekend.
Derek Prior, worldwide research director with Gartner`s SAP advisory services (application infrastructure and operations), presented a keynote on the first day, asking how many HP/SAP customers present had a SAP competency centre.
On seeing only a few hands held up, he remarked that he had expected more from such a conference. "If I have found one thing in common with all successful SAP implementations, it is that all of them have had a competency centre [CC]," he said. "It has to be a prestigious place to work, in order for businesses to retain the skills necessary to quickly change or extend implementations."
Make friends with the giraffes
Referring to a recent German business manager conference, which on a poster likened business managers to giraffes with their heads in the clouds, Prior said CCs had to be "friendly" with the giraffes in business, which meant aligning the implementation with business imperatives.
"Business management has ownership of business processes, business changes, priorities of change and funding resolution," he said. "To realise business benefits from one`s implementation, there has to be hard cost savings (from skills retention, reduction of attrition costs and others) as well as a reduction of complexity of systems."
The challenges to any SAP implementation, said Prior, included careful measurement of cost, customer satisfaction and business benefits. "It is tough," he acknowledged. "Everything changes at once with a SAP implementation - industry, enterprise economics and other projects. But smart enterprises do it, and in tough times, we all have to try a little harder."
He added that Roll Royce managed to measure the effectiveness of its SAP implementation, as can be viewed in its 2002 financial statements, where the effect of enterprise resource planning on inventory was listed.
"I said I would give you some free statistics," he concluded. The benchmark for operational cost in a SAP lifecycle is as follows: $273 000 for staff, $175 000 for software and $90 000 for hardware.
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