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What are you experiences with SAP ERP?

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Urban Urban Project Manager| ABB Switzerland Basel, Switzerland
Almost every customer company I dealt with uses SAP in one form or another. I'd like to hear about your experience in this area: troubles, lessons learned etc...
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Peter Ambrosy Weinheim, Germany
SAP ERP supports many companies to harmonize their business process company-wide and it is a key enabler for the digital transformation journey. Main troubles/ Lessons-Learned: Relevance and significance of OCM (Organizational Change Management) very often underestimated.
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1 reply by Urban Urban
Nov 01, 2017 9:51 AM
Urban Urban
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Thanks for your Response Peter
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Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
Urban -

I would double-down on Peter's feedback on the importance of good OCM practices as moving to a tier 1 ERP platform like SAP is a transformation in every sense of the word.

A couple of other challenges are:

1. Unwillingness to modify your processes to fit the ones which the SAP modules provide out of the box.
2. Inability to hire or retain sufficient talent to maintain and evolve the functionality. SAP consultants tend to be worth their weight in gold and if you don't compensate and treat the internal staff you expect to support the system appropriately, they will leave...

Kiron
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1 reply by Urban Urban
Nov 01, 2017 9:52 AM
Urban Urban
...
Thanks Kiron for your insights
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Urban Urban Project Manager| ABB Switzerland Basel, Switzerland
Nov 01, 2017 7:53 AM
Replying to Peter Ambrosy
...
SAP ERP supports many companies to harmonize their business process company-wide and it is a key enabler for the digital transformation journey. Main troubles/ Lessons-Learned: Relevance and significance of OCM (Organizational Change Management) very often underestimated.
Thanks for your Response Peter
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Urban Urban Project Manager| ABB Switzerland Basel, Switzerland
Nov 01, 2017 7:57 AM
Replying to Kiron Bondale
...
Urban -

I would double-down on Peter's feedback on the importance of good OCM practices as moving to a tier 1 ERP platform like SAP is a transformation in every sense of the word.

A couple of other challenges are:

1. Unwillingness to modify your processes to fit the ones which the SAP modules provide out of the box.
2. Inability to hire or retain sufficient talent to maintain and evolve the functionality. SAP consultants tend to be worth their weight in gold and if you don't compensate and treat the internal staff you expect to support the system appropriately, they will leave...

Kiron
Thanks Kiron for your insights
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Stéphane Parent Self Employed / Semi-retired| Leader Maker Prince Edward Island, Canada
Most ERP implementations are led by senior management. That's because senior management gains the most from these systems.

This can be a major factor in making decisions on where to customize the software and where to change business processes. (The presumption is that ERPs implement best practice processes out of the box.) As you can imagine, each alternative brings along its own set of risks.
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Aaron Porter
Community Champion
IT Director| Blade HQ Payson, UT, United States
- Over communicate
- Keep communications as short and succinct as possible
- Engage markets in testing
- Figure out how to decouple the web so that you don't have to have 20 hours of downtime
- Include the web in your N+1 environment so that you don't have to switch web & ESB pointers back and forth, multiple times, during testing
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Vincent Guerard Coach - Trainer - Speaker - Advisor| Freelance Mont-Royal, Quebec, Canada
Not specific to SAP.
There is documented history of ERP implementation that where too customized to work in the end.

Like the first challenge identified by Kiron

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