SAP

After assimilating the nuances of the business, the fundamental way of value addition in steady state environment is challenging users’ requirements. Upon receiving any change request from the business ensuring that the requirements are justified with the implications on the business process and are not arising from user’s wish list is a key task, although often assumed to be done well. Ensuring the standard solutions are preferred and reducing the number of changes with custom objects in the SAP ERP leads to business processes mapped in line with the industry standards and best practices. It also results in reduction in the support cost. Some of the must ask questions while screening user’s requirements are as follow. What is the best practice from SAP for this task/activity in the given industry?  Is this available in standard SAP? Is there anything already available in the company (all regions, all SAP instances, and all languages)? What are all the possible options we have and which one is better for business? Is this a one-time requirement or periodic/repetitive? Can this task be made easier by delegating to the Business User with adequate training? Such constructive confrontation on the user’s stated requirements can lead to effective and sustainable solutions to the challenges faced by the business.

Addressing the missing link through SAP ERP can lead to effective utilization of the investment already made in SAP application and can even obviate the need of another IT application, in turn can add value through a simplified process. The activities where a business process or its stage is still carried out off-SAP and can be brought into SAP as a new functionality can create remarkable value for the business. This can not only replace another inefficient application but also bring in a manual task into an organized IT application.  At several enterprises it is observed that all the modules of SAP ERP do not receive the due attention for implementation. Some of the SAP ERP modules may get a back seat in implementation project scope and instead a new interface gets developed with the legacy tools for similar functionality that must be in use for many years. A leading business literature publication, CIO, has mentioned interesting findings on usage of SAP based on a study conducted by IT Consultancy West Trax. The findings stated “in those business areas where some SAP standard transactions had been used by companies, a very high proportion of the available functionality was still going unused”. The take away is that a reality check on the effective utilization of the running SAP application is a good idea for adding value to the business.

Making the SAP ERP more User-friendly is another potential area for creating value. Reducing the system user’s effort to carry out transactions can add value by allowing the user to spend more time on the Business side of his work. It can be a tiny change technically, but as long as the business process realizes a benefit it should qualify as value add. For example, in the ‘Help’ menu available on each SAP ERP screen adding a business specific help option (and creating relevant content at the backend) gives easy and quick access to the business specific way of running the transaction which is typically stored in a Business Process Procedure (BPP) in the document repository of the company. In the absence of such quick help on screen, the user has to all the way reach to that right and updated document in the document repository, read, understand and come back to the SAP screen to execute the transaction. Needless to mention, in this longer route, there are challenges of time and ease of finding the right document which cause loss of productive business effort.

The next promising area for helping the business with the SAP ERP is the Master Data Process Standardization. Having a single version of clearly defined master data creation and editing processes and ensuring user community as well as support staff is updated on it can result in considerable value with the goodness of the data that acts as backbone of business processes. Many a times poorly maintained master data halts business transactions and in turn affects agility of the business.  At a client it was seen that SAP Purchasing master data was maintained by particular users with their own specialized ways (read custom programs) for different countries with practically no useful documentation. There were offline files like MS Access used just to identify the next available number while creating a material master record, since the number was to be used in other ERP instances as well and for retaining the identity of the product in multiple instances the same code was seen as a way out.  One of the main reasons for such arrangement was multiple SAP and non SAP instances and isolated business and support staff hierarchies. The issues with this arrangement were many like not so good quality of master data, inflated lead times for creation and editing master data records, low productivity of the combined SAP support team, high dependencies on the few support staff, custom programs with limitation of modifications etc. The single answer to all such issues is to have single process for master data maintenance across sites, instances, languages and training entire support team on this common process increasing the data quality and availability.

In the next blog in this series I will focus on ways of articulating business value added from the SAP ERP. Please share your views and any more such avenues of BVA with SAP ERP.