Category: Change Management

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.

In its latest Forrester Wave report, SAP Services Providers, Q2 2011, authored by Liz Herbert, the researcher summarises significant changes in the SAP services market over the last two years, with acquisition and consolidation running “rampant” and new delivery models changing the game for buyers and providers. Recent major developments, some even materialising during the course of the Forrester analysis, suggest an imminent changing of the guard, with established players falling by the wayside and hungry up-and-comers jostling for supremacy.

During the several months of research for the Forester Wave analysis, a number of significant acquisitions took place, including the NTT Data Group acquiring Keane, Accenture securing Ariba’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) operations and Atos Origin announcing plans to take over Siemens’ IT business. Forrester’s analysis points to continued acquisitions by larger multinationals – including Accenture’s acquisition of CAS, IBM’s purchase of Cast Iron Systems, the acquisition of Diamond by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and Deloitte buying up ClearCarbon, steady investment by the India-based giants and an increase in Japanese service providers buying up companies as strong evidence the systems integrator (SI) landscape around SAP is experiencing drastic change. 

The report’s 65-criteria evaluation of SAP service providers reveals ...

The idea of this blog is to be a fast read of the changes and new functionalities in Change Request Management in SAP Solution Manager 7.1. Changes include a new user interface which is based on the CRM Web UI framework and additional transaction types and configuration options.

Anglo American said optimising its procurement, asset management, knowledge systems and shared services will be vital in making the most from its $5.1 billion (£3.2 billion) takeover of De Beers, announced on Friday. In a presentation to investors, Anglo American said simplifying systems and processes was a key part of making the takeover a success. Both Anglo American and De Beers are extensive SAP users. Anglo American uses SAP enterprise resource planning and SAP Netweaver business intelligence. De Beers also uses SAP, as well as the vendor’s Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence application.

In real estate the key factors in making the sale are location, location and location. In an SAP project I’m coming round to believing that success requires testing, testing and testing. Unsung heroes abound on SAP projects and your client’s key business analysts can be fabulous participants or sacks of rocks you have to carry everywhere for no apparent benefit. Always choose the former or trade up if you discover you got the latter. Engaged business analysts are great when they bring business knowledge, a willingness to learn SAP, insight to the hot-button, day-to-day issues and the understanding that the consulting team may know a lot, but not necessarily everything. Partnership between consultants and business analysts can be very fruitful at teasing out mainstream, what happens 90% of the time, business scenarios and building coherent test cases.

PwC (PriceWaterhouseCoopers just released its quarterly forecast that covers three broad themes: The collaboration paradox; Enterprise success with emerging social technology; CIO's role in social enterprise strategy.

Creating error-free documentation should be the aim of each organization regardless of discipline. The attached article, "Fagan Inspection," describes a systematic methodology by which documentation can be reviewed, and in all cases, minimize the defects resulting from the review and subsequent correction. The following analysis deploys the Fagan methodology plus some value-added characteristics. Mr. M. E. Fagan claims that there can be up to a 25% resource savings with this methodology.

There has been lots of chatter recently about SAP Solution Manager, especially with Solution Manager 7.1 in ramp-up. SAP has diligently promoted this product for a few years now. But the huge challenge with broader Solution Manager adoption is the general customer perception that SolMan is a technical tool used only to help monitor systems. For this reason, selling a broader project to senior management can be challenging.

Fluor has been using SAP software for a decade now. The company, founded in 1912 as a construction firm that now delivers engineering, procurement, construction maintenance and project management to governments and clients worldwide, is well past the go-live “excitement” stage and now into the maturity model of, as Julie Stokes describes it: How do we keep things alive and make everybody smarter?

At SAP Sapphire last month, SAP's focus on in-memory computing with HANA, mobile and "people-centric" applications (looking to leverage the accessibility and community creation and allure of social business) bring both additional opportunities and challenges in the areas of application life-cycle management (ALM) and IT governance.  SAP's executives laid out a broad and attractive plan for leveraging these areas which was augmented by additional sessions at the conference. The performance optimization benefits to in-memory computing with SAP's adoption of HANA at a time of dramatically increasing data and analytic demand is engaging. Mobile is becoming the platform of choice for users – most of us – with our insatiable demand for immediate, 24x7 access to key corporate (and personal) financial, supply chain, and customer data which is driving massive growth for mobile applications. And accessing that information in ways that take advantage of intuitive, alluring social media create potential benefits for collaboration, for intuitive ease of access and broader user adoption and leverage by communities. Yet missing from this was a clear discussion of how to address the challenges of managing key applications in these emerging environments which are differently architected and carry with them the need to handle ...

Executive involvement goes hand in hand with the difficult change management decisions that need to be made to ensure that the money, and time, spent on SAP produces a business return. In this interview, Art Worster shares his tips on building a successful SAP change management strategy.

Clients aspire for Vanilla SAP during planning, however the final implemention is never Vanilla SAP. Why do customers fail to implement Vanilla SAP?

As a consultant, you are sometimes drafted into projects where the business users are the main blockers. Some might feel that their job is on the line because of the project you are working on. This is a hard working environment as you have a clear remit, but there will be resistance internally.

Quality Gate Management, which is included in SAP Solution Manager 7.0 enhancement package 1, helps you achieve a full overview of all changes implemented in your company's system landscape. It provides a detailed report covering all the changes that occur across the landscape, including information such as the change owner and source system. Within Quality Gate Management, quality gates control the change flow across the system landscape, which helps your company maintain change transparency.

SAP has signed a worldwide reseller agreement with iRise for its Enterprise Visualisation Platform, enabling rapid visualisation and verification of business requirements. The partnership will help to accelerate solution design for SAP implementation projects by improving communication between business users and IT departments early in the project lifecycle, as business requirements are developed and validated. “The ability to convert business requirements into visualisations during the SAP solution design phase can accelerate the validation of the business blueprint and project realisation. Paired with frequent and early design reviews, visualisations can reduce costly change orders and rework during the build and test phases of a project,” according to an SAP spokesperson. Without the ability to visualise the solution, business stakeholders and development teams are often challenged to interpret and understand business requirements and validate what users really need. Describing visualisation as a “game-changer” for the design and delivery of business software, iRise CEO and co-founder Emmet B. Keeffe III, said the agreement with SAP will help the company achieve its vision for all software to be visualised by 2020. Melinda Ballou, program director for IDC’s Application Lifecycle Management and Executive Strategies service, said its research indicates that application visualisation can lead ...