Rapid SAP Implementations (part 1)

I am starting a new series on rapid SAP implementations. Over the years I have developed an approach to rolling out SAP in only 2 months. Most of you will not believe me until you read further, but I have implemented SAP 15 times and 10 out of the 15 implementations I completed following a 2 month project plan.

What's the catch? You have to start with a system or plant or company site / facility of record. What I mean is you start with a baseline configuration that is running all of your business processes effectively in at one facility. Then you must take a cookie-cutter approach to rolling in out to all other facilities in your organization.

Many people will say that this approach will not work in their company because each of the sites are too different from each other. I say prove it to me. I have heard many skeptics who say things like, “It may work for a small company, but not for one as large as ours”; or “This kind of implementation can only work if all of the stars are aligned which is not the case in real business.” The fact is that I have used this method in more than 10 successful SAP implementations with companies of various sizes manufacturing various products and services with various customer bases. One of the most important ingredients is a positive attitude. I ask you to keep an open mind while consuming the contents of this blog series. I have proven the approach many times. I have proved that it is repeatable.

I am in the process of documenting exactly how perform a 2 month SAP implementation in a book. I plan to call the book, "On Your Mark, Get Set, Go-Live". But this blog series will give you a sneak peek into the contents of the book. The book will contain project plans, cut-over plans, issues logs, and many other helpful examples. But throughout this blog series, you will find tips and trick and the basics on how to do this at your company.

It is just as important to understand why you should implement SAP this way as it is to understand how to roll out SAP in only 2 months.

I will start with the "why" and detail the "how" throughout the series.

The "why" is not very difficult to understand. Although I was an SAP expert and I brag of my accomplished project management career, I come from a business background and the reasons why to implement SAP with this approach are purely business reasons.

World class companies try their best to run the same business processes at every site throughout their company. Companies that achieve this are not only world class, but best in class. Having the ability to run the same business processes throughout every company entity allows companies to share resources which in turn allows them to reduce their costs and run extremely efficiently. Companies that have done this gain tremendous synergies throughout their organizations. If they are a manufacturer, it allows them to easily move the manufacturing of a product line from one plant to another. It allows companies to share human resources. Employees can land on the ground at a different plant and immediately start working effectively. There is extremely little learning curve if they have already been doing the same job at a different plant.

In this approach, companies end up running a single instance of all of their enterprise applications which brings synergies in the form of shared master data. They can easily extend materials and BOMs in their system from one plant to another. They use the same data fields for the same purpose. They use the same codes for the same purpose. This creates synergies in reporting and analytics. All of the sites can use the same set of reports and better yet, they read the reports in the same way. It avoids confusion in terminology.

Using the same terminology in itself builds synergies. Many people speak the same industry language within an industry. Many companies use the same terminology within a company at a high level. But these language synergies are brought to the ultimate level when companies use a single instance of enterprise applications using the same fields in the same way. For example, if all sites are using stock locations that begin with an "8" for RMAs (Return Material Authorizations) and stock locations that begin with a "9" for finished goods inventory, employees from different manufacturing plants can speak of materials in location 86473 and 90876 and there is no explanation required. When employees throughout the entire organization worldwide, can have detailed conversations without have to explain the basics every time, the company benefits dramatically.

All of these synergies together save considerable time and money. Then on top of that, add the cost savings to the organization gained in the IT department. It simply takes fewer IT resources to manage a single instance of each enterprise application than to manage several instances or several applications. IT workers who are familiar with working on a single platform such as the SAP NetWeaver platform can easily learn more than one SAP module or component. Therefore IT resource can be cross trained which saves even more money. Add this to the cost savings of implementing SAP in only 2 months compared to 4, 6 or 8 month implementations and you can easily carve $500K off every site implementation. When I roll out SAP to a site using internal resources, I usually budget the project at about $50K - $75K per site. Essentially this is the travel budget.

It is easy to see why this approach should be followed from a business perspective. In the next several blog posts, I will begin to detail how you can make this approach work for you and your company.

Please feel free to post any questions you may have along the way and I will be happy to answer or discuss your concerns.

Dan