Gartner has published a forecast on the sales of mobile phones for 2010 – It is quite obvious that the future is in mobility. Mobile phone prices are decreasing and network service providers are having to compete more and provide extended services in order to get the edge on sales.

Mobile access to SAP introduces endless possibilities to an organization – Just to name a few, some use-case examples of accessing SAP through a mobile device follow:

- Empower managers on the move with the ability to action approval requests from their mobile phones
- Capture data directly into SAP using mobile phones – no more paper forms out on the field or on the road
- Provide SAP reporting to employees and managers
- Share SAP system data externally with extended multi-enterprise supply chains (i.e alerts, updates, reports, etc.)
- Provide mobile “proof-of-delivery” applications to your truck drivers
- Plant maintenance managers can use mobile inspection applications to feed SAP – this data can then be used for management reporting
- Allow employees to submit leave requests via mobile phones
- Allow employees to access electronic payslips on their mobile phones
- Allow customers to keep track of orders via their mobile phones
- Other areas such as security, asset management, inspections, compliance, job estimating, fleet management, engineering, construction, logistics, etc.

Without doubt, the above points have sparked some sort of an idea in your mind about how having access to SAP from a mobile phone could drastically benefit your business.

This is the age of information – To keep the lead in any market, your business processes need to flow smoothly; your corporate information needs to be available to the right people without delay; managers must be informed when quick decisions need to be made – they must then be given the ability to make those decisions on the spot; duplicate data capture must be reduced; legacy interfaces into SAP must be phased out. All of this will increase efficiency of processes and drastically decrease the total cost of ownership of your SAP systems.

If SAP mobility has not been considered yet, then it is time – Empower your managers, impress your customers, leverage your employees.

Traditionally SAP has been contained within the IT department. Break down the barriers and enable your business to do what it does best.

Contact K5 ERP Solutions if you would like an obligation free analysis of areas in your business that would benefit from SAP mobility.

Among 200 clients surveyed, 80% declared having minimum use of the basic contract. On average, clients are using their support services less than 6 times a year – to use this service they must obtain the full subscription to premium support even though it is not used very often.

To overcome this cost issue, some clients subscribe to external SAP support companies such as K5 ERP Solutions.

Your Support Could Be Better. And Cheaper.

It’s not uncommon to come across companies that are being taken advantage of with regards to SAP services  – The shocking thing is that usually these companies don’t really mind. Don’t be mistaken – they pretend to mind. They complain bitterly about all sorts of downfalls: the terrible support, massively over-zealous quotations for small jobs, lack of flexibility, lack of skills, lack of knowledge transfer, bad communication, and it goes on… Even though they complain so much, when it comes to contract renewal, they stick with the same SAP service partner. Why is that? Rather the devil you know than the devil you don’t, right? With all due respect, that is a terrible mentality to become victim of – Don’t let it happen to your company!

Many SAP service partners muscle their way into tenders by promising amazing solutions at premium rates that are very well motivated; fixed pricing is used to eliminate the risk on the client side; clients like big names because that should mean that the job will be done right. Once these support partners have won the tender, they implement the project by cutting corners wherever they can in order to increase profit margins and meet deadlines. They often play the blame game with their consultants when things go wrong, and project managers don’t take responsibility for much – This causes contention and the very consultants that are supporting you no longer want to be there. This has a huge effect on the quality of service provided.

Disturbingly, it has become more common for us to provide resources to other support partners out there. The question is, why? Well simply put, we have excellent consultants at very reasonable prices. We make our clients happy and they always come back for more. Very often, other support partners call us in to help them clean up the mess that their internal consultants have left behind after a project implementation. Of course they need to make a profit, so they add on an extra 20%-60% to the hourly rates of sub-contracted consultants.

The obvious problem with this model is that companies are paying a lot more for their SAP services than they need to. If you are not happy with your current SAP support or services, contact us – We will gladly provide an obligation free proposal.

One of my recent projects included an HR Leave workflow that had already been worked on by 4 other consultants – none of them managed to complete the job ; no one in the business knew “who did what” ; transports were a mess ; the wheel was reinvented far too many times. I landed up undoing a lot of their work, and reverted to using standard business objects, steered clear of using custom tables, and added meaningful and valuable descriptions to tasks and workflow templates. By the end of it the client had a working leave workflow, which was a lot simpler in design but achieved exactly what was needed – Not only that, but the end users love the fact that more meaningful content is now being delivered to them. In the big scheme of things, user acceptance is everything – Why didn’t the previous consultants emphasize this? Even more importantly, why didn’t the previous workflow consultants finish the job properly? Because they didn’t know how to.

Another typical example recently popped up with a client of mine – I was asked to quote on the design and development of 11 QM Notification workflows. The consultant that previously worked on the project adopted a very rigid design that did not allow for any change to the business process. They also told the client that certain things could not be done. After my initial assessment, I proposed a generic workflow design that would mean one workflow for all notification types. My design included the flexibility for business change and growth – It was not restricted to particular notification types. QM configuration was used to manage deadlines and task processing. In the end, instead of creating eleven new workflows, only one was needed – It had a much simpler design, and achieved a lot more, while still reducing future maintenance costs.

The moral of the story:

• Inexperience = Low initial cost, future redesign,lower business value, less return on investment, higher overall cost of ownership.
• Experience = Higher initial cost, higher business value, higher return on investment, lower overall cost of ownership.

Experience conquers all!

When it comes to finding SAP-related jobs, most people rely on the run-of-the-mill tools like job boards. Some will ask friends and family, and others will have former colleagues “ask around”. But when it comes to finding a new job in the current global economy, it is important to use all the tools at your disposal. This posts perfectly compliments Personal Brands and Your Career.

The following online tools can very effectively help you find a job online. I have listed them in order to indicate, in my experience, the success of using the tool.

1. LinkedIn

Over the last 12-18 months, LinkedIn has been transformed into a professional powerhouse. With over 35 million profiles available, LinkedIn is fast becoming the preferred site for business professionals around the world. Once you have created your own profile on LinkedIn, you can join any number of SAP related groups – from the SAP Community with 26,000 members (and growing) to the SAP Freelancers group with about 5,000 members, there is bound to be a group that suits you best. Make sure to complete your profile – Add a picture, keep your work history up to date, add your education details. The more you add to your profile, the more impressive you look.

Have a look at the following groups to join:

• South African Certified SAP Consultants
• International SAP Projects
• SAP People Forum
• SAP Certified Consultants
• SAP Community
• SAP Freelancers
• SAP Community Network
• SAP Resources Africa

2. Job Boards

In the South African market, it is still very effective to post your CV on multiple job boards. Of course it can become a little frustrating posting the same information over and over for each job board, but it will pay off in the end. Make sure to have a very professionally formatted and up to date CV. The nice thing about local job boards is that you get more personal service – Your information is delivered right into the recruiter’s lap – They don’t have to go looking for you on the web. This means that you will get more individual attention because they know that you are serious about finding a new job. If you haven’t already, register on our job board.

3. Ning

Ning is a predominantly European social network platform – You can create your own social network, targeted at your specific audience. International SAP Projects is an extremely successful social network obviously targeted at SAP consultants. Go join International SAP Projects in order to gain exposure and use their job facilities to find new jobs around the world. Once again, the complete your profile, the more likely you will have recruiters knocking at your door.

A good start once you have registered is to join these groups:

• SAP Certified Consultants
• South African SAP Consultants

4. Twitter

It is still not known how Twitter will influence the business market in the future, but more and more companies and job seekers are beginning to leverage the power of micro-blogging. At first I thought it was a load of bull. I though – “What is the point of posting one line to the world?”. Why would anyone care? Well I decided to give it a try, and in my experience, it opened up endless potential to build new relationships with other prominent SAP users, and keep up to date on current market trends. Being active on Twitter and following other SAP consultants and companies helps you to know where SAP is going, what the current trends are, what job opportunities are out there, and what areas you should be up-skilling in. As a starting point, have a look at the following and start following!

• SAPListens
• sapnetwork
• jonerp
• oliver
• wolf_gregor
• rmtiwari
• thomas_jung
• eddai
• SAPMentors
• sapteched

You can find me on Twitter here.

Twitter realised that a lot of recruiters and job seekers we re using their site to look for jobs or find candidates. That’s when they decided to introduce Twitter Job Search. Using this tool you can search for location specific jobs that have been marketing by recruiters and companies using Twitter.

5. Facebook

Increasingly, Facebook is bridging the gap between our professional and private lives; and it is important to never underestimate the power of your personal network. By clearly identifying your SAP skills in your profile, it will expose this information to the millions of people who use Facebook every day. Of course, there are some specialized SAP-oriented Facebook groups available. Some are closed while others are open. Make sure you join those that align closely with your interests and skills – you may be surprised how many opportunities may present themselves. Some to look at are SAP Consulting South Africa, SAP Positions – South Africa Group, SAP Page, SAP Consultants Group, SAP Network Group, SAP Network (GLOBAL) Group, SAP Group, and a whole lot more – These ones mentioned are just a few of the more popular ones…

6. Xing

Xing is a serious competitor with LinkedIn – but has a much larger user base in Europe (and in particular, Germany). It has similar functionality available, including groups – but may be a more useful network for those who are based in Europe. And while it can take some time building and maintaining your profile on multiple sites, your goal is reaching the right employer in the right location. By doubling up on your profile information you may actually be doubling your chances of a new job.

7. Visual CV

Think of this as a professional lifestream. Visual CV provides a single view of your career achievements in a web interface. You can control the privacy settings, enrich your CV with multimedia, links to websites and social networks/profiles, share your profile via a unique URL and automatically generate a PDF version.

Benefits of SAP Workflow:

• Eliminate human error
• Reduce process times
• Increase vendor / customer satisfaction
• Improve the SAP user experience
• Reduce business process costs
• Measurable return on investment
• Full audit trails

If you don’t know much about SAP Workflow, have a quick read here to get an overview.

The IT world has already been affected by news of the global recession with CIOs facing shrinking budgets, limiting new projects, and prospects of staff layoffs. CFOs increasingly cast their critical eyes on the till to realise most IT shops are behemoths on the spending front. For large companies, SAP budget/spend often runs into 10s or even 100s millions of rands which takes up a significant portion of the overall IT budget. As a result, it gets special attention/scrutiny from CFOs. Their conversations with their IT counterparts often involve a butcher knife in one hand and ready to slice IT budget on the fly.

While seasoned SAP & IT professionals who have been through the early-90s recession and the more recent Internet bubble have seen all this before, there’s a need across the board to re-think strategy in the face of radically reduced budgets.

Ironically this can be a time of enormous opportunity for IT departments: cutting costs, increasing flexibility and proving an ability to generate returns while others are wringing their hands will mark out winners from losers over the next 18-24 months, and IT is at the heart of this internal efficiency transformation.

Listen carefully to the needs of the business

Economic downturns create a tighter focus on value, which means IT departments are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate quantifiable improvements for money spent. Business users often feel victimised through the process of SAP implementation which often forces the business to adapt to a generic set of business processes. It is at these times, their complaints become more vocal than ever.

It is now the time to listen to their needs and address their concerns and negative perception of IT as during tough times, unpopular and costly SAP department can be a toxic combination. Usability is often a key issue for the majority of SAP users, addressing key areas of pain in usability can go a long way to improve user productivity, perception and cut training costs.

It is time for innovation and flexibility

During time of recession, successful businesses do not just slash their IT budgets – they look for investments in IT innovations to create new efficiencies and to be first out of the traps when market conditions change. The key to survival in the current environment is characterised by much shorter innovation cycles and the requirement to get goods and services to market more quickly.

SAP traditionally positions its products as tools to provide enterprises with a competitive edge. With many large enterprises now running SAP, your organisation may not be all that different from competitors in terms of its IT infrastructure. The time to innovate is now.

Engage smaller SAP consultancies

Business advantage can prove short-lived as economies contract, dramatically increasing competition. This drives a need for radical change without the budgets normally associated with this kind of re-invention.

Traditionally CIOs have felt secure using large SAP consultancies with the ability to pull together large project teams to support R multi-million installations often with 2-3 year time frames. In the current economic climate there are a number of factors that undermine this approach:

1. Large consultancies often won’t engage in smaller, sub-R500k SAP projects. With massive overheads and large teams from pre-sales to account management to project delivery, they just can’t mobilise the right resources for smaller more nimble deliveries. With a limited SAP budget, smaller consultancies are far better positioned to respond to your needs.
2. With a skills investment strategy often defined years in advance, bigger consultancies build large resource pools around established technologies. This acts as a block to innovation, where more agile consultancies are free to explore new techniques as soon as they become available and compete on innovation rather than raw manpower.
3. Smaller companies tend to be more responsive and focused on client needs. Demanding projects more quickly for less investment is exactly the sort of challenge growing consultancies relish, where larger businesses may simply refuse.

Smaller companies are typically more responsive, flexible and innovative. Due to their low overheads, they can also be very cost effective with smaller projects. If you’re looking for SAP innovation delivered in the shortest possible timeframe and at lowest possible cost, it is time to engage smaller SAP consultancies.

Rethink/reprioritise your SAP upgrade strategy

SAP has traditionally released products and made major changes to underlying functionality on a 5-year schedule. However in recent years, this cycle has shortened to 2-3 years due to their diversification in products such as CRM and Enterprise Portal – there have been 5 major releases of CRM in the space of just 8 years.

For companies with global deployments, multi-terabyte databases, and tens of thousands of users, an upgrade project is often disruptive, expensive and deeply unpopular. SAP recognised and acknowledged this problem in the recent years. With the shipment of its ERP 6.0 product, instead of bundling 2-3 years of product enhancements and technology improvements into one massive release, SAP has now moved to what it calls a continuous innovation strategy by releasing smaller enhancement packages.

But what if you’re not on ERP 6.0 and have other SAP products? In the current tough business conditions, businesses are less likely to have the appetite to spend large sum of money and face significant business disruption to take on major upgrade projects just to take advantage of some functionality improvements. There is an alternative.

You could build solutions on top of your existing SAP platform to provide the additional functionality that the business demands, without embarking on a major upgrade programme. More functionality in a fraction of the time and at far lower cost leads to vastly reduced risk and much faster return on investment.

Maximise your existing SAP investment

CIOs who worked with SAP before 1999 would know that SAP was known as a one-product company, which had a much less confusing naming convention for its products and releases (R/1, R/2 and R/3). Since then, SAP has accumulated dozens of products with a large set of options, variants and names such as Customer Relationship Management, Product Life Cycle Management, and Business Intelligence etc. This diversification strategy aimed to sell new products and licenses to new and existing customers. SAP product licenses are not cheap. With the recent hike in maintenance cost, a business case which involves buying product licences, cost of implementing and customising the standard product, deployment, getting new infrastructure/support capabilities and paying annual maintenance cost can be an extremely difficult proposition to present to the board.

Therefore, similar to the upgrade question, you can/should look to maximise your investment in existing SAP solutions. With introduction of NetWeaver and Web Application Server, SAP has effectively exposed itself as a technology platform. With its support for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), it allows customers and partners to use it to extend SAP applications or even build brand-new application. This provides the opportunity for SAP customers to develop new functionalities utilising innovative technology on top of your existing SAP platforms such as ERP rather than making new product acquisitions. The list of potential savings include: no additional license/maintenance cost, infrastructure and you can leverage existing skills. Adding these up, the savings should start to make a lot of sense.

Apart from utilising your SAP solution as a technology platform for extending existing functionality, another quick win can come from a simple audit of your existing SAP products and licenses. Unless you have done one recently, you may be surprised how many shelfware products and licenses you have got and been paying for which your business is not utilising. With the recent SAP maintenance cost hike, you can potentially save your business a lot of money just by doing a simple audit.

Change before you have to – Jack Welsh

CIOs have an opportunity to act now before the recessionary economy forces them to. The easy option is to stop projects, get rid of contractors, layoff staff and go into ‘maintenance mode’, but this won’t help your business gain competitive advantage, which it critically needs to survive and emerge stronger.

Adopting a more flexible approach and strategy for different times to continue to deliver value to the business can help making SAP/IT the true differentiator in supporting the business to remain competitive during the time of recession.

Reference: Recession Proof Your SAP Strategy