In my years consulting, I’ve often found that so often someone in an organization gets “sold” on a piece of software that is going to revolutionize their business. It could be a manager, a director or a CEO. Inevitably, that software comes with a huge price tag, not just for the licensing, but for the implementation, the maintenance, etc. At the end of the day, you can feel like your leveraging your entire business, just to pay for the software you will use to run it.
Now, being the SAP world for as long as I have, I’ve come to understand how expensive the implementation is for any ERP software. Trying to find a good set of people that can make the software match your business is a HUGE challenge. I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of good companies. And there are a few that standout in my mind that should never have implemented SAP. The reason I say that is because they were willing to invest in the people that are required to keep a system up and running. The bigger and more flexible a system is, the more permanent resources (or permanent consultants) you need to keep it running day to day. And this doesn’t even cover all the areas where configuration can’t make your life any easier. SAP is clearly a German built piece of software, and the Germans are very good at processes. However, must of the design is built around having a lot of people doing small portions of the data entry. The smaller your business is, the less likely you are to have 5 people entering data, but rather 1 person doing it all. And while, it is “doable” to have a single person creating a help desk ticket, creating the sales order and even creating the delivery to receive the goods in, that person is likely responsible for a lot more things than just data entry.
I saw this so often working in the service world. There were 10 people to do everything. That meant taking the customer’s call, doing the pricing, fixing the units, purchasing parts to complete the repair, and handling their own shipping in and out of the units. Now, if you have to do the real work, and then do all of the computer work… what do you think ends up happening??? Either, you need to hire people just do the data entry, or the quality of the data becomes pretty questionable. Either the data is incomplete, because only required fields were populated, or the data might not get entered for 4 days… I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time remember what was for dinner last night… now try to remember what job numbers you worked on, and for how long… There might be paper in place, but now you spend time writing down what you did, just so you or someone else can punch it into the computer later. Efficient??? hardly.
so what can you do to help??? I’ll continue this tomorrow.
thanks for reading,
Mike