SAP

Let us first look at the probable challenges, which I envisage, will be coming their way. Most important challenge would be to educate users to use and understand a new business application like SAP and its offerings, for which adequate time should be devoted to ensure effective end-user training. A related issue is how to meet diverse needs across an organization i.e. adopting SAP's standard functionality and customizing wherever absolutely essential to meet unique business requirements. Next would be managing master data and the issues around it, along with data integration aspects between external systems and SAP. Another obvious challenge would be meeting local regulatory requirements, while adhering to the organizational standards and policies. One more potential problem can arise from rapidly evolving business needs due to key business functions being re-established, leading to fine-tuning of the final system to be developed. Last but not the least, would be to handle financial consolidation of local subsidiaries efficiently right from the onset, so that it doesn't become a pain point later.

So, what are the potential advantages these companies will have, once they have successfully moved on to an SAP environment? Yes, without doubt organizations will see a dramatic improvement of their business, and let us evaluate few of them:

Process Automation leading to improved Business Model: Automation of business processes definitely boosts business growth, by ensuring reduction of cost of additional business transactions. And as we all will agree, ultimate evidence of business automation is the ability to increase business volume with limited growth in overhead costs. This transformation will actually have a positive impact on all the affected business processes from order reception and confirmation, to production and inventory turnover, delivery and customer service. One can conclude with assurance that automation of all procurement, supply chain and finance processes would ensure that data is captured and stored centrally, in turn minimizing duplication and error prone data and enhancement of visibility across geographies.

Business on the Web: In today's date, self-service based offerings require an open and modern business application with high quality of transaction and master data. Once on SAP, these companies will be able to open up their systems for customers, partners or suppliers to service themselves. It should be noted here that, many self service features, if designed and implemented correctly, will eventually prove as extra service provided to external stakeholders, contributing positively to customer delight. We might actually visualize a dynamic change, with significant portion of orders placed through portal, and customers will also have the option of checking their delivery status at their convenience.

Efficient Reporting Mechanism: An eternal issue has always been that existing legacy systems provide limited or no support for effective real-time decision making due to low data quality. Such barriers to business intelligence have headed the issue list of many organizations for year, for which often critical business decisions had to be based on experience, rather than on factual data. However, things are bound to improve once there is SAP in place as reliable and precise data will be used for decision making. For example, there will be quantitative information available at the finger tips, for analyzing inventory turnover, profitability, revenue growth and supplier evaluation, just to indicate a few.

Thus, despite all the challenges related to implementation of an SAP system mentioned earlier, companies in and around the Caspian Sea region can eventually expect a robust IT system, enriched with SAP's best practices, to cater to their day-to-day business needs. And let me wish them all the very best in their exciting journey ahead.