Day 3 - Lesson learned - Seçil Akdemir

There are 3 types of Opportunities:
In-house developed systems
Best of breed approach – taking the best systems from different vendors
ERP system
Keep legacy system and improve whatever needs improvement

1st stage: Current SWOT analysis
2nd stage: Future SWOT analysis
3rd stage: Options in order to reach future desired and estimated state
4th stage: Choose the provider and the system

These vendors come to the potential companies and talk about their systems.
Companies should ask lots of questions in order to understand the exact benefits of the vendor system since there could be extra costs or different needs in order to use that feature.
Sales people do the presentations most of the time, implementers are different people. So, sales people do not care much.

Best of breed: bargaining power is the main advantage; hopefully you take the best products of each vendor so you can achieve a better system at the end.
But you have to manage the upgrades of different companies. You always have to manage the integration points.
Cost disadvantage since you need different consultants for each product.

If there is no clear documentation of business processes, then it means they do not know the business processes in detail.
When you buy an ERP system, it comes with some business processes in mind. So consultants have generally in depth knowledge in terms of generic business processes.

Sales people generally do not want to use information systems:
Since they are paid in terms of their sales amount so they do not want to share the information with others within the company
In most of the companies, they do not have good evaluation systems so they are not interested in seeing the reports of sales people
Moreover, sales people are only interested in sales and if reporting is not a part of the evaluation process they would not report.

Organizational Change Management Presentation
In many ERP projects, most of the companies did not consider the organization change part of this project.
Communicating expectations is a key part of OCM.
OCM is a series of initiatives to prepare your company to the change.
Commitment of the employees is also important for OCM.

Technical stuff vs. people stuff
People stuff is training, communications, security authorization, super user organization, business process procedures. These are all initiatives that involve changing people behavior.
Technical stuff is blueprinting, configuring and etc.

Which one is harder to change?
Company culture really matters in strategic changes and decisions. Culture includes values the company holds, behaviors, leadership, and customers.
Culture and the view points really affect the success of the project.
Training has several elements:
Core team training is important so they will be involved more and understand the features of the system
Management seminar – ensure management understands what is going on
End user training:
Training needs analysis
Develop course contents
Deliver training courses
After training – practice before go live

Getting employees to see SAP as an organization and business process change
When training is approached as a software project, participants focus on “how to perform their own transactions”

1st part of the OCM is the training and the 2nd part is the communication.
Communication
It is important in order to take support and commitment of every department and user.
Security / Role Development
At the beginning defining the end users access needs could be a difficult task.
Super User Development
Use these people to increase the communication within the organization. Also, we can use these users for training purposes. Super users could be used to elevate problems. To distribute support within the organization is the main idea.
You want people who know about the process.
You select the key users – good workers. They need to be helpful. You need to ensure that super users know where to get help.
Super user workshops can be useful in terms of improving the ERP system.
Super user trainings can be organized so they will transfer their knowledge to the regular users.
Business Process Procedures
BPP is a document to define steps – how each transaction is used within SAP system as configured in your company.

OCM initiatives are inter-related – support and enhance each other.
OCM is hard stuff because you are talking about changing people.
Do plan the OCM and have a significant budget. At least 10% of implementation cost should be put apart for this purpose.