Category: Strategic Enterprise Mangement

In December, SAP announced that the launch of the new SAP Community Network, originally planned for that month, would be pushed forward to early this year due to various technical problems. "Since then, while all of us have been working on the new platform, I've been publicly quiet on the launch topic, since the news changed daily as progress was made on one front, and new issues were uncovered on other fronts, and I didn't want to set a new date or new expectations and not be fully confident of living up to them," said Mark Yolton, senior vice president of SAP communities and social media.

The past few years have not been easy on the IT organization. IT budgets at many companies remain tight and there are still a number of companies whose SAP organizations are concerned about justifying their staffing and resource levels. When you spend a long time building up an expert SAP team, the last thing you want is to have it broken apart as a result of cutbacks and the inevitable departures that follow those cutbacks.

So how can you keep your SAP organization together? Here are a few suggestions for IT executives looking to keep their SAP teams intact, based on recent conversations I’ve had with SAP customers.

After seeing several recent GRC projects, SAP Mentor Gretchen Lindquist of PwC shares some of her experiences. See why she now believes the solution has something for every SAP installation, large or small, public or privately held.

Unfortunately, ERP implementations still aren’t any easier than they were 15 years ago when I started in the ERP world. Despite the enterprise software industry’s best intentions to mitigate risk with cloud ERP systems, implementation accelerators, and other tools, ERP failure rates are still high and most projects still take more time and money than expected. For example, our 2012 ERP Report, which will be released next week, shows that nearly half (44-percent) of all ERP implementations fail to deliver at least half of their expected business benefits.

There is no such thing as ERP success without leadership and governance from the executive level. As much as some C-suiters would like to defer involvement in and responsibility for an ERP implementation to their IT department or some other functional area, it is absolutely critical that executive sponsorship is vocal, clear and consistent from day one of the ERP project for without this kind of visible executive buy-in, ERP failure is a very likely outcome.

To plan and execute tests there are many different products on the marketplace. SAP Solution Manager provides different options that can be utilised depending on which 3rd Party tools are already deployed. This blog focuses on utilising the SAP Solution Manager toolset .

It’s that time of year again. Enterprise social media has had an impressive ramp-up in 2011 as well as being well-poised for a banner year in 2012. However, along the way, social business has become a very broad topic indeed, covering a wide range of topics that ranges from social marketing and Social CRM to [...]

SAP's Cloud Strategy has taken some big turns. But, will it be a boon for all businesses.

The implication is that SAP is building and promoting cloud, HANA and mobile apps that connect to pre-existing application suites (e.g., BusinessOne, Business ByDesign and Enterprise Suite). They are not planning on materially re-working the Enterprise Suite code anytime soon.

Bottom line: SAP cloud progress has been notable. BUT, the benefits will be uneven with mid-market buyers getting a better value experience in the short term.

Okay - Custom Development is bad as a rule as COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) is meant to be best practice but I think it's got a bad wrap...

SAP always talked a good game about the cloud, but today it put its money where its mouth has been, acquiring cloud HCM vendor SuccessFactors. Now what, SAP?

SAP is currently running a first pilot shipment for SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio for ABAP (aka ABAP in Eclipse). SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio for ABAP is the new ABAP IDE built on top of the Eclipse platform.

It is November again, and for the 4th time in a row - I am attempting to blog about what will be the top areas for SAP consultants to focus on for 2012

You may never have heard of it, but The Executive Value Network for Finance is a business community of practice for the senior business leaders (CFOs and senior finance executives) where SAP customers can meet their peers from leading companies to discuss today’s challenges and solutions. The purpose of the network is to facilitate the exchange of customer success, innovation, and best practices – but don’t worry their subject matter goes well beyond software

With enhancements to FloorPlan Manager framework in Web Dynpro ABAP, we would be able to use Business Object Layer to build applications, does this sound familiar to existing SAP CRM Web Client UI framework. What would be the road ahead for UI enhancements in SAP CRM Web Client and Web Dynpro based applications?

Do you really know the full implications of the new release strategy SAP have announced? This blog looks at the view of SAP Product Managers around the impact the new strategy will have for customers.