SAP creates South African channel for SAP Custom Development

SAP Africa has established a local channel for SAP's global Custom Development business unit in order to provide South African customers with affordable, risk-free means of adapting standard SAP applications to meet their unique business needs.

SAP Africa's engagement manager for SAP Custom Development, Tjaart Malan, points out that 'customisation' and 'custom development' are separate activities, with different specialist skills required for development.

"Customisation does not fundamentally change a standard SAP application - it merely configured the application according to existing parameters that are selected according to a customer's particular operational or strategic circumstances.

"When customisation isn't able to go far enough in addressing those circumstances - because of unique company- or industry-specific requirements - then custom development becomes necessary. That may mean building a new application from scratch or enhancing the functionality of an existing one.

"Either way, development methodology is different from implementation methodology and needs to be handled by appropriately trained people in order to reduce risk to the customer.

"The biggest risk is that developers external to SAP are not aware of SAP product roadmaps and may end up delivering software that is quickly overtaken technologically by new SAP functionality - thereby wasting the customer's time and money in the development phase, pushing up long-term maintenance and management costs and complicating upgrades."

An example of this is SAP's current move to service-oriented architecture (SOA), which focuses on breaking business processes up into their component parts or 'services', creating interfaces among the services, and publishing them as text blocks - along the lines that made html such a universally useful language.

SAP's version of SOA - called Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) - provides an outline for adaptive business solutions, building on the benefits of Web services to enable both flexibility and business efficiency without increasing costs.

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"All of which makes changing the way an organisation operates much easier, faster and cheaper," Malan says. "Non-SAP, non-SOA developers could very well inhibit this flexibility by creating old-style solutions. Even custom development that is SOA-aware but is not aligned with the SAP roadmap could create performance and upgrade difficulties."

The SAP Custom Development division also eliminates time and quality risks. "We provide direct access to global SAP industry or functionality specialists who have the knowledge and experience to plan and execute high-quality custom development projects.

"We also provide evaluations that define a strategy for custom development as well as specialised project management resources. We manage quality throughout the development lifecycle via a plan that specifies clear development requirements, establishes realistic schedules and executes the right reviews at the right time. In other words, we bring a custom development project in on time and on budget without interrupting customer operations.

"Thereafter, our support and maintenance options ensure that custom solutions are sustainable. Customers benefit from using the global SAP infrastructure that already supports their standard SAP solutions."

SAP's NetWeaver integration technology stack also enables SAP Custom Development to increase the customer's return on investment in his existing technology - by leveraging his existing hardware, infrastructure, software and people.

SAP Custom Development provides project management and quality assessment skills to SAP business partners and customers wanting to use their own resources on a custom development project.

"Application development is, after all, what SAP does - and has been doing very successfully for more than 30 years," Malan says. "So our Custom Development division enables our customers to leverage off that success and build on what is already the best."

SAP Custom Development employs over 700 development resources located in nine centres worldwide and executed over 800 development projects in 2005. Since starting up in mid-2005, SAP Africa has already undertaken three custom development projects.