I am coming to the end of researching and completing the October sharedserviceslink.com conference in London on Maximising SAP to Enable Finance Shared Services Process Excellence (it’s a long… and yet, I’m sure you’ll agree,  very memorable title).  The baffling thing is that, with all the people and companies using SAP, they all seem to have used the system differently.  How can this be?  I realise that organisations have different process and business requirements and need to bespoke their ERP to an extent.  I also realise that organisations that implemented SAP 15 or so years ago may have been offered a very different looking platform… essentially a little thin on the functionality front.  The early adopters bore the brunt of having to plug the functionality gaps with their own creations.  And maybe… just maybe, they ended up creating a monster, which is a financial horror to maintain and has a questionable and uncertain future.  But even companies using vanilla SAP seem to be doing things differently from other vanilla users.  Is this because companies are only using 20% of what they’ve bought?

Did you know that SAP stands for Systems, Applications and Products and was founded by 5 ex IBM engineers in 1972?  It ran out of small town near Heidelberg, Germany.  It did something right as it is now the third largest software company in the world, has offices in 50 countries, and has 17,500 customers (around 250 of them in the Earth Top 500).  So how did that growth happen?  In 1979 SAP launched R/2 into the German market and it was an instant success.  If you were a German corporate, chances were you were running off SAP.  Eventually R/2 crossed the German boundaries and expanded across Europe.

But it was not till 1988 when R/3 was released and published in North America, that SAP flourished globally and became ideal for global organisations operating out of 2 or even 3 regions.  By 1993 North America was making up for 44% of SAP’s total world wide sales.

SAP can be the biggest investment made by finance in a generation, costing tens of millions and taking 5 to 10 years to implement in some cases.  Advice surfacing from all this research the team and I are doing is stressing, and then over stressing, the importance of knowing your spec (based on understanding your own processes), and then knowing the capabilities and limitations of SAP, and taking the implementation from there.  It may sound obvious, but it doesn’t necessarily happen every time…

If you are doing something special with SAP please contact me to let me know at susie.west@sharedserviceslink.com