SAP ECC SCM Implementation

Imagine you board a plane for the very first time. You are apprehensive about the experience you are going to undertake when you have found your window seat. You read the safety guide several times and try to show a brave face to the man in suit and tie who takes the seat next to you.
While the plane is taxiing, your neighbour asks you whether this is your first flight. While you wonder why he is able to identify this, he shares his observation that you were paying close attention to the safety briefing. After you acknowledge that is he correct with his analysis, he starts to recite his worst flight experience. As he is more than willing to share all the details, you start to feel most uncomfortable. Just when you grasp the courage to ask him to leave you alone, the plane starts to take off. While being pushed back into your seat you watch while the plane takes flight.
With sweat on your forehead and while holding a firm grip on both arm rests, you look outside and try to admire the view. When the ‘fasten seatbelts’ sign switches off, the stewardess asks for your attention and offers you a glass of water. You kindly accept her offer and apologise that it is your first airborne experience. She says reassuringly that travelling by air is safer than by car or train and that the entire crew has a lot of experience.
You look at your neighbour. He acknowledges that he feels very comfortable with flying, irrespective of his experiences in the past.

Slowly you are able to relax.

Many consultants will be able to tell horror stories about disastrous implementations of ERP systems. It is the lack of focus combined with lack of understanding the impact on the business that is the main reason for these failures. But at the same time these businesses are able to thrive when taking advantage of the capabilities of these ERP systems.
There is this dogma that implementing ERP systems will cause disruption of your daily business during the first months after go-live, with loss of turnover as a result. Instead No Tie Generation Consultancy focuses on transforming this fear into strategic benefits, eliminating negative short and long term impact on your business.

When it comes to implementing SAP ECC, there is no a generic implementation method available.
The main reason is that the available functionality is extremely flexible and therefore you always have multiple routes to reach one specific destination. Also the integration element of this ERP system adds various levels of complexity.
But whatever method you choose, it should focus on best practice and case studies applicable in the industry in which your company is operating. Also, you need to communicate with all departments within your organisation to get a complete overview of functionality required.
The implementation of SAP ECC always triggers change within your organisation. It is important to identify these changes as quickly as possible and address them immediately. If not, then it is inevitable that there will be delays in implementation. The acceptance of change within the entire company is a vital factor of success and therefore needs to be driven from higher management.

As highlighted above, the implementation of SAP ECC is based on best practice and case studies. The change management element comes in the equation when the current ways of working within your organisation can’t be replicated by using standard SAP ECC functionality. It is safe to assume that SAP ECC represents a system based on best practice within your industry, so when there are gaps identified. The choice is to either change your organisation or deviate from the standard SAP ECC system. It is the management of the gap analysis that will influence the speed of implementation. When taking into account the integration element of SAP, deviating from standard SAP to solve a specific gap identified by a specific department could cause major issues with other departments.

Deviating from standard SAP should be avoided. Any change to the standard system will cause potential issues with other departments not directly affected. When you analyse the cost on support activities, you will notice that the vast majority of subsequent changes after implementation are directly linked to non-standard SAP enhancements. The more you change the standard functionality, the more costly an inevitable release upgrade will become. In extreme situations a release upgrade is considered more expensive or dangerous compared to start with a fresh new SAP environment.
So on the long term it is always more efficient and cost effective to change your organisation to fit within the standard SAP system.

No Tie Generation Consultancy always advises to implement standard SAP and there prefers to facilitate your business to change your current ways of working. The main reason for this approach is that it will provide enormous future business benefits. Even though your company might consider standardisation a step backwards, it will prepare your business to swiftly take a competitive edge compared to your competitors. Remember that SAP can only remain the market leader for ERP systems when they listen to the industry regarding changes in best practice in order to keep competitive edge compared to their rivals.

Here are some suggestions how to avoid the most common mistakes when implementing a SAP ECC system…

Project preparation: Targets

As implementing SAP ECC is very expensive, it would make sense to know up front why this investment will be beneficial for your company.

There are four types of internal stakeholders with specific targets within your company when it comes to using the SAP ECC system, being:

  1. Sponsors
    The objective of the sponsors is to control their company based on key performance indicators.
  2. Managers
    The objective of the managers is to have access to up to date reports in order to make strategic and operational decisions.
  3. Auditors
    The objective of the auditors is to assess the quality of data and to validate it against legal regulations.
  4. Operational users
    The objective of the operational users is to provide compete and correct transactional data in the SAP R/3 system

It is vital to identify and document the targets for each stakeholder prior to the blue print phase as it will facilitate the potential change management activities. Taking the effort of documenting the goals per grouped stakeholder will make it easier to stay focused on the objectives during the implementation.

Blue print: Discovery

Many consultants will be eager to start building a prototype, but precious time can be saved when consultants take the effort to listen to the experience and expectations of your company.

Often collecting information is done by a standardised questionnaire containing an extensive list of topics using SAP terminology. Instead No Tie Generation Consultancy would prefer to take interviews with key people within your organisation and translate that in SAP terminology. The interview sessions have to be organic. Although being well prepared, there is no script for the interviews. If vital information is missing, then there is always the opportunity to ask questions afterwards.

When doing an interview the objectives are pre determined. For example, you want to eliminate fears of losing turnover during the first few months after implementation. Therefore it is important to identify which 20% of your customers generate 80% of the company turnover. As soon as you have those important customers identified, then you review billing documents recently sent to those customers. You can quickly find the business processes you need to include during user acceptance testing. Also, it is advised to inform your important customers about the SAP ECC implementation.

There are always very rare business processes which only occur incidentally or seasonally during a calendar year. Quite often those irregular processes require extensive manual involvement from various departments. Identify those processes at an early stage as it could put a lot of pressure on the organisation when they are discovered close to go-live. So it is advised to have specific interviews with a specific focus on these irregular processes.

After all these activities, it should be possible to have a list of gaps between the business requirements and the standard SAP ECC functionality.

Development: Building

You know the targets of the company stakeholders and vital regular and irregular business processes. Also the gaps are identified. Nothing stands in the way to start building the SAP ECC system.
When building, take into account the big picture as your company will change in time. Therefore embrace the offered flexibility in the system instead of building boundaries because your company is not considering new and more effective ways of working.

It is impossible to build in isolation because SAP ECC is an ERP system and controlling the integration between departments within your company is a key success factor. Whatever the business process, there is an element of cause and effect. Each effect triggers another cause.

Start with business processes. They follow a time line. An example is the process of registering a customer order, the delivery of the order, the issuing of the invoice, and the receipt of the invoice payment. cause and effect cycles can be traced over time.
There are also facilitating transactions that facilitate the business processes, such as updating backorders based on the most recent stock availability data and releasing sales order blocked due to credit management restrictions.
Merge the business processes and facilitating transactions to ensure that you offer a system that can cope with real life situations.

Identify the configuration data, master data and transactional data that will control the interaction between cause and effect, between business processes and facilitating transactions. Focus on the information flow, goods flow and money flow linked to each business process. And when you write the necessary various types of documentation, focus on answering the question ‘why?’ as that will add most value during the knowledge transfer to the support organisation.

Finally, start with data migration activities as soon as the building phase is initiated. Even if in the beginning it could be frustrating as requirements will be fluid. But the requirements regarding collecting vendor and customer addresses mainly stay static, and this set of data require various verification phases and therefore takes time.

Final preparation: Realisation

It is advised to document the steps needed during the ‘go live weekend’ weeks before the ‘point of no return’ – also referred to as project ‘go / no-go decision’. Therefore scheduling a dress rehearsal immediately after user acceptance testing would make sense. The dress rehearsal aims to verify the estimated lists of tasks, the dependency between tasks and the time required to perform each individual task.

Finding the most appropriate non productive system for a dress rehearsal is important. As the dress rehearsal activity focuses on prevention, you would need a system that is solely used for quality assurance activities and must be able emulate the productive system.

Post go-live: Continuous improvement

The most ideal system landscape would exist of four separate systems: development, user acceptance, quality assurance and production. Use the development system for unit testing, the user acceptance system for user acceptance testing and the quality assurance system for regression testing.

System configuration and development objects must flow from development to production via the user acceptance and quality assurance system.

As the quality assurance system is a reliable copy of the production system, the result of the dress rehearsal should match the result of the actual go live. Allow the time in the overall project plan to be able to perform several dress rehearsals when there has been to many deviations between the planned activities and actual results.