Do you work for a company that uses SAP?

If so, how do they structure support - in-house or third party/consultants? Maybe some combination?

I recently finished a huge SAP implementation and I need a better understanding on the methods companies are using to support current systems and drive upgrades. Asking from the employment standpoint so I can better focus my job search and be a desirable resource for businesses that use SAP.

SAP is not only the name of the software, it's also the term used for the person that bought it!

Sorry, I kid. I just had absolute hell with SAP at a previous employer because the implementation was much longer than planned and a pain in my ass. I heard once it was fully implemented after I left it worked well though.

Thats not the first time I've heard that story. A poorly scheduled project and strung out go-live, combined with lack of hypercare once the switch is flipped...its a bad combination as you saw first hand.

Combination of in house support and consultants. Analysts tend to be in house, while developers tend to be consultants.

Love SAP

@Ryan - have an e-mail address where I could ask a few more questions?

We have a combination of in house and external support. I really like the SAP platform. What gives me headaches are tools and bolt-on systems that our company tries to integrate with SAP. I've worked at three O&G companies and each one had initiatives to make SAP a more user friendly platform by attaching clumsy front-end programs and analytics tools to it and building up freaking empires of support staff to support those programs. SAP is not that hard and it just works if you put a little effort into learning the nuances of it.

agree

I wish there was a better published list of all the transaction codes and maybe more importantly the technical data of each field.

@Tommy - sounds like you've seen a lot. Have an email where I can reach you?

Thanks for sharing what you've seen.

TommyGun said:

---

We have a combination of in house and external support. I really like the SAP platform. What gives me headaches are tools and bolt-on systems that our company tries to integrate with SAP. I've worked at three O&G companies and each one had initiatives to make SAP a more user friendly platform by attaching clumsy front-end programs and analytics tools to it and building up freaking empires of support staff to support those programs. SAP is not that hard and it just works if you put a little effort into learning the nuances of it.

---

Literally the exact opposite of our company. We've used SAP for about 20 years, and it's so inefficient that we have tons of bloat in production support staff. The SAP team itself is fairly small, maybe a dozen or so.

Now we're doing what you described by taking functionality out of SAP and using more user friendly systems, and it's been significantly more successful.

Any of these externals yall use TMS or TMW types?

Interesting. Good info.

Ryan or Tommy - have an email where I can reach you?

To OP

I worked for a company that uses SAP. SAP stated our company was the largest deployment they ever undertook. Started around 2007, 4 years of training, meetings and process mapping before building the software, ahead of deployment. Deployment is still ongoing today.

Support was, few SAP personnel, many Andersen's, Deloitte & Touche, many external contractors, many external SAP experienced users hired-in and internal I/T staff trained ahead. (However, internal U.S. I/T got whacked one day, over 450 lost their job. That U.S. work went off-shore to global contractors with a relation to SAP)

The big bucks were paid to the Andersen's Consulting. Learn as much as you can, there's always a need by a company that buys SAP as their software system. If you are mobile and well trained in SAP - the sky is your limit in earning potential.

SAP (venting here) FWIW

*SAP has the best sales people in the world.
*If a company goes cheap on the SAP frontend version purchase, that company will end up buying add-on's and bolt-on's that drive costs out of control. Either buy SAP's best version or don't buy at all - use another software.
*If you're Senior Level Finance/Accounting you love the reporting features of SAP. If you're Operations, Supply Chain, Sales or other, it's a pain to do your job, but those 10 to 15 extra SAP steps that are needed to process information (versus the previous steps to do your job in the former system) gets the Finance/Accounting folks the info they need...or want to model from.
*Functionality of the SAP system, works great if you get it working or when you get it working. The problem is, no one wants to change anything, line extensions, add options to products, etc. because they're afraid the system will not be functional or breakdown creating more costs to hire someone to fix the problem. System holds back business grow and product innovation, in my opinion.
*SAP sells the system to a business stating you can put your entire company on one system. The company I worked for was quite diverse and proved their theory as inaccurate. Also, out business in Brazil could use SAP, but it was against Brazilian laws to store a Brazilian business (finance/accounting) information on servers based in the U.S. - SAP didn't know that tidbit when the system was sold to us. We gained nothing from that standpoint, just another software program located offshore and no different then the system it replaced. Our company conducted business with manufacturing/processing operations in 67 countries - Brazil was not a one off for us.
*SAP is a totally illogical system. For most software systems, logic and some intuitive thinking can overcome a problem, but not in SAP. You cannot outguess SAP. Trying to apply logic to SAP system coding is not worth the time to think about as there is no logic.
*I never saw/worked on the "top of the line" SAP version, but I know people that have worked with it and love it. Our company went cheap and paid for it. The original cost was estimated at $2.3 billion and would be rolled out to the entire company in 7 years. At last check (as I am retired now), it's been 11 years, 40% of the company has the system, and they are in excess of $6.0 billion into the project.
*Off-shore contractor help,....through all the process mapping that took place for 4 years before the software build, if the company employee had an SAP problem and needed help, the off-shore person has a notebook of steps to take for problem resolution. If anything occurred outside the problem resolution steps in the notebook, the off-shore help stopped helping and shifted the problem to "Level 2" client help who responded within 72 hours....and you usually got a call at hour 71. When a plant operation goes down, there's not time to wait 72 hours for a response, but that's what the company signed up for. It was/is insanity. If Level 2 could not fix the issue, it went to Level 3 and Level 3 responded within 36 hours of notification.

Search the internet and view the comments and stories about SAP. NIKE, Waste Management, Hershey's, even the State of Tennessee had a website devoted to a class action suit against SAP. If I needed a business software, I'd look around..

SAP to me is extremely intuitive. I think where people/companies fail is they try to adapt SAP to their business instead of adapting their business to SAP.

Your business workflow shouldn't be so rigid that you cannot adjust and restructure these processes to better streamline the use of the ERP you are spending so much money implementing.

I don't think that SAP the software is bad; like most software it usually does what you ask it to do. That said, implementing SAP seems to turn into a huge cluster most of the time, which i think has a lot to do with the sales job SAP and the consulting firms do. They massively overpromise not just capability but the time and cost to get it finished.

The typical sequence seems to go:
1. Huge aspirations, this thing is going to reinvent how business is done!

2. Ok, we're going to have to descope some of the real future tech, that goes in phase 2

3. I know we just spent a ton of time designing a new system but those multi-year deadlines have turned into a few months. Just rebuild what we already have on the new platform, we'll reinvent how business is done in phase 2 and 3.

4. Sure you'll lose some capability, but there's a pretty good chance that you'll still be able to operate your business!

5. The implementation is way over budget and the building probably won't literally explode into when we turn it on, so let's try it.

6. Mission accomplished! Also we're keeping all the programmers and consultants for 3 more years for some minor tweaks.

Ragoo said:

---

SAP to me is extremely intuitive. I think where people/companies fail is they try to adapt SAP to their business instead of adapting their business to SAP.

Your business workflow shouldn't be so rigid that you cannot adjust and restructure these processes to better streamline the use of the ERP you are spending so much money implementing.

---

You're right, SAP is pretty intuitive for most people. Not the shop floor personnel typically though.

I think the main problem with SAP is that it doesn't scale very well. Managing thousands of parts across several facilities requires a lot more people than should be necessary due to how focused a lot of the transactions are and how much data configuration has to be maintained. So companies try to automate some of those transactions, which inevitably ends up with custom code and tables, which in turn bloats IT staff.

That's a tough tradeoff. Either deal with needing a large support staff to manage the system, or hire a lot of IT people to automate it, which makes upgrades and sustainablility more difficult and probably cost even more money in the long run.

Either way, it stifles innovation. One of our directors, who was a part of the original SAP implementation 20 years ago, went to another business unit and came back somewhat recently. He was shocked how little we had progressed since he left. But that's just the reality with SAP in large businesses. The implementation costs listed above are about what I've heard for us too.

It's also difficult to implement lean production systems with SAP, but that will be the case with any push-based system (and MRP is inherently push).

In any case, we're trying to let SAP handle financials, which it does very well, but replace other functionality with different systems. That has it's own challenges too, particularly trying to keep the number of additional systems to a minimum.

PFG, I'm happy to exchange emails, but I don't have one that I'm willing to list on here.

@Ryan - pfg7xy at gmail

@Farmer and @Ulrich - shoot me an e-mail as well, if you get a chance. As many SAP connections as I can make, the better.

Appreciate everyone sharing what they've seen. The implementation I was part of started out as a $70 mil project.
It bloated from there, and in the end...never went into action. There's more to it than I can share, but yeah. All that work, and nada. It was like I had a puppy to raise, and they took it away 13 months later right when it was ready for its first hunt.

As a supply chain professional in O&G, I could not agree more with this.

Lester Freamon said:

---

As a supply chain professional in O&G, I could not agree more with this.

---

my experience with SAP originally began on the engineering side within an O&G OEM company. We had two engineering groups within a single organization, one focused on NAL projects and one focused on offshore and international markets.

The engineering group for NAL albiet a smaller team really focused hard on understanding SAP during an initial implementation. Understanding what workflow in the system looked like and reworked internal workflows to match the processes within SAP. So that the day to day transactions outside SAP mirrored the same transactions inside SAP.

The other engineering group turned their nose up to the implementation, didn't bother to learn the system and didn't adapt their processes to match SAP workflow. They struggled mightily from day 1 roll out and continue to struggle today 7 years later. Which is really quite sad.

Ragoo - thats interesting. Mind sending me an e-mail so I can ask a few more questions off the forum?

pfg7xy at gmail dot com

Bumping back up for some new eyes.

Anyone who responded here that has SAP use at work - if you get a chance to e-mail, I can be reached: pfg7xy at gmail dot com

Would like to connect and ask a few more questions.