Rapid SAP Implementations (part 3)

The Project Team

There are many people involved in an SAP implementation. There are people from the business who are critical to the project because they understand the business very well. They know what is required to satisfy the needs of the business partners. They know the "AS-IS" processes. During an SAP implementation, these people are commonly referred to as "Key Users". Usually there are one or two key users from each department within an organization that are assigned to the project. Their participation in the project ranges from 50% to 100% depending on the stage of the implementation cycle.

The SAP team is obviously critical to the implementation as well. These people are the SAP experts that configure the system, write the code for programs and reports, and load the data into the system. This group is a mix of technical resources and functional resource. They are usually very business savvy and capable of understanding and recommending business processes based on the requirements from the Key Users.

It is extremely important to have a lean SAP team. There should only be one SAP team member per module making the configuration decisions. There can be additional people at different locations to provide local support, but the configuration decisions should be made in a centralized manner. Often you can find one person that can handle multiple modules and responsibilities in a project. I strongly believe that one of the reasons that companies have problems rolling out SAP is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. SAP is extremely versatile. There are often multiple ways to configure the system to get the same business results. With more people involved in each module time will be wasted arguing over the best approach. Moral is negatively effected and the project is delayed. It is hard enough to coordinate configuration between SAP modules without adding complexity within a module.

For companies that have already implemented SAP in at least one site and are rolling it out to new sites, there is a third team of people that is critical to the success of a fast implementation. These people are business people from a site that is already on SAP. Usually there is one person from each department who use SAP on a daily basis. These are hands-on department leaders. They are the "Go To" people within the department. They are the ones that everyone else in the department leans on for support. I like to call these people the Champions. I offer them extra training and they act as the front line support for SAP questions within a department. IT organizes meetings for the Champions to get together and discuss inter-department business processes.

One of the keys to success of a fast SAP implementation is the "Buddy System". I pair up Key Users from the new site with their Champion counterpart from a sister site. Because these people do the same job, they understand each other. The Champion can easily explain how and why business processes are run in SAP. The Champions help train the people in the new site. They help the new site through the integration testing and they become the "Go To" people providing front line support to the new site acting as a buffer between the new Key Users and the SAP team after go-live. Most of the questions or issues after go-live are training issues that are best handled by the Champions.

After an implementation, the Key Users from the new site become Champions and in the future, they may be able to help roll out SAP to a new site themselves.