Confessions of an SAP Super User

Maybe not anyone knows (and why should they? I wonder) that I am an SAP super user. Are you impressed, aren't you? I mean, it does not happen every day to meet somebody who can actually make wonders out of this amazing German ERP. You're still not impressed? Come on guys! My company had to pick among a few people when deciding whom was the lucky winner of this kind of super powers and they chose ME. Ok, I see, you're not impressed at all, maybe because you don't know what an ERP is. Or maybe because you know it. Or maybe because you thought I knew nothing of new technologies and now it turns up I am a geek and you feel rather deceived. It was not really my intention to hide this truth from you, I had kind of forgotten so, well, to make up, let me tell you my ERP story.

I have been working the last 6 years with the probably most known ERP system which is SAP, earning a pretty deep knowledge of the Sales&Distribution and Inventory modules.
My direct experience as user has been quite enjoyable, maybe because for the first time I was knowledgeable in something which looked cryptic to most of people. When I joined the company SAP had been used for a couple of years with great satisfaction of everyone, apparently.
This was my impression until when, one day, talking to a marketing colleague, I realised that the company was not so well integrated as I had imagined. As a matter of fact the CRM module had not been purchased because the company did not find it flexible enough to satisfy the marketing department needs. Later on I realised that our HR department was not using SAP either, better they were considering buying another solution called PeopleSoft, by Oracle, as, apparently, SAP HR module is not considered the best fitted to support the everyday challenge of the Human Resources guys.
Eventually, this year, while deploying the same project into different sales Companies around Europe, I have realised that SAP was not able to cope with some of the needs of our procurement and forecasting process. As a matter of fact we had developed an in-house software which was retrieving data from the very same SAP, reworking them and uploading them back into SAP. This in-house tool was requiring the continuous work of at least 4 developers which were making sure that the data flow was not corrupted. I can tell you that, from time to time, funny forecasting figures were popping up. Eventually Sales Companies started to complain asking why they could not use our ERP to place their orders as they did for other busuness group within the company - a similar functionality does exist in SAP. Point is that our forecasting process is very different and SAP was not really capable of satisfying the business need. So we had developed this in-house tool which was quite complex to use and, apparently, not reliable any longer.

Luckily I escaped to Madrid just in time to avoid the storm, leaving my boss handling the frustrated Salescos.

Point of the story is that ERP's are without any doubt a very helpful tool for companies improving efficiency and economic performance by facilitating the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the organization.

However they are not always offering tailor-made solutions to their customers, or, let's put it in another way, companies should be ready to pay an awful amount of money to have a customised service. In the case of my company the choice made was to buy certain modules in the key areas, ask for some customisation and leave out what was not considered vital. This could be a wise approach, however the result has been having different systems running in parallel creating cost duplication and operational inefficiency.

So should we have adapted to SAP in order to have all the modules and, therefore, departments integrated? Overall I think that ERP's should be capable of adapting to companies, understanding their processes and providing ad hoc solutions for a reasonable price. On the other hand, if, for instance, the company is very young when acquiring an ERP system, maybe it could stick to the standard modules offered and develop its processes starting from there.

As in many situations, there is not just one solution, it rather depends on the objectives of the company. The ideal option would be that the company creates its own ERP system, however this implies huge costs as well as lot of time and going to a specialist on the market is a more viable solution.