Inside SAP Summer 2012

Issue 20 | Summer 2012

www.insidesap.com.au

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

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CONTENTS

10

18

22

29

35

46

4

Editor’s note

27

A best practice solution

Research

5

Quarterly news roundup

28

Engineering and construction speed adoption of technology

44

News in focus 10

SAPPHIRE NOW + TechEd Madrid 2012

12

Identifying the trigger points for a cloud deployment

Change management Case studies 29

Case study: A fine drop – The Wine Society

33

Case study: Cloud, on-premise or a hybrid? – Transfield

Special feature: Mobility 13

In the palm of your hand

Leadership

16

Case study: The bionic salesforce – Zimmer

35

18

Is it time to BYOD?

20

SharePoint and SAP tasks in one list

Mining and resources 22

Digging deep

Next generation ERP

46

Careers 48

39

SAP HANA: Australia ahead of the pack

41

SAP HANA: Communicating customer value

On the Move

Community 51

Racing to raise money for Redkite

53

Event calendar

54

Partner directory

Ensuring SAP projects deliver real business results

Technology

Training: It’s business as usual

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EDITOR

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Managing Editor/Publisher

From the Editor In this 20th edition of Inside SAP, we have focused on some areas of the market which have generated strong interest this year – and probably will for years to come.

The mining and resources sector has been the poster child for Australian economic growth, but even it has faced its challenges this year, as demand for key commodities softens and companies slip into cost control mode. Eleanor Reader reports on the major trends in this area influencing technology investment, as well as the development of the latest release of SAP’s Best Practices for Mining solution.

In terms of technology, mobility is near the top of the list of CIO priorities at the moment, and in our special feature, we look at how to create a mobility strategy that works for your organisation, how to handle BYOD, and a mobility project from medical technology provider Zimmer, which took out a Best Run Innovation award from SAP this year.

In tough times, the focus on business value ratchets up, and elsewhere in this edition, we look at what customers can do to get the most from their investment, including a rapid BusinessObjects deployment at The Wine Society, why ‘business as usual’ SAP training shouldn’t be neglected, and how to plan business transformation projects so they actually deliver. We also fi nd out why a relentless focus on business value is actually making Australia the fastest adopter of SAP HANA technology.

On the cloud, Transfield’s Michelle de Wet outlines why it has decided to adopt a hybrid model for its HCM solutions, while Datacom’s Mark McWilliams defi nes the trigger points that could motivate a move to cloud for other organisations.

All in all, a bumper edition of summer reading for you – wherever you are heading. We thank you for your support in 2012, and look forward to bringing you more SAP news and views in 2013.

Freya Purnell Managing Editor, Inside SAP ps. We are reverting to a free subscription model for Inside SAP from 1 January 2013, so if your colleagues have been stealing your copy, tell them to visit www.insidesap.com.au to register for their own subscription.

4 Inside SAP magazine

Freya Purnell t. (02) 9929 5465 m. 0412 602 579 freya.purnell@insidesap.com.au

Journalist/Editorial Assistant Eleanor Reader t. (02) 9929 5465 eleanor@flapjack.com.au

Creative Director Justin Knights t. (02) 9929 5465 m. 0425 292 075 justin@flapjack.com.au

Advertising Sales Laura Blackwell t. 02 8011 4822 m. 0412 685 864 laura@flapjack.com.au

Editorial Advisory Committee Anna Cridland (Axient), Stuart Dickinson (Oxygen Business Solutions), Paul Hawking (Victoria University), Calvin Kally (KALtech), Kevin Killey (IBM), Iain Macleod (CSC), Mick Windsor (Windsor Business Solutions)

Contributors Richard Frykberg, Adam Sivell, Philip Dove, Warrens Burns, David Moschella, Lynton Howes

Published by FlapJack Media Pty Ltd Suite 7, Level 9, 122 Arthur St North Sydney NSW 2060 ABN: 93 142 878 135 © 2012 FlapJack Media Pty Ltd. Inside SAP is published four times a year by FlapJack Media Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publishers. FlapJack Media Pty Ltd makes no representation or warranties with respect to this magazine or its contents including, without limitation, material communicated by third parties.

FlapJack Media Pty Ltd does not warrant that the information available in this magazine is accurate, complete or current.

Opinions expressed are those of the respective authors and not necessarily of the publisher. Neither FlapJack Media Pty Ltd nor any persons involved in the preparation of this publication will be liable for any loss or damage as a result of use of or reliance upon advice, representation, statement, opinion or conclusion expressed in Inside SAP magazine.

NEWS ROUNDUP

Making news this quarter From SAP SAP AG announced it will offer new packages that merge Apache Hadoop and SAP HANA into a “big data” bundle. According to SAP, the new solution makes it much easier for customers to integrate Hadoop into their business analytic environments and refi ned data warehousing practices. Based on HANA in-memory database technology, the bundle combines the SAP Sybase IQ server, SAP Data Integrator software and SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solutions. The new packages give customers a newer and faster way to extract business value from massive data set and is being offered through SAP partners Cloudera, Hitachi Data Systems, Hortonworks, HP and IBM.

SAP Asia Pacific Japan’s (APJ) software revenue grew by 12 per cent in the third quarter of 2012. This marks the eleventh consecutive quarter the company has recorded double-digit growth in the region. SAP attributes the impressive increase to the continual rise in customer demand for mobile, analytics and SAP HANA inmemory database solutions. “We have maintained our consistent track record of growth in the APJ region, with database, technology and analytics making up 40 per cent of our revenue mix. Japan and China grew 36 per cent and 43 per cent respectively,” said Steve Watts, president, SAP APJ. The most popular sector for the region was analytics, with solid growth in the public sector, banking, auto, high tech and retail industries also contributing to the results.

In a move to stem the shortage of IT skills, SAP Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) will offer online SAP courses at Brisbane North Institute TAFE (BNIT). BNIT will be the fi rst TAFE in Australia to offer the self-paced learning program, which is apart of SAP’s uAcademy. The courses combine e-learning content and hands-on experience with SAP software and live training systems. At the conclusion of the course, students will have the requisite knowledge to sit for SAP Associate Certification. Franscesca Salvo, director of SAP Education, ANZ, said they are working to ensure students receive appropriate SAP certification that is recognised in the industry.

“SAP professionals are in high demand for their technical and business skills, as well as their abilities to deliver SAP solutions to enterprises and government,” Salvo said.

SAP ANZ has also increased the workplace opportunities available to students at The University of Queensland (UQ) by entering a partnership agreement. Under the agreement, UQ will offer SAP uAcademy courses to its ICT and business students. The uAcademy program gives UQ students access to a self-paced learning environment, enabling them to achieve expertise in specific SAP solution areas. UQ’s head of the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE), Professor Paul Strooper, said that providing students with the option to study the SAP uAcademy curriculum will ensure they have relevant and highly sought-after industry skills. “The skills gained through uAcademy will not only support the Queensland workforce, but also Australian and global industry demands,” Professor Strooper said.

Project news Global operations, maintenance and construction services provider Transfield Services has chosen SAP to provide a mobile application development platform, including mobile device management, mobile enterprise application management and packaged mobile enterprise applications (including SAP Work Manager by Syclo). SAP said the new holistic mobile approach will replace ageing mobile points, reduce operational costs and result in productivity savings. It will facilitate knowledge sharing between Transfield Services’ 24,000 people and enable rapid access to information in the field.

www.insidesap.com.au 5

NEWS ROUNDUP

Project news The New Zealand Governmentowned Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR) has chosen Soltius New Zealand as its new SAP service provider. Soltius is the only New Zealand partner with Gold status and an SAP-certifi ed Partner Centre of Expertise for support services, with ESR acting CIO Paul Stevens saying the provider gave them a fl exible contract that would not compromise the quality of support services. “Soltius was able to design an agreement that gave us the fl exibility we required and their strong track record in providing SAP support to a wide range of organisations meant we were comfortable they could deliver the high service levels we expect,” he said.

Australia’s fi rst real-time payment solution for large companies and institutions is in the works, with SAP and Westpac Institutional Bank teaming up as development partners on the project. By utilising SAP’s NetWeaver Process Integration, the companies will overcome the delays created by the current multi-step process of digital payment instructions, by delivering a one-step payment solution. As a result of the project, named the Corporate Banking Connectivity Project, Westpac will be the fi rst of the big four banks to offer corporate customers the ability to send a payment instruction directly from their SAP system to the bank’s core payment systems, and receive acknowledgement messages back in real time.

Newmont Mining, the world’s second-largest gold producing mining fi rm, revealed in a presentation to SAP’s Mining & Metals 2012 Forum in Germany that a global SAP system has been implemented in its Australian operations over October and November this year. The scheme is part of a two-year rollout that officially started in October 2010, called Project Pangaea.

According to the presentation, North America and Peru went like in April and July this year, with the fi nal rollout including Australia, New Zealand and Ghana. The project was undertaken to regulate its global operations on SAP ERP, with hopes to establish consistent processes and data globally and to “create a foundation for Newmont’s global shared services strategy”.

Partner news HCM specialist service provider Redback Consulting and global IT business Wipro Technologies have both become strategic partners of SuccessFactors. Redback joined the SuccessFactors Partner Program as a SuccessSales Partner in order to leverage its expertise in the public sector to resell and implement SuccessFactors’ BizX suite within Australia and the APJ region. Redback managing director, Ben Sebo, said: “With capabilities that easily integrate to any existing customer HRIS, it will allow our customers to leverage industry leading HCM capabilities quicker and with minimal IT footprint than onpremise solutions, thus increasing time to benefit and total cost of ownership.” Wipro partners with SuccessFactors as a Strategic Success Consulting partner, helping to market and provide consulting and implementation services for SuccessFactors Business Execution (BizX) suite globally. Both partnerships were formed in November this year. “As SuccessFactors is the driving force behind SAP’s new cloud efforts, the partnership will provide Wipro with an early mover advantage and create the right engagement opportunities with customers, in support of SAP cloud offerings,” said Amitava Sharma, vice president and global practice head, SAP solutions, Wipro Technologies.

6 Inside SAP magazine

As of 1 November 2012, Extend Technologies began operating under the name NTT DATA Business Solutions. The company unified under the brand with Business Formula (Malaysia) and Cornerstone Asia (Singapore), creating one of the largest SAP reseller and solutions based consulting firms globally, with 3000 SAP consultants worldwide and 300 across Australia and New Zealand. “Operating as one regional team will allow us to drive our expansion through three simple but compelling principles: industry alignment, technology innovation and local coverage model across specific geographies,” said Max White, CEO Asia Pacific, NTT DATA Business Solutions. “Though our name has been changed, our commitment to delivering unparalleled value to our customers remains the same. We will continue to leverage our global strength and capability while delivering localised service and flexibility to ensure you receive top-quality, optimised SAP solutions, hosting and support.”

Oxygen Business Solutions and Hayes Technology Group have joined forces to deliver Gold Client Solutions data management software to companies in Australia and New Zealand. The software, which was developed by Hayes, allows teams to quickly select and copy subsets of only relevant data from production or non-production sources to non-production targets, eliminating the need to copy the entire production database to nonproductive environments. The strategic partnership is designed to accelerate the growth Oxygen has been experiencing from SAP expanding their solution portfolio with products such as SAP HANA and BusinessObjects. Oxygen CEO, Stuart Dickinson, said he looks forward to the two companies working together to maximise the value of their clients’ investments in SAP.

Community news The SAP Australian User Group (SAUG) has made some major changes in 2012 by updating their constitution and revamping their website. The new constitution has streamlined SAUG’s membership process, with a membership sub-committee automated via the website in place of the previous three-stage process that was used to on-board members. Other key changes include corporate members, consultants and associate members being allowed to join, the number of committee members dropping from nine to eight, introducing a two-year term for committees with a 50 per cent rotation each year, and changing the membership structure to remove all product-centric names. This comes in the wake of SAUG unveiling their simple and stylish website, which went live in October this year. The website now allows a huge number of member processes to be completed online for the first time.

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NEWS ROUNDUP

Community news A new group of SAP Mentors were announced in late October, with a noticeable increase in Mentors added from SAP’s Asia Pacific region, in particularly China. There were 21 newcomers this time around, with one New Zealander, Corey Adams, and two Australians – Alexandra Carvalho, from BI Group, and Gary Hooker, Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA). Each SAP Mentor is a hands-on expert in an SAP product or service and has a proven track record of successful project implementations. They are nominated by their SAP Community Network peers and chosen based on a number of relevant criteria.

Market trends Emerging technologies such as mobility and cloud computing are some of the top IT business priorities for Australian CIOs and IT decision makers in 2013, a survey conducted by research fi rm Telsyte has found. 800 Australian CIOs and IT decision makers were surveyed, revealing that the top IT business priority is security, with 21 per cent deeming it “critical”. More traditional technologies like business intelligence (including big data) and skills development remain high on the list of priorities. Telsyte senior analyst and CIO program lead, Rodney Gedda, said as emerging technologies become mainstream leading into 2013, the shift in priorities is apparent. “With mobility in the top five of critical priorities, CIOs are responding to demands from the business as well as a mobileempowered workforce, and this will only increase in 2013,” said Gedda.

The September Quarter of the Clarius Skills Index has predicted the demand for ICT professionals in Australia will pick up again from March 2013. Times for ICT workers have been tough of late, and though unemployment rates have decreased, there is still demand for 5925 jobs. The index reveals New South Wales and Victoria saw a rise in permanent staff in the sector, while the market in Western Australia has come to a standstill in the last quarter, with many projects shelved until 2013.

South Australia remains steady in the contract market and Canberra continues to display demand. Mobility has been named as a key growth area that will continue to rise in 2013, which will result in greater working opportunities for ICT professionals. The index found employers are looking for value for money and candidates who have more than just technical skills. However, there will be a renewed focus on technical skills when the market picks up, demand rises and contract rates rise.

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8 Inside SAP magazine

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NEWS IN FOCUS SAPPHIRE NOW

SAPPHIRE NOW Madrid 2012 From November 13-15, members of the international SAP ecosystem travelled from near and far to attend SAPPHIRE NOW + TechEd Madrid 2012. With over 979 sessions, 757 speakers and 256 exhibitors, SAP showed its new innovations to more than 75,000 people on-site, online and through social media. Eleanor Reader reports on the highlights.

SAP customer solution goes 360 SAP is going above and behind traditional levels of customer service with the announcement of the new SAP 360 Customer solution, which brings together the SAP CRM application powered by SAP HANA, cloud-based solutions such as the SAP Customer OnDemand solution, the SAP Jam social software platform and several mobile solutions. By combining these components, SAP said the 360 Customer solution will deliver real-time insights, allowing companies to understand customer needs and preferences and predict future behaviour; real-time interactions, so companies can deliver one-to-one interactions through any channel; and real-time execution, enabling organisations to instantly carry out end-to-end customer processes beyond the front office. “This is a game-changing solution that will help companies market better, sell better, service better and truly create remarkable experiences for their customers,” said Bill McDermott, co-CEO, SAP. “With SAP 360 Customer powered by SAP HANA, companies gain true 360-degree customer insight that is real-time, actionable and available anywhere.”

The virtualisation of SAP HANA SAP HANA is going virtual, with SAP announcing they will be supporting VMware vSphere 5.1 for test and development use on the in-memory platform. The virtualisation of the software will give customers the ability to provision instances of SAP

10 Inside SAP magazine

HANA in virtual machines faster, give them access to the data centre capabilities of VMware vSphere and enable SAP HANA to operate on a VMware deployment architecture that is commonly found in SAP customer data centres. This will result in agility, cost savins and easy provisioning, according to SAP. “The software defined datacenter, delivered by the VMware vCloud Suite, can empower organisations to achieve greater agility and flexibility while simplifying their IT operations,” said Parag Patel, vice president, global strategic alliances, VMware.

Start-ups given opportunity with SAP HANA Twenty start-ups from the SAP Startup Focus program have been given the opportunity to accelerate their growth by innovating on the SAP HANA platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Since the program launch six months ago, more than 800 start-ups from 17 countries have been evaluated, with 153 chosen to participate. “Having been an entrepreneur and founder of a start-up, I believe that a true platform must serve, and benefit from, the imagination and passion that these startups bring,” said Dr Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP executive board, technology and innovation. “The revolutionary platform ability of SAP HANA, combined with the SAP Startup Focus program’s steadfast dedication to openness and co-innovation and SAP’s massive reach are helping to bring this vast pool of imagination to market fast.”

NetWeaver partner program announced SAP has announced the launch of the NetWeaver Cloud Applications Partner Program, which aims to support partners in the development of cloud-based packaged application. The program gives partners full access to the SAP NetWeaver service and offers a comprehensive set of enablement tools, benefits and support that will help them develop, market and sell cloud applications. “Customers large and small are using or looking to use the cloud, not only to save money but also to become more agile, innovative and responsive,” said Bernd-Uwe Pagel, senior vice president, platform ecosystem and echannels, SAP. “With the growing demand for softwareas-a-service applications, the window of opportunity for this market is wide open. Continuing a deep commitment to the ecosystem, SAP is helping partners take advantage of this huge market opportunity to develop cloud application offerings and reach SAP’s vast customer base by selling them on the SAP Store.”

Ariba Network goes even more global SAP revealed plans to infuse its innovations in social, mobile, cloud and the in-memory technology of the HANA platform into the Ariba Network as a way to drive global businessto-business collaboration and give the network higher levels of efficiency and insight. SAP also revealed several rapiddeployment solutions that will make it faster for customers running SAP Business Suite software to integrate with the

Ariba Network, including product catalog integration between SAP Business Suite and the Ariba Network based on SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration software, and purchase order and invoice automation for automated exchange of documents in the procure-to-pay and order-to-cash processes.

“With one million companies connected, SAP and Ariba have created the largest business network in the world. Together we will deliver game-changing gains in productivity, collaboration and agility across the entire value chain of suppliers, partners and customers,” said SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe.

Six new apps for Windows 8 Six new mobile apps for Windows 8 will take advantage of the touchscreen capability and features of the new Window user interface, according to SAP. “SAP takes advantage of the current install base and customer relationships to transform enterprises to a mobile-centric computing model. We look forward to helping our customers fully leverage Windows 8 and bringing new business and consumer apps to the industry that take full advantage of the new Windows user interface,” said Sanjay Poonen, president and head of mobile division, SAP. Some of the apps include SAP WorkDeck, role-based view which allows employees and managers to initiate and process workflows on the go; SAP Manager Insight, an employee profile app that provides managers with access to key HR indicators; and SAP Learning Assistant, an app providing ondemand, online training.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

www.insidesap.com.au 11

NEWS IN FOCUS CLOUD

Identifying the trigger points for a cloud deployment In September, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) released its guide to implementing cloud services, and recommended that government agencies should identify the ‘trigger points’ that present opportunities for a move to cloud-based services. Freya Purnell spoke to Mark McWilliams, director of Datacom, which was recently been selected for the AGIMO Cloud Panel, about what those triggers points are.

According to Mark McWilliams, cloud adoption has been quite slow because it has tended to be positioned as a technology substitution, and with many Australian organisations already taking advantage of the benefits of virtualisation, the pros cloud presents are not immediately clear.

McWilliams believes that as we move into the age of the ‘Internet of Everything’, however, this is a lost opportunity.

To truly leverage the cloud commercial model, we need to see beyond the well-publicised benefits of lower price, flexibility and standardisation.

“New business models are really driving disruptive products into previously stable sectors, and where IT departments used to be viewed as a real cost or a tax on the business, in this digital age, we really need to be viewing information and technology as the foundation of our competitive advantage,” McWilliams said.

He identified four ‘trigger points’ that could see cloud bring great value to the organisation.

1. New business models With cloud technology enabling some innovative business models, businesses should look at their own markets for both opportunities and threats that could present themselves.

“Could a competitor take away massive chunks of your market by deploying a new digital way of doing things? With these new consumption-based cloud models, highly functional mass-market solutions can just take off,” McWilliams said.

“Businesses need to think about what is going to drive the revenue of the future, and where their competitive threat is going to come from. Cloud is the foundation enabler for this.”

2. Driving business improvements The next opportunity comes from looking internally for obvious areas which could benefit from an efficiency overhaul.

“Are you able to drive improvements in your business and become more effective and efficient than your competitors?

This affects your ability to price the market,” McWilliams said. “The cloud obviously helps a lot with that because you’re able to roll out new ways of doing things very rapidly because you’re not having to wait to implement new solutions and infrastructure the same way that you used to.”

12 Inside SAP magazine

3. Using, not just collecting, big data Big data is the talk of the town, and with the exponential growth in the number of ‘things’ – devices, sensors and so on – connected to the internet, we’re seeing a corresponding explosion in data volumes. The challenge is not just collecting and storing big data for its own sake, but actually using it to drive customer value.

“Would your business be more successful if you could understand the data that you create from potentially thousands of sensors in your business? The economies of scale that cloud providers can deliver means you can be storing many terabytes or even petabytes of information very cost-effectively,” said McWilliams. “You have to consider how you actually bring the net volume of data into a product that you can either offer to attract new people or you can sell and drive revenue from.”

4. Consumerisation of IT BYOD, widespread app usage and the proliferation of cloud storage available to consumers has shifted the goalposts on what they expect from IT. “People expect modern, flexible, powerful functional tools to be available in real time. Your ability to attract and retain talent in your business will be dependent on your ability to be flexible with your infrastructure,” McWilliams said, adding that the flexibility of cloud does make decisions about deploying new technology easier.

“I think that’s why we’re seeing a move away from monolithic software and hardware deals, where organisations have to tie themselves into long depreciation cycles that inhibit future choices. With cloud-enabled businesses, it’s a two-year commitment, and if I want to walk away, it’s pretty easy.”

These four areas of opportunity should therefore be considered carefully in the context of what cloud can bring to the table, rather than just moving in-house technology directly to the cloud as part of a technology refresh.

“If I just pick that stuff up and move it, am I allowing our competitors to bring a new product to market that we’re not even thinking about?,” McWilliams said. “Some people are just ticking the box and that’s a real shame when they could take it so much further.”

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Mobility TRENDS

In the palm of your hand The pace of change in enterprise mobility is extraordinary, and organisations face considerable challenges in devising a strategy and choosing the right platform. Fortunately, SAP has now given its customers the clearest picture yet of its roadmap.

Freya Purnell reports.

According to Telsyte research, mobility is now appearing in the top five critical priorities for CIOs in 2013, with 9 per cent seeing mobility as ‘critical’ and 27.8 per cent seeing it as ‘very important’. To put this in context, mobility has now assumed a higher priority than ICT spending reduction and IT/business alignment.

Certainly SAP’s experience in ANZ bears this out, with head of mobility, Andrew Fox, reporting the enterprise mobility market is currently around twice the size that the company anticipated in 2012.

“Just about every customer that we are currently talking to either has a plan for enterprise mobility or is working on that plan for 2013,” says Fox. Organisations across a range of industry sectors are undertaking enterprise mobility initiatives in three areas.

The first area is implementing consumer-facing apps designed to build better relationships with customers – for example, loyalty apps in retail, or mobile banking and utilities apps which could replace call centre services.

“The change in structures caused by the ability to reach your consumers without having bricks and mortar, for example, are absolutely enormous. Banks around the world are able to grow quite significantly without having to build a branch network. That doesn’t just apply to places like Bangladesh, South Africa or India. We are working quite closely with a number of financial institutions in developed parts of the world, including here, to deliver those solutions,” Fox says.

The second area is apps built to serve a specific business purpose.

“This is where the business case is really driven by the productivity of the road warrior. For example, organisations have built specific apps to put in the hands of their sales force, so they can do demonstrations for customers or order consumables or spare parts for them,” Fox says.

Mobility architect and SAP Mentor John Moy says there is clearly a big shift towards high usability of apps in the current tranche of mobility initiatives.

“What organisations are struggling with now is workers wanting self-service functions on their mobile, executives wanting to see analytics on iPads. All of that is very business demand-driven,” Moy says.

The third area is the mobilisation of the field worker, typically in plant and asset management in sectors such as utilities and mining. SAP’s acquisition of Syclo has added considerable impetus to this area, with implementations typically integrated with either an SAP enterprise asset management or Maxima back-end.

“There is an enormous opportunity for us to deliver huge value to organisations with those field workers, delivering a 10-20 per cent performance improvement and very fast return on investment,” Fox says.

Indeed, SAP was heeding customer feedback that Syclo held the solution set they needed when it acquired the business.

According to Fox, Syclo has brought a metadata driven model to the solution portfolio, which allows organisations to

www.insidesap.com.au 13

Mobility TRENDS

change applications very quickly.

Mick Windsor, chief executive of Windsor Business Solutions, believes SAP’s mobility portfolio for asset management has been greatly strengthened through the addition of Syclo, as well as Afaria for mobile devices and Geo.e, a joint collaboration between SAP and Esri.

“Syclo brings simplicity and ease of use to the portfolio for SAP. It’s a very powerful tool behind the scenes, but it is a very easy tool for people who are not used to technology – it’s quite intuitive,” says Windsor.

SAP recently announced operations, maintenance and construction services provider Transfield had chosen its mobile application development platform including mobile device management, mobile enterprise application management and packaged mobile enterprise applications, including SAP Work Manager by Syclo, to mobilise its 24,000 workers.

“With outsourcing contracts where they provide field service work for other customers, their ability to optimise both their profits and the efficiency of the customer is paramount, and they regard that as a huge competitive advantage as they go forward,” Fox says.

SAP’s maturing strategy 2012 has also seen SAP provide a new level of clarity on its mobile roadmap, which has three stages. Step one is integrating the Sybase Unwired Platform with the Syclo Agentry Platform to provide a run-side environment for writing enterprise apps; step two is integrating this with the Mobiliser platform, the consumer app platform from Sybase; and step three is providing that unified code base both as an on-premise model and as a cloud solution.

“That’s the roadmap we will be working towards, and that’s the foundation of what Sanjay Poonen [president, technology and innovation products, SAP] described as our attempt to be the Apple of the enterprise,” Fox says. “Because then you can write mobile applications through a consistent standard that you can publish on some form of application store, and everyone can use them because they are certified

by SAP to run in our environment. It’s a brave and quite aggressive plan but we are already seeing signs that we are on track in delivering.”

Moy also believes that SAP has taken positive steps this year to show the way forward with mobility, and have made a number of excellent moves, including partnerships with Sencha, Appcelerator and Adobe and differentiating itself by providing an application store with off-the-shelf apps.

“I think we’re at a turning point. When Sanjay Poonen took over, he provided a lot of leadership,” Moy says. “The fact that they have a unified roadmap, that the pricing has become more transparent in the last six months, and that they’re now more vocal about rolling out mobility as a service in hosted or cloud-based offerings, I think that’s all been positive.”

However, he warns that it still takes time for customers to understand the implications of these changes. At the same

14 Inside SAP magazine

time, there are many other players in the market, some of whom have also been hot on the acquisition trail, including Antenna and Kony Solutions, which bought Sky Technologies in August. It’s not just big players either – small companies are also offering their own mobility platforms to SAP customers.

“I think it’s actually making it more confusing for customers because now it’s not just even SAP, everyone has a platform and everyone has a solution,” Moy says.

He says he would like to see SAP deliver mobile as a managed service, rather than simply striking partnerships with other providers to offer these services, which would help to make pricing structures even more transparent.

“Not every customer wants to open up a relationship with another partner [for hosted services], because they already might be using a competitor as their strategic partner. It’s just that little bit of extra friction in the whole process,” Moy says. “Now that SAP is officially getting serious about cloud with SuccessFactors, maybe they should be running their own service.”

Developing an enterprise mobility strategy Enterprise mobility is still changing so rapidly, it’s almost impossible to keep up.

“There was a quote I remember reading not long ago, which pretty much summed it up. It was about a company that had acquired another one just to get a little bit of extra functionality that they could have built in six months,” Moy says. “But then the article went on to say six months is aeons in mobile. It’s so true, everything is changing so quickly.”

Organisations should start with a mobility strategy, but following the traditional model of setting out a five-year path probably won’t work given the pace of change.

“You want to spend some time to basically collect your thoughts around what is important to the organisation, what are the use cases that are going to bring the most value, can we prioritise and can we have a framework where we can continually keep that prioritisation fluid,” Moy says. “There are big questions about whether you’re focusing on enterprise versus consumer, because they are such massive differences in ways of thinking and what platform is best to serve those.”

Customers are commonly asking questions about where to start, according to Fox – what platform should they choose, should they wait for the next release, should they choose offthe-shelf or custom-built apps? He says it all comes back to the business case.

“If the business case for a mobile app has a payback which is months, then you start now and deliver on that payback in the knowledge that you are probably going to want to implement that application with a different look and feel in a three- to six-month timeframe anyway,” he says. “If it’s an application with a wishy-washy business case that might have a multi-year payback, you’d probably wait until we firm up the product and the roadmap so it will be easier to implement.”

While the conversation with organisations about mobile

Html vs native apps

initiatives often start with mobile device management (MDM) preceding any discussions about strategic platforms, Fox says SAP is probably not the right choice if MDM is the sole endgame.

“If it’s about delivering the apps for this business case or to these people, and if it’s about managing multiple applications through a lifecycle, then we can provide those solutions,” he says.

Choosing any one platform is difficult for customers at the moment, Moy says, given the breadth of options and the high level of acquisition activity.

“I think customers should look at what’s on offer, but really do some due diligence. Consider that you don’t always need your platform on-premise. I’m a proponent of considering a managed model – in other words, a platform in the cloud,” he says.

By opting for a managed service, organisations may also be able to avoid the expense of full-time resources to manage an on-premise system – if they can find people with the right skills, both in platform management and in developing apps.

“Because mobile is changing so rapidly, the platforms have to abstract you from the different devices,” Moy says. “The platform is not your traditional SAP system, which you create once every three years, it’s something you need to patch every month or so.”

Another battle is emerging between business and IT, over whether native apps or HTML apps are the right choice for the enterprise.

“With native, you are prioritising usability above all else, and on the other hand, using HTML5 or mobile web, you’re minimising development and support costs by being able to code as much as possible and provide cross-platform support,” Moy says.

In its strategic technology outlook for 2013, Gartner highlighted the complexity of the market for tools to create consumer and enterprise-facing apps, with over 100 potential vendors. The analyst firm predicts that no single tool will be optimal for all types of mobile applications, so organisations should expect to employ several, but there will be a long-term shift from native to web apps as HTML5 becomes more capable.

Moy says at the moment he is seeing a lot of fracturing in the SAP world, and that the native or HTML choice also comes back to the business case.

“The reality is it’s possible to be native if you’re only targeting one or two specific platforms. If you have a consumer-focused app, they just won’t settle for anything less, plus your market is bigger,” he says.

“If you’re building a very specialised app that might service 100 people in your organisation, the only way you might get the business case up is by building a simple HTML app. It might not be as usable, but that may be the only way you can actually get the funding and pull that off based on the value proposition.”

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MOBILITY

ZIMMER

The bionic salesforce In a world of surgeries, knee replacements, MRIs and x-rays, medical technology specialist Zimmer has undertaken an SAP mobility project to make its salesforce more efficient, picking up a 2012 SAP Customer Award of Excellence for Best Run Innovation with partner Ciber in the process.

Eleanor Reader reports.

Background

The solution

Zimmer is a world leader in orthopaedic and musculoskeletal health, providing joint replacement technologies to meet the needs of orthopaedic surgeons, who restore mobility and relieve the pain of arthritis and traumatic injuries. Headquartered in Warsaw, Indiana, Zimmer designs, develops, manufactures and markets orthopaedic reconstructive, spinal and trauma devices, dental implants, and related surgical products. With operations in more than 25 countries around the world and products sold in more than 100 countries, the company is currently in the midst of a mass SAP global rollout.

When the rollout began, Australia and New Zealand proved to be among the most progressive of the countries involved.

As front-runners, the ANZ operation quickly came to the conclusion that in order to support its sales staff properly, it couldn’t rely on having a standard SAP front-end on a laptop connected to a wireless card to interact directly with the backend systems.

Instead the company developed a customised front-end screen for sales reps visiting doctors’ surgeries and hospitals, but unfortunately this solution did not live up to expectations.

Michael Niestroy, director of Australia and New Zealand, Ciber, says, “Zimmer found out that almost none of their reps were actually using it, so it was hugely inefficient.”

In a bid to overcome this issue and make the salesforce more efficient, Zimmer set its sights on an iPad solution, engaging Ciber as the implementation partner on the project.

The project, which kicked off in late November 2011 and went live in early February 2012, was focused on creating an iPad app that would allow Zimmer’s salesforce to track the stock they would need to take into hospitals to showcase to orthopaedic surgeons, ultimately making the whole process more efficient.

According to Niestroy, the challenge for Zimmer’s sales team was that around 90 per cent of the inventory they need day-to-day is always in the possession of surgeons who may need to use them for a patient’s surgery. This loss of control over inventory placed Zimmer in danger of losing significant amounts of money.

“For a knee or hip joint replacement, the challenge is that when the patient has the surgery done, the surgeon doesn’t know the size of the joint he is going to take before he begins the operation,” Niestroy says. “For example, if a patient is scheduled to get a new knee joint, the doctor typically has five or six different sizes of a particular knee joint available, but only picks one to actually put into the patient.”

Providing the solution involved building a very complex app, allowing Zimmer’s salesforce to check what components are in stock, and if out of stock, how soon items could be obtained.

It tracks not only the skeletal components, but everything required for the operation, right down to the nails and screws.

The app contains details of all appointments, including contacts for doctors, surgeons, patients, addresses, what type of

16 Inside SAP magazine

operation is being performed and when, and what products or materials are actually linked to each appointment.

“There are also links and online documentation available that show, for example, the x-rays, the MRI scans, the documentation on how to implement a certain product and what supplements are needed,” Niestroy says.

The app was built for iOS devices utilising the SAP Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) as the Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) that provides online as well as offline integration with the backend SAP ERP system.

The implementation While the implementation mostly ran smoothly, when Ciber installed the SUP, they quickly realised that their biggest challenge was the need to upgrade.

Having deployed the second release version of the software, additional functionality that was required for the Zimmer solution was being developed by Sybase more or less in parallel with the implementation. Updates and bug fi xes were delivered in software patches as well as the 2.1 version of the solution.

Ciber worked with SAP and Sybase to obtain the latest patches for the solution, while Zimmer’s team undertook much of the development work on providing service calls and interfaces into SAP.

Being an early adopter of the SUP, particularly in the region, contributed to these issues.

“It was still very much in development, so some of the patches were probably more like mini-upgrades of the solution,” Niestroy says.

But the challenges didn’t stop there. The large volumes of data needed to initialise the devices weren’t easily transmitted wirelessly. The solution was to initialise all devices in-house, and then only supply updates to data wirelessly.

This meant that each device of the 40+ strong sales team within Zimmer had to be left with the IT team to have the app installed and the initial data load performed.

Business benefits The iPad app solution for Zimmer has been a success for the business, with very positive feedback and a significant turnaround reported for the salesforce. The look and feel of the app has improved significantly, with probably the biggest tick of approval being the fact that the salesforce is now using the app in their routine work.

“Because the device is online capable, the sales rep doesn’t have to worry about whether they are in a network cover area anymore,” Niestroy says.

There are also plans for Zimmer to roll out the solution across Asia.

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MOBILITY BYOD

Is it time to BYOD? Considering a BYOD strategy within your organisation? Adam Sivell looks at the risks, rewards and success factors.

Should you allow employees to bring their own device (BYOD) into the enterprise? It’s a question that raises many others. Is the business data going to be at risk? Can the business save thousands of dollars a year through not buying devices? Will employees fi nally get the latest gadget they want?

The idea of employees using their own equipment at work is not new. Using private vehicles for sales representatives, couriers, and truck drivers has a long history in industry.

Likewise, enterprise mobility is not new. Companies like Intermec and Motorola have developed fit-for-purpose mobile devices since the 1970s. What has changed and continues to advance rapidly, is the sophistication of consumer mobile devices. These are now more powerful and feature-rich than ever before. With the explosion of mobile device technology, early adopters immediately brought the latest devices into the workplace. Before the iPad was released in Australia, it was being used in Aussie workplaces to show videos, take notes, and access email. Therefore the big question for enterprises isn’t ‘should we allow BYOD’, but ‘how do we allow BYOD?’

BYOD strategy success factors If we further explore the analogy of vehicles in the workplace, you will see some governing factors that ensure their successful use. Firstly there are situations (dare I say applications) where it may not be appropriate to use a private vehicle. For specialist fields like mining, police, health or where there is a need for branding, a company vehicle may be a better fit. Secondly, there are mature policies that outline how a private vehicle can be used. For example, bicycle couriers may get a fee per delivery, whereas taxi drivers must prepare and service their vehicle following strict guidelines.

Another challenge to consider is that employees expect to be able to use their private vehicle in their own time for their own purposes. So what should the enterprise do to prepare for the BYOD that is already happening? A useful technique is to develop a BYOD strategy that encompasses the requirements, risks, policies, and technology.

Current usage of mobile technology The fi rst factor to consider is how your enterprise currently

18 Inside SAP magazine

uses mobile technology. The most common answers are phone calls, emails and associated attachments, calendar, internet, and map services. These features may be low risk for most, however, consider the specific risk to your enterprise and data. If a phone was found by a competitor, what data could they get access to? Could a malicious user release commercially sensitive information or compromise a government regulation?

Increasingly, enterprises already use or are planning to use mobile technology to access the corporate network and back-end systems like SAP. These uses of mobility warrant a closer review of the requirements and risks. Typically these applications fall into the category of either web-based or rich/native applications. Consider carefully what data and features the mobile applications enable. Could a malicious user download all of the customer data? Some rich mobile applications are akin to the police car in the vehicle analogy and require specific equipment to run properly (for example, bar code scanning, a specific operating system, or a printer).

It may help to document each type of user and the features and applications they require.

Managing other risks and factors While loss of IP and corporate data is of paramount importance, there are a range of other factors your enterprise should consider for BYOD, including: y Cost of support: how will you handle problems on BYOD devices? y Personal data: what if employee data is wiped or accessed? y Who’s paying: for the device, data, calls, and support? y Short lifespan: with models changing every six months, what will your upgrade plan be? y Employees leaving: how do you clean up the enterprise data?

Sensible policies should protect the enterprise without hampering productivity and innovation.

The right policies for your enterprise This is a real ‘horses for courses’ question. I’ve worked with small businesses that love technology and utilise every feature, including geo-fencing and remote control of devices for support, but don’t require strict regulations on their data.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are governmentregulated industries that only use technology when they have to and every feature needs to be encrypted and locked down.

In my opinion, sensible polices should protect the enterprise without hampering productivity and innovation.

When you have a good picture of your requirements, data, and risks, think about the policies that your enterprise would want to include in relation to mobile devices. These policies may in fact be appropriate for both BYOD and corporate devices. Most enterprises have an acceptable use policy for their desktops and/or the internet, and these may be a good starting point. Don’t just consider the technical policies (for example, security, authentication, password strength, and data segregation), also think about the commercial (that is, who pays for the data, calls, and support).

Managing the mobile fleet I’ve seen a number of organisations where the mobile fleet is out of control and monthly fees are paid for dormant SIM cards sitting on a shelf. Consider all the device models, brands, and operating systems that you have out in the field.

Do you have a mixture of old and new devices, iPhones for executives and ruggedised devices in the field?

Just because your enterprise will support BYOD doesn’t mean it needs to support every type of consumer device.

Look at the popular consumer device models and consider your enterprise requirements and policies. You can create a whitelist of devices that are suitable.

MDM solutions are reliant on the features provided by the operating system or hardware manufacturer. For example, you may be able to remotely view the screen on a Windows mobile device, but an Apple device might not support this feature. Likewise, some MDM products are offered as a hosted service, and others must be installed on your own hardware. To investigate the toolsets (for example, SAP’s Afaria), a good starting point is Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report for MDM. If you’re thinking about iOS, a great public resource is the Department of Defence iOS hardening guide.

Employees always want to utilise the best tools, and mobile technology is an area that continues to evolve. Be prepared so that your enterprise can cost effectively leverage the benefits of mobility. Develop a BYOD strategy that considers the requirements, risks, policies and technology. Consider that BYOD is happening but may not be suitable for every mobile enterprise need.

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BYOD May suit: Phone Email Web-based applications Simple workflow-style applications Reporting and business intelligence

May not suit: Applications that rely on rich device integration like RFID, scanning, keyboard, or stylus Tasks requiring a specific operating system or API

Supporting tools and solutions Once you have a handle on the BYOD requirements and policies, you may need to consider a toolset like Mobile Device Management (MDM) to assist with the implementation of your strategy. Typical MDM features include: yy Application management, yy Asset and lifecycle management, and yy Authentication, policy and security management.

An MDM solution can help segregate personal and corporate data, establish a standard operating environment (SOE), and support fleets of devices more easily. However,

Scenarios where a rugged or IP rated device is needed Where the business process is wholly reliant on the device

Adam Sivell has worked in IT since the mid 1990s, and is currently practice leader for mobility at Fujitsu Australia.

He has an extensive background throughout Australia and around the world working on more than 30 SAP and mobile projects.

www.insidesap.com.au 19

MOBILITY

SOLUTIONS

however, remains relevant for transactional SAP-centric processes. As a result, it is becoming increasingly inevitable that most organisations are supporting multiple workflow engines.

Task lists vs email The traditional consolidation point for multiple workflow systems is the approver’s email inbox.

But what happens if you’re busy? Which emails didn’t you get around to actioning? It’s at this point that the confusion starts. Imagine having to approve CAPEX requests via a SharePoint CAPEX approval task list, scheduled activities in SAP CRM, and Purchase Order approvals in SAP ERP. What a pain!

What every manager begs for is one list containing all their outstanding tasks.

SharePoint and SAP tasks in one list Many organisations are adopting SharePoint for business process collaboration, but this requires busy executives to learn yet another workflow approval process. Richard Frykberg looks at a practical approach to simplifying the executive task approval process by providing one list for all assigned tasks – actionable anywhere.

Why SharePoint and non-SAP workflow?

An increasing number of organisations have selected the SharePoint platform for process collaboration.

Collaboration is vitally important for key business processes such as bid management, new product introductions, and project management.

SharePoint workflow provides key benefits over SAP workflow as it can effectively support complex collaboration processes involving multiple internal and external participants, structured and unstructured content, and multiple back-end applications. SAP workflow,

20 Inside SAP magazine

Outlook, portal and mobile So where should this one list of tasks be presented to the users? Everywhere they would expect it! Many executives spend most of their days in Outlook, which is their primary productivity tool. More and more users are using SharePoint as their portal to business applications, and would prefer a web part display of their tasks. And everyone these days has a smartphone – so providing a native mobile app that allows managers to process approvals whilst on the move is an absolute expectation.

Offline access Do you need offl ine access to your one list of tasks? Task caching and store-and-forward capability on the phone adds significant solution complexity. But until Wi-Fi in trains and planes becomes ubiquitous, the view of most executives is a resounding ‘yes’!

Native vs hybrid vs core Another challenge for many organisations is whether to go down the hybrid HTML5 style of mobile app which theoretically supports a broad variety of devices, or to invest in proper native apps for the primary device platforms. The bottom-line is usability – only native apps deliver the required user-interface performance, offl ine capability and robust device hardware integration that senior managers expect.

An optimal approach now commonly adopted is the core model – leverage cross-platform technology that allows for the lion’s share of core code to be shared, but target the user interface to specific platform features. This approach ensures consistency across platforms whilst delivering the best possible end-user experience.

Configurability Business processes are continuously evolving, and new approval scenarios will continue to be added over time. It is essential therefore that these new scenarios can be readily

enabled via central configuration. Rather than having separate apps for each approval type, design one application that displays all task categories dynamically based on the configuration of a single central service.

Technology choices There are many platform technologies to support your one list initiative. Netweaver Universal Work List is one approach and is suited to organisations heavily invested in Netweaver Portal and Java skills. The Sybase Unwired Platform is a natural consideration for a mobility platform but may not provide the required level of support for internal scenarios, nor the richness of a native mobile application. However, as organisations are already implementing solutions to allow mobile workers to access SharePoint, hosting one list services on SharePoint is a viable approach for organisations with a strong commitment to Microsoft technologies.

Conclusion Don’t be afraid to combine the best blend of workflow technologies to solve business process management needs.

However, provide users with one list of tasks that they need to action. Present these tasks through multiple channels to maximise productivity be eliminating context shifting. For ongoing agility, ensure central configuration of scenarios is possible.

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TRENDS

MINING AND RESOURCES

Digging deep With the mining boom credited with sustaining Australia’s economic prosperity, recent signs of demand softening are igniting concerns about its future. Eleanor Reader investigates how SAP plans to help mining companies navigate safely through the uncertainty.

Shifting social, economic and political trends are constantly changing the mining industry. A renewed focus on cost control has gripped the industry and as rising demand looks to increase into the future, the lack of skilled labour becomes a greater concern. As a result, technology as an enabler is becoming more important to the industry than ever before.

management (HCM) processes, making sure they’re aware of staff and contractors’ performance, with a focus on recruiting and retaining a good workforce. Ariba allows them to better manage their procurement spend, and as a mobility solution, Syclo allows them to manage their maintenance spend in particular, so it is more efficient,” Hodgins says.

Under pressure

Demand-driven growth

As certain commodity prices soften, the focus of the mining industry has returned to cost control. Operational costs and project costs have taken centre stage as the industry seeks to implement the right systems and processes to gain stability and control of their businesses. In particular, price shifts in Australia’s two main commodities – iron ore and coal – have prompted a return to a more traditional method of cost control.

Tony Parvin, business manager – mining solutions for NTT DATA Business Solutions, says he finds the refocus on operational activities and project costs to be refreshing.

“There’s a recognition that the production demand is softening and that has led business activity for some time.

There’s a surprising amount of activity going on but I think that’s a function of the recognition that as times get tougher people need to have the right systems and processes in place,” he says.

SAP is responding to this cost control trend by providing solutions to mining customers that allow them to put better process controls in place, ensuring there’s consistency across their processes so they can monitor costs and report on the efficiency of the operations, says SAP Australia and New Zealand’s industry principal for resources and mining, Peter Hodgins.

“The best way to control costs is to understand where the costs are and where the efficiencies are; that’s what ERP systems can do,” he says.

SAP’s three most recent acquisitions – SuccessFactors, Ariba and Syclo – also address key processes for miners.

“SuccessFactors allows them to manage their human capital

As emerging markets continue to surge toward industrialisation, the fundamentals driving demand in China (Australia’s biggest export partner), India and even Africa are strong, and though there has been a blip in demand of late, it looks like this will be the long-term trend.

Though the scale and speed of growth in demand for raw material has obviously slowed, Hodgins says it is still growing nonetheless.

“I think what we’ll see is a slight change in focus as China in particular has gone through their phase of construction, so steel, iron ore and coal in particular have been a big focus. The maturing of that market means we’re seeing different demand for different materials, such as aluminium, copper and other metals,” he says.

Parvin believes that there is still a lot of opportunity with SAP projects, as smaller organisations are recognising that having the right systems and good business processes in place are the key to success in the sector.

“There’s a recognition that there’s a lot of business improvement activities that can be addressed going forth for the existing SAP install base, but also for smaller organisations who in a sense are still on the upswing, so they might be involved in projects directly or they’re providing services to other companies,” he says.

22 Inside SAP magazine

Lack of skilled labour Continued market growth means that the war for talent also continues, especially as new technology and operating models emerge, says Accenture Australia mining lead, Nigel Court.

New capital expenditure in the Australian mining industry was expected to rise from AU$55.5 billion in 2010/2011 to $AU73.5 billion in 2011/2012. This places huge pressure on the lack of skilled labour in Australia as resources companies must ask how they can deliver future projects. Bassan says this is a problem that is being felt in the sector all around the world, not just in Australia.

“There are people challenges, particularly in the developed world but also in developing countries. They have a slightly different spin on the problem, but they are also faced with the challenge of getting skilled resources to mine sites.”

CSC senior consultant Jarrod Bassan attributes the skills shortage to the limited number of mining and engineering professionals graduating in previous decades and to the remote location of mine sites.

“There is a shortage of people who are willing to work in remote locations, and there are also a lot of disadvantages to fly in, fly out work.”

SAP projects have already suffered as a result of the talent gap, according to Parvin.

“I think it’s always a challenge to find the right people at the right time, but it has been particularly difficult over the last couple of years and I’d say that some projects have suffered as a consequence of that, where the right skills haven’t necessarily been available at the right time,” he says.

“I’m probably seeing a little bit of softening in that, in that some of the larger projects have been perhaps deferred or downsized a bit. But it continues to be a challenge to find the top people when you need them.”

Digital mining The workforce shortage is just one of the trends driving a rise in technology in the mining and resources sector. Matthew Easlea, solution expert for mining, SAP, says digital mining is an emerging way for resources companies to work smarter instead of harder, by enabling mining operations with modern technology and optimised processes.

“The mining industry, jointly with SAP, is exploring how to take mature technologies out of other industries and apply them,” he says. “Examples are automation, which has been used in manufacturing industries for a long time. But unlike clean and controlled manufacturing environments, applying this technology in remote outdoor locations, exposed to the elements and unpredictability of the mining process, remains a major challenge.”

Autonomous operations, driverless vehicles and remote operation centres are just some of the technically orientated initiatives Parvin is seeing in the industry at the moment.

“That’s driven by the need to provide as safe a working environment as possible, along with potential cost reductions

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through more efficient operations,” he says.

This type of automation has been an area of focus for SAP. “We are providing the layers in between technology platforms, so if you’ve got onboard systems on trucks and trains in a plant and equipment area, we’ve provided the integration layers between those systems and the commercial operations systems, that allow you to make informed decisions about where the equipment is going and the performance of that equipment,” Hodgins says.

The very complex iron ore supply chains in Western Australia, the coal supply chains on the east coast of Australia and iron ore networks in South America require next-level technology to enable them to run, according to Bassan.

“As they now break this new ground, they recognise they need the technology to enable them to scale,” Bassan says.

“Autonomous vehicles are heavily reliant on information technology to make them work. Operation centres bring workers away from remote mine sites and allow more of them to work in capital city environments. To do that requires systems and technology for communications and analytics, and enabling new business processes to make this work efficiently.”

Easlea says solutions from SAP, like the new release of MII v14, HANA, the 3D visualisation capability in Visual Enterprise and the ongoing work with major infrastructure players like Cisco ensures that they at the front of delivering the digital mining vision.

Decrease in easy to mine reserves As the majority of easily accessible resource reserves have already been mined, these days, miners must often work harder for every tonne of ore produced.

“The majority of the large quality deposits in safe countries have already been claimed and are in development. Often the highest quality parts of these deposits have been extracted, so the grade of what is left is decreasing,” Easlea says. “Also, to expand production, many miners are having to dig deeper or go into more remote locations, such as mining within the Arctic Circle or the seabed mining that is currently planned in Papua New Guinea – these are difficult and new environments.”

This brings new challenges relating to logistical and supply chain issues, and Hodgins says products such as SAP Transportation Management can help businesses to better manage and reduce costs associated with the supply chain.

Managing regulation Mining in Australia has always been heavily regulated, with health and safety a very strong focus. While Hodgins says he is not seeing a significant increase in the regulatory issues impacting the sector, there is more pressure on miners to measure carbon emissions in the wake of the introduction of the carbon tax.

“Companies are starting to focus on carbon emissions more and more now that they’re anticipating a trading scheme coming in.”

Richard Lissett, national practice manager – SAP solutions,

ASG Group, says that his team expected more of a demand from organisations looking to track their carbon emissions.

“We’ve probably not seen as big an uptake as we would have expected, based on the government pressures and media noises which was made,” he says. “The rich functionality in SAP ERP and SAP BusinessObjects provides capabilities for tracking the current emissions requirements while having the capacity to adapt for future changes. We have not seen companies take great advantage of SAP for their emissions management and reporting requirements.”

And although other countries do not necessarily have the tight regulatory framework of Australia, according to Bassan, companies are always under the pump with the challenge to maintain their licence to operate, no matter what part of the world they are in.

“Even when operating in parts of the world with less strict compliance requirements, the parent companies are still answerable to their shareholders in the developed world and the supplier networks are so complex that they often end up using companies from all around the world. You have to apply global best practice no matter where you’re mining,” he says.

Project trends Pressure to contain operating costs and increase productivity and efficiency are being noticed across the sector. Bassan says technology is increasingly being used by miners to address these challenges and gain a competitive advantage.

“This is about essentially being able to produce more tonnes with the same number of mines and machines,” he says.

“Increasingly we’re seeing a recognition that technology has the capability to achieve more tonnes from the mine without additional investment in capital infrastructure – less steel, more investment in silicon.”

Meanwhile, the biggest project trend Parvin is seeing at the moment is in the ERP space.

“The trend I’m seeing is SMEs looking to upgrade their enterprise systems, particularly ERP enterprise systems and obviously SAP is front and centre for that,” he says.

Mobility Given its often remote operations and challenging environments, it is no surprise that the mining industry is utilising the benefits of mobility.

“Mobility is one of the key enablers of digital mining. We are seeing strong demand for maintenance, procurement, inventory, production and health and safety mobility solutions from

www.insidesap.com.au 25

SOLUTIONS

MINING AND RESOURCES

companies that want to not only control their costs through streamlined processes but also attract a younger generation to the industry to replace an aging workforce,” Easlea says.

However, using a mobile device on a mining site isn’t as simple as incorporating it into an office environment. Mobility has always been a challenge in the mining sector because the geographical areas are relatively constrained, Parvin says.

“The mine might be in a very remote area so mobile solutions have some benefits in certain aspects, but often the business case is quite difficult because it’s a very harsh environment, so there needs to be a fairly significant investment in hardware and infrastructure.”

Despite this, there is no doubt the focus on mobility will continue to grow, especially for field service crews using it for maintenance purposes.

“They will benefit from optimised routing, access to back-end systems and data,” Parvin says.

“Mobility is a dimension where we have seen interest, but not at scale,” says Court. “There has been more focus on analytics and how broader technology plays in an operational domain. Some organisations are assessing how the mobility aspects play into the process improvement and benefit delivery across client sites.”

Clearly, a different range of mobile devices from the typical iPads and iPhones need to be applied to the harsh mining

environments, says Bassan. As well as providing critical voice communications, today’s digital two-way radio handsets have colour screens, GPS and can be connected to corporate apps running on the enterprise network.

“We’re also seeing specialised hardened devices, ruggedised tablets and handheld smartphones that can be used even in underground environments,” Bassan says. “They’re not quite as user friendly as an iPhone, but they can provide some basic workflows and functionality, and link the mobile field worker to live data and business process.”

SAP has supported its mobility strategy with the acquisition of Syclo and Sybase, which are able to provide infrastructure to manage mobile devices and also specific mobile applications for functions such as maintenance and procurement, which are critical in the resources sector. Hodgins says being able to access apps such as these increases the amount of time maintenance or operational staff can be out in the field rather than doing admin in the office.

“The other advantage of this is the better quality of data that is entered in the systems, because they’re not double or triple handling information, writing down things on bits of paper and coming in trying to remember what they did,” he says. “That accentuates the value of the ERP system in particular, where you’ve got better quality information and the company can make better decisions on how they’re performing.”

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SOLUTIONS MINING AND RESOURCES

A best practice solution The latest version of the SAP Best Practices for Mining solution incorporates industry and partner expertise. Eleanor Reader reports.

SAP Best Practices for Mining provides an ideal springboard for customers and their partners in the mining and resources sector to jumpstart their ERP implementation. Originally released in 2000 on 4.6b with the IS-Mine extension, Best Practices for Mining has a long history of joint innovation with the industry.

In 2012, SAP released its latest version this year, Best Practices for Mining V1.606, which is localised for Australia and built on ECC 6.0 Enhancement Pack 6 (EhP6).

SAP’s solution expert for mining, Matthew Easlea, says, “We leveraged the Best Practices concept to show our deep mining industry expertise and to show how to use the standard ERP and IS-Mine add-on solutions to implement mining-specific processes.”

Updating the solution To ensure the update is specifically targeted to the needs of SAP customers, the mining industry team at SAP called on the knowledge and experience of partners with specific expertise in this area and mining company CIOs. The team regularly meets with a group called the Industry Advisory Council for Mining (IACM), where a select group of mining CIOs shared their requirements and vision with SAP. Mining experts in North America, Australia and China took these requirements and developed new scenarios to directly address the industry’s needs. After this, the SAP team travelled to China to do final development and testing, then progressed to running user acceptance testing with the partners in Brisbane.

The solution What originated from this detailed process was a fully updated and relevant Best Practices for Mining solution. SAP uses the new NetWeaver Business Client in all 29 of the processes, resulting in a streamlined and attractive user interface to assist with user adoption, according to Easlea.

In the area of maintenance, SAP uses the new Simplified Maintenance Worker User interface, which streamlines the process of creating notifications, work orders and confirmations and dispatches the work to a user’s job list.

“We’ve also embedded TREX into the process to provide Google-like searching capabilities to the maintenance worker,” Easlea adds.

The sales and invoicing process has been updated to use the new Commodity Management solution, which provides end-toend support for quality based contracts, as well as provisional

and differential invoicing. A new scenario has been developed which shows how to use the new Linear Asset Management functionality in maintenance.

Finally, SAP has included a scenario based on the new Environment Health and Safety Management (EHSM) 2.0 solution, which replaces the former Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) solution. This new solution for managing safety incidents and risk assessments features tight integration with the Plant Maintenance module and was developed in conjunction with the mining industry.

Industry input Partners play a key role in the development and testing of the solution, according to Easlea.

“Their engagement is critical. It is our partners that will be taking the best practices solution, extending it with their own intellectual property and rapidly deploying it to mid-sized mining organisations,” he says.

The partners involved in this update were Windsor Business Solutions, Accenture, Courtland/ASG Group, Wipro, COSOL and Zer01.

Mick Windsor, CEO of Windsor Business Solutions, says SAP works extremely closely with the industry to ensure that their offering meets current requirements.

“The benefits that end clients of SAP will gain from our experience is that we focus specifically on integrated enterprise asset management,” he says.

Key trends Because the solution is focused on the requirements of a typical mining and minerals processing company, trends that shape the present and future of the industry can have a huge impact on the solution. One key trend that influenced this latest update is the current price variance of commodity prices.

Another trend is driving simplification and usability. There is currently demand from the mining industry for SAP to handle power, water, slurry, road and rail using a linear asset management approach. Safety also continues to be critical to the Australian mining industry, with Easlea saying only an integrated solution with HR, maintenance and finance can deliver real outcomes.

The new release of the Best Practices for Mining solution is now generally available.

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www.insidesap.com.au 27

Q&A

MICHAEL MASLEN

Engineering and construction speed adoption of technology The mining boom doesn’t just reward resources companies – organisations in associated fields such as engineering, construction and professional services also reap the benefits of an uptick in activity. Michael Maslen, industry principal – engineering, construction and operations, SAP ANZ, discusses why these sectors are an emerging area of focus for the company.

ISAP: How are the construction and engineering sectors faring?

MM: There is a couple of industry dynamics that are really causing some anxiety. One is obviously the massive construction downturn, so every single business in this sector is looking at cost containment. I cover companies that service the mining sector, such as mining services and oil and gas services companies, so when the mining sector goes through challenges and downturns, and BHP and Rio slow down their projects, my customers like Transfield, GHD and Leighton suffer as well.

Because construction is down, many of the big commercial construction firms like Lend Lease and Multiplex are now trying to swing into infrastructure on mining, so they can broaden their portfolio and continue to be profitable and successful.

Technology and innovation are not necessarily the construction industry’s default mode of operation. But over the last five to 10 years, we have seen the advent of collaboration technologies. Professional services and construction companies are going in boots and all on online collaboration and document sharing for their clients.

Mobility is also coming to the fore, so when businesses have 85 per cent of their workforce out in the field, then mobile access to information becomes absolutely paramount. There is not a single person in this sector who is not wowed by mobile computing’s ability to greatly reduce the time it takes to raise questions and variations and confirm project information. And it’s lighter than carrying around armfuls of plans.

We are also seeing the popularisation of Building Information Modelling (BIM), which basically meshes three-dimensional modelling with information technology, to improve the way you treat information, coordinate construction documents, and visualise the physical assets being constructed. 3D modelling and CAD design is getting increasingly sophisticated and that’s a big IT driver in the industry today.

ISAP: What SAP solutions are engineering and construction organisations favouring?

28 Inside SAP magazine

MM: The project-based contracting type businesses have been slower to adopt basic ERP, so that’s where the interest is. Across the sector, there are a lot of companies that still rely heavily on spreadsheets, and that still see IT as being a business hindrance rather than a business enabler. So the industry is still very much taking up core foundational project systems, finance and HR, but they are also being pushed into the more sophisticated world of IT in areas like mobility.

ISAP: What is happening in the professional services market?

MM: The majority of the customers I work with are in two separate categories: traditional white-collar professional services like engineering, architectural, environmental, and IT services, through to emerging blue-collar service-based industries, such as laundry or catering. Their clients are becoming more savvy, they want more transparency in the contracts that they are taking with those professional services organisations. The commoditisation of these sectors is also driving these businesses, which must ‘differentiate or die’.

ISAP: What is the outlook for SAP’s penetration into those sectors?

MM: It is quite positive. When we look at these sectors, there are two or three businesses that dominate, and those companies have made their technology decision one way or the other. But there are many organisations out there that haven’t made the move into an integrated technology platform. A lot of them might be running systems that may have worked for them in the past, where they were running maybe a dozen projects, but now those businesses are expanding and having to increase their workforce. To be able to do that, they need to have a back office and technology platform that allows them to bring on other businesses quickly. They can’t run off spreadsheets – they need a tier one system. That gives SAP an enormous opportunity to invest and capture that side of the market.

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CASE STUDY THE WINE SOCIETY

A fine drop A rapid implementation of SAP BusinessObjects has provided The Wine Society with the solution to problems in access to and use of sophisticated reporting. Freya Purnell reports.

Background Established in 1946, The Wine Society is Australia’s oldest independent wine club. With over 55,000 members nationwide, the society has a commitment to distributing Australian wine, and also offers wine education, events and corporate services such as private tastings.

The Wine Society has been a long-term user of SAP, fi rst implementing the system in July 1998, and upgrading to 4.7 in 2006.

As a small business, the Wine Society has not been able to invest significantly in its SAP solution outside of the core business functionality, according to Nick Perrin, information systems manager, The Wine Society.

“This meant the business had no integrated reporting solution, and was reliant on a combination of LIS, custom ABAPs and exports. In addition to SAP, the business required reports from our various standalone retail point of sale (POS) systems, from our email marketing system, and from our inbound and outbound contact systems (currently separate),” Perrin says.

Data from these disparate sources needed to be manually extracted and consolidated in Excel.

“A consequence of this was the business was heavily reliant on the availability of certain key users to generate these reports manually, and access to timely and relevant insight was limited at best,” Perrin says.

In addition to these system challenges, The Wine Society operates in an incredibly competitive market, due to an influx of online wine merchants and the high Australian dollar presenting challenges around competing with cheaper imports. In this environment, having better business insights provides an advantage.

“We had already been working on a home-grown solution for this issue using SSAS and consolidating the large variety of existing exports developed over the time since implementation, but we were held up at the last stage trying to resolve performance and usability issues for the end users,” says Perrin.

SAP services provider Icon Integration, which had been working with The Wine Society on maintaining and supporting its SAP environment, suggested SAP BusinessObjects as a solution that could be rapidly deployed to resolve these issues.

Peter Collett, director, Icon Integration, says, “We knew that they had created a SQL server datamart that they weren’t getting much from. In the end, we said give us a box, we will

install BusinessObjects and connect it to your datamart, and we will show you what it can do.”

Implementation and challenges In undertaking this implementation, Perrin says the main aim was to provide the business with timely and accurate reports, which they were unable to do effectively with the existing manual processes.

“By automating all our key reports, as well as our list segmentation and generation, our aim was also to free resources to focus on more in-depth reporting and analysis, rather than wasting time on daily and monthly recurring requirements,” Perrin says.

The solution used SAP Business Intelligence Edge 4.0 SP4 over a SQL Server datamart to provide quick, specific access to information needed by the business – such as sales, membership and product information – in a very simple and easily maintainable deployment.

The implementation was very successful, with Icon installing the new solution rapidly so The Wine Society could get up and running with its new reporting processes.

“Given the work we had already done on the data extraction and consolidation, in just a handful of consulting days Icon had deployed the system and trained the key IT and business users,” Perrin says.

While a challenge for The Wine Society with this project was making resources available to develop the required reports and manage the

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incorporation of new data into the BusinessObjects universe, Perrin says Icon was able to make a resource available quite flexibly to assist with additional training and insight.

To date, the key user within The Wine Society of the new BusinessObjects solution has been its marketing data analyst.

There are now a significant number of previously manually generated weekly and monthly reports scheduled and running daily. Perrin says the business has also recently automated the generation of basic lists for its email marketing campaigns, and has currently incorporated data from its POS system and email marketing system, and working on the integration of its outbound and inbound contact systems data.

“In the three months since we implemented BusinessObjects, we have already scheduled around 14 weekly/monthly reports, meaning results that were usually reported on once a month after the sales have been completed are now being reported every day, significantly improving responsiveness,” Perrin says.

Collett says the feedback from the marketing analyst is that the solution saves her hours each day, compared to the previous processes of extracting data manually and manipulating in Excel.

“That’s probably one of the reasons why this small project has proven so successful – they have someone who really has a vested interest in this solution and she is just flying with it.”

Business benefits Perrin says BusinessObjects is providing a new level of visibility and analytic capability to the business.

“As we hoped, the new solution is already providing daily insight into business performance in a way that was not possible previously with our reporting and resourcing limitations,” he says. “Key anticipated benefits include significantly improved customer segmentation, enhanced stock forecasting, improved channel analysis and opportunity identification, along with the general expectation of significantly improved decision-making. Our experience so far indicates that it will allow us to deliver on those expectations in spite of our very limited budget and resources.”

Collett says this project shows that achieving results such as these doesn’t require a six-month or 12-month project.

“You can deploy it in a matter of days, and you can have real business benefits in a matter of days,” he says.

The BusinessObjects solution also provides a platform to make the facts needed for good decision-making, and even predicting customer desires, available for the business to act on.

“When your facts are so hidden within SAP, you need to have a sensible way of getting the facts out to the right people at the right time. The Wine Society has to know who is buying what, and almost be able to predict what their customers will want to buy,” Collett says. “BusinessObjects lets them make informed decisions as opposed to guesses.”

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Delivery focus Acuity Search comprises Alex Gomez, Sam Vargas (Directors) and Shane Morgan (SAP Recruitment Partner). All three of us have experience recruiting SAP professionals dating back to 2000/2001. This depth of SAP recruitment experience is second to none in the Australian market. As SAP is the only focus of our business, this allows us to keep up to date with market trends and identify candidates in niche areas ahead of hiring curves. This can be invaluable to clients who need new and emerging SAP skills for project work with immediate effect. We understand the tight timeframes that are associated with hiring programmes and the adverse effect of not attracting the right resource to a project at the right stage of proceedings.

We have the capacity to provide both contract and permanent resources covering the entire SAP spectrum, ranging from senior SAP leadership and management right through to SAP graduates. We can provide ad-hoc resources at short notice or build entire project teams from the ground up.

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Because we are considered experts in our field many of the candidates that we deal with are happy for us to consult on what their current value is at any particular time. This allows us to ensure that rates/ salaries are not inflated due to over confidence. It is also our aim to purely deal with the very best proven SAP consultants working on the best projects in Australia. These are consultants who have the focus, drive, articulation and professionalism to ensure that projects do not drift and that re-work is kept at zero.

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CASE STUDY TRANSFIELD SERVICES

Cloud, on-premise or a hybrid: which way will you jump?

Transfield Services HRIS program director, Michelle de Wet, who spoke at the SAUG Summit 2012, shared the key steps in Transfield Services’ decision-making process on choosing its SAP Human Capital Management (HCM) direction.

Following SAP AG’s acquisition of SuccessFactors earlier this year, the company made some key announcements about the future strategic direction for the SuccessFactors cloud-based HCM solutions, versus the SAP HCM Talent Management suite, hosted on-premise. SAP confi rmed that while there will be ongoing support for the on-premise Talent Management solution, future innovation and investment will be directed towards SuccessFactors HCM modules in the cloud.

This, therefore, has implications for many organisations, which are now being forced to re-evaluate their HCM roadmaps.

Transfield Services is one of those companies. When SAP made the announcement, Transfield had already commenced its global Quantum program, which aimed to install the SAP ERP platform across Transfield Services’ operations, to drive common policies and processes. So they had to consider how to proceed – whether to continue with an on-premise implementation, or consider a hybrid model incorporating SuccessFactors.

Despite already being some way down the path with the SAP ERP model, Transfield decided it was the right time to take the leap into the cloud. The fact that the company had very little in the way of automation in the Talent Management space made that decision easier.

“For such a large organisation, a lot of our people processes are manual, driven by spreadsheets. So from a landscape point of view, it didn’t really hurt us whether we went down an SAP ERP path, or decided to go with cloud,” de Wet said.

Having already completed the blueprint phase of the Quantum project, Transfield Services was able to give

SuccessFactors the complete map of its processes and business requirements, and ask the crucial questions on whether cloud could deliver on these.

“We were under pressure, because we had the Quantum project up and running and still had to make sure we delivered on regional deadlines. We completed the whole change request process from end-to-end in eight weeks, which was a large achievement in itself,” de Wet said.

On 10 August, Transfield Services became the fi rst customer in the Asia Pacific to sign up for the hybrid model, combining SAP and SuccessFactors.

Key decision factors So what got Transfield over the line on the cloud/onpremise hybrid model?

From a business perspective, Transfield Services was looking to expand its HCM self-service offering, make it much more user-friendly, and centralise it globally.

“We really want to get better at managing our people as people are really at the heart of our business. We are a people business, we sell people with certain skills to deliver certain services, so we have an opportunity to get better at that,” de Wet said.

The attractive user-interface of SuccessFactors was a key factor in Transfield Services’ decision.

“For us as an organisation, because we had a large amount of manual processes and our workforce is mainly blue collar, we needed to make sure that the user interface is something that people will actually want to work with,” de Wet said.

Transfield Services also considered the level of access and reach in the organisation.

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CASE STUDY

TRANSFIELD SERVICES

“We have a very distributed workforce, some in remote locations across multiple geographies, so we considered the cloud providing benefits in this area,” de Wet said.

Transfi eld Services also discovered that implementing SuccessFactors would actually reduce project implementation costs.

“The cloud is very different to SAP on-premise.

There’s nothing to build as such, no customisation, only confi guration, so it’s literally out of the box. You switch on a few things and design forms to suit your organisation, but really it should decrease implementation costs,” de Wet said.

Transfi eld also had to consider the long-term commercial impact, including operating costs, which were found to remain unchanged.

The hybrid model Transfi eld Services has chosen to implement the whole SuccessFactors cloud offering, with the exception of Employee Central, as this functionality will be kept in the SAP on-premise system, and feed data into the cloud.

The future, de Wet said, is for the SAP on-premise system to include core HR, Organisational Management (OM), Personnel Administration (PA), Payroll and Time

Management, while Talent Management will be held in the cloud, with an ESS/MSS Portal integrated with the cloud.

Lessons learned While Transfi eld Services is still at the beginning of its implementation journey with SuccessFactors, de Wet said they have already learned some lessons along the way that others may benefit from when undertaking a similar process.

Though most are familiar with the concept that cloud has a subscription model, it may not be clear that subscription fees kick in as soon as the project begins implementation, rather than when the system is live.

“Also, it’s not really the number of users of the solution, it’s the number of employee records in the cloud that will determine the price. It’s very important to be aware of that point.”

De Wet stressed that when considering cloud, companies should revisit their original business case and adapt it to the new functionality cloud provides.

“You may be able to deliver more benefits because the cloud operates differently. It takes a mindset change, and it’s going to impact what you do and how you manage people.”

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TRANSFORMATION LEADERSHIP

Ensuring SAP projects deliver real business results It is the aim of all SAP projects – providing real business value. So why do so many projects fall short? Philip Dove outlines here how to extrapolate measurable business improvement targets from SAP functionality, develop a target operating model to ensure dependencies for success are addressed, and define and tightly manage project scope to achieve the results the business is seeking.

There was a time when organisations did ERP projects because they felt that they needed to. Promising a foundation for growth was sufficient, and delivering on time and to budget was the hallmark of success. This is no longer the case. If you own or significantly contribute to an SAP project large or small, CEOs, CFOs and shareholders are going to come after you for the return on investment (ROI). The ‘buzz expression’ is time to value. SAP’s investment in value engineering in recent years, and cloud-based offerings in the last six months, underpins this – and with good reason.

The traditional benefit definition method for ‘foundation’ projects was to: 1. Start by punting for the obvious total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits, 2. Throw in the odd ‘surely’: “Surely we’ll increase sales by 1 per cent”, 3. Finish it off by rounding it out: “By redeploying fingers and toes to value-adding tasks”.

All of this would lead to an uninspiring prize of limited measurable business value, and certainly not one from which project scope could be clearly defined.

All successful projects need a clear and compelling case for change, and all projects need a robust ROI.

Address the core levers of value The days when it was enough to merely build a foundation for future growth or bringing in a budget on time and in full have gone. In the current economic climate vague, intangible promises just won’t wash. Any self-respecting business needs to see the ROI, and a guarantee that you’ll get it right the first time.

How can you do that? You need to develop a benefits-led strategic approach.

Don’t just focus on the immediate tactical issues at hand, instead conduct deep dive analysis on those areas of the business where value is generated or money is spent, and focus

80 per cent of your energies on these.

Use a hypotheses-based approach to weed out potential opportunities for revenue enhancement, cost avoidance or reduction, working capital reduction and automation.

The best way to develop these hypotheses is to get the brightest and the best in your business, and lock them away in an offsite workshop for a couple of days with a good facilitator that can help to tweak out and elaborate the initial hypotheses.

Then, make sure that you use up-to-date benchmark data to validate, confirm or challenge your findings.

Using a structured Target Operating Model approach (which we will go into in more detail later) will ensure that you cover all of your strategic, operational and tactical bases, and has the added benefit of providing a methodical framework.

The message here is don’t just focus on the back-office efficiencies, but really challenge yourself and try to identify potential value from a front-end perspective.

An excellent example is the approach used by Birmingham City Council in the UK.

Case study: Birmingham City Council (BCC) Starting in 2008, BCC was looking for an SAP-driven uplift in process efficiency. At the heart of this new strategic direction was the development of a new shared services body, which was to be jointly owned by the Council and private enterprise.

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TRANSFORMATION LEADERSHIP

Anyone that has worked in or with UK and Australian government institutions can vouch for the fact that large transformation successes have been somewhat mixed. Here is an example of a public sector organisation where it has worked extremely well.

The BCC had 55,000 employees, a £3 billion budget including a £1.4 billion property portfolio, and 250 different services and revenue streams.

The core outcome was a balanced budget and the generation of funding for other transformation programs, delivering a little over £800 million over a 10-year period.

The key drivers for change were:  A shift to outcomes and delivery focus. o An aim to become truly delivery focused rather than constrained by internal structures.  A drive for greater efficiency. o Increasing demands for limited/reducing resources (more for less; 1.9 per cent council tax rise). o Need to secure greater value for money in delivery.  A need for cultural change. o Emphasis on delivery, outcomes and accountability at all levels.

o Openness, supported by accurate information. o Shift to faster change decisions.

The program initiated a holistic transformational program across all Corporate Services, the outcomes of which included:  A 21st century SAP ERP system and CRM (single customer record);  Standardised financial information in a single system available more quickly (72 hours);  Improved cashflow;  Reduced financial processes;  An end-to-end procurement process – improved invoice processing (95 per cent);  On-contract spend from 9 per cent to 77 per cent;  Off-contract spend reduced to less than 1 per cent;  Implementation of category management;  Reduction in headcount of 28 per cent;  A standard council-wide approach to people management matters, including MSS/ESS;  A single performance management regime;  New pay progression arrangements, and  Improved asset management for property leases.

To date, the transformation program has identified over £2 billion of cashable and non-cashable benefits.

At the heart of BCC’s success was the way in which they used the strategic planning process to link the high-level strategic benefits to the day-to-day delivery of services.

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They did this by:  Confirming appropriate strategic and operational benefits. o Producing scorecards, linking service activities to BCC’s strategy.  Mapping services and investments against these benefits. o Identifying the strength of relationships to benefits. o Confirming the degree to which services contribute to delivery strategy.  Identifying target services and investments for further review. o Identifying activities which are outliers, making unusually large or small strategic contributions.  Performing detailed service and investment delivery planning. o Performing detailed planning and funding options analysis on these outlier activities. o Refining and improving the council’s ability to deliver its strategy.

Scorecards were used to stitch this incredibly complex patchwork of information together, thereby providing a tangible link between BCC’s strategy and the delivery of services as well as service level agreements, helping to manage the relationship between benefits and delivery, and managing critical issues.

The advantages of adopting a Strategic Planning Process were that it provided a clear link between delivery, benefit priorities and service delivery, better allocation of limited Council resources, better alignment of service delivery, financial planning and performance management, and improved focus and evidence of delivery via a single version of the truth.

From a wider program perspective, the strategic planning process also helped to:  Improve communication and understanding of the program aims;  Focus resources on delivery priorities;  Align initiatives, tasks and people to priorities;  Ensure evidence-based planning and performance management;  Ensure that budget/resources were put to most effective strategic use, and  Enhance internal monitoring and external communication of achievements.

they established a Target Operating Model.

A Target Operating Model (TOM) defines all the dependencies for the achievement of the benefits. It does this by defining the end state that needs to be reached across all the key facets of the business. Moreover, it shows how these different areas will interact in the future model. The TOM is defined at the beginning of the initiative in line with the development of the benefits case. It provides overarching guidance to any subsequent blueprinting activity.

How do organisations get this wrong? By either having too many unanswered questions or too few. For example, an organisation which constrains system design and optimisation ends up with excessive customisation and development costs.

An over-reliance on tactical short-term requirements, instead of long-term strategic alignment, can lead to a dependency on bottom-up organisation design, which results in insufficient role-based clarity during blueprinting, and increased organisational design timelines and costs.

Define measurable benefits How many projects do you know where they get to the end and someone asks: “where are the benefits?” And no one knows what wasn’t achieved and what the points of failure were.

What are the critical success factors for ensuring the benefits which are expected to be delivered are clear?

1. Taking ownership of the benefits; 2. Having a bullet-proof baseline; 3. Defining measurable benefits, and 4. Dependency identification, measurement and ownership.

Benefits management must be fully integrated into the program lifecycle.

Benefits phasing should include:  Strategy and benefits identification;  Validating benefits;  Enabling benefits;  Realising benefits, and  Sustainability and continuous improvement.

The Target Operating Model In the BCC example, we can see that the benefits were driven by a number of changes in addition to simply implementing SAP. Core was changing the service delivery and sourcing model to a shared services body, but with it also came behavioural changes, new governance and performance measurement changes. In short,

www.insidesap.com.au 37

TRANSFORMATION LEADERSHIP

Benefits identification should cover:  Revenue enhancement;  Reinvestment;  Cost avoidance;  Cost reduction;  Working capital reduction, and  Financial engineering.

Dependency maps and benefits plans provide detailed plans and strategies for realising benefits.

Keeping the scope tight With the benefits and TOM established, projects often start out with the best of intentions, but in the hurly-burly of delivery, the benefits are lost in the sheer effort of getting the changes in.

Benefits should be the sole determinant of scope – if something comes out, then the benefit impact is clearly identifiable, and project leaders need to guard against extraneous items being included in the scope.

The importance of end users There is one aspect of project delivery that does not always conform to a pre-design template or methodology, and that is the end user.

A critical aspect of any successful business transformation is the development of audience segments – the art of slicing and dicing stakeholders into their respective groupings, so that you don’t have to end up dealing with every individual in isolation.

This process helps to determine:  Levels of expectation among different user groups;  Preferred communication styles, channels and frequencies;  Training approach; and most importantly,  Prioritisation of benefits.

Turning benefits into money Having considered the strategic value levers, identified and measured the benefit, kept a tight scope and carefully considered the target audience, how do you turn benefits into money? By employing a completely holistic change management approach.

38 Inside SAP magazine

Too many SAP programs make the mistake of managing impacts in isolation and forget that change management’s first priority must always be the realisation of benefits. Always ask yourself, what’s the point of doing it if there’s no benefit to be gained?

The way to do that is to tie all impacts back to a benefit, thereby providing a tangible measure of the size of the impact and therefore the level of prioritisation required. The bigger the prize, the bigger the effort.

For the change impact mitigation to be truly holistic, it must be fully integrated across: 1. Stakeholder engagement, 2. Communications, and 3. Training design and delivery.

A bold leader must call out the ‘elephant in the room’. Along with experience, foresight and technical understanding, they need the courage to identify the need for true macro change, which could involve outsourcing, acquisition or sale, or a new service delivery model.

In the case of BCC, this involved realising the traditional in-house delivery model had to be broken to lower back office costs and allow a sharp focus on improving citizen services.

In summary: 10 guiding principles for SAP business transformation 1.

SAP programs must have a tangible and bold return on investment.

2. Aim for strategic, not just tactical transformation.

3. Use benchmark data to evaluate your targets.

4. Use a TOM methodology to drive real value.

5. Bring benefits to life and ensure they are owned by the business.

6. Link benefits to the program scope.

7. Link all impacts back to a benefit.

8. Develop a detailed understanding of your audience.

9. Develop a holistic change management approach.

10. Call out the elephant in the room.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Philip Dove is business transformation director, HCL AXON.

SAP HANA TECHNOLOGY

Australia ahead of the pack Australia has emerged as the fastest adopter of SAP’s HANA real-time technology in the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region. Freya Purnell spoke with Anthony McMahon, senior vice president, database and technology, SAP APJ, about why Australian customers are making the investment and how they are justifying the value.

In-memory computing platform SAP HANA has emerged as the fastest-growing product in SAP’s history since it was launched just over 12 months ago. It has achieved that mantle with just under 600 customers worldwide (as of October) – but this is no casual purchase, requiring a significant investment from customers.

SAP’s Anthony McMahon says the maturity of the Australian and New Zealand markets in terms of ERP and analytic technology adoption compared to other parts of Asia has been a key factor in our willingness to venture into the database space with SAP. “I think there is a certain level of trust and investment that comes with that level of maturity, so that the customers are now very open to looking at innovative database platforms from SAP and anything that can help identify and extract more value out of that investment,” he says.

The natural cynicism of Australian customers has also, ironically, been an aid in adoption of HANA, driving a more relentless focus on generating a business case to be ascribed to any new investment outside the normal project or maintenance budget. Effectively, customers are making SAP work hard for the money.

“We have gone through the exercise of getting a business sponsor and looking at some innovative use cases for different customers, and then they can really scrutinise and be very rigorous on that business value. Once we cross that hurdle, the adoption is very, very fast,” McMahon says.

Organisations from across the full spectrum of industries are seeing this value – including fast-moving consumer goods, insurance companies, government agencies, retail and utilities – although the use cases typically fall into three broad categories: Business Warehouse acceleration, SAP application acceleration, and customer datamart initiatives.

The speed seekers Organisations seeking to optimise the performance of SAP Business Warehouse (BW) and Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) are typically driven by a need for speed. While McMahon is quick to point out that some

customers are very happy with the way these applications are performing currently, others want to squeeze more from these systems.

“They are looking for a way to improve and accelerate their systems for some of their analytical applications or their operational reporting that works with BW, and HANA is providing them with levels of performance around the deployment much better than any other database platform solution in the market is offering,” he says.

In this type of use case, the IT barriers to change are fairly low, as long as the business case is there to justify the improvements.

“As they migrate the data from their existing underlying database to HANA, there is no change required to their existing applications and reports they are using out of BW,” McMahon says.

In some cases, this use of HANA is removing barriers that have frustrated companies for many years.

“The CIO of one customer, a large beverage company, said that eight weeks after deploying BW on HANA, they are now able to get access to information in operational and senior level decision making that they have not been able to produce for 20 years.”

The ‘better, faster, stronger’ adopters With around 25 SAP applications now running natively on HANA, some customers are adopting the technology so they can get access to what are effectively solutions on steroids – such as BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC), Cost and Profitability Analysis (COPA), and Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable (FICA).

“What you are seeing is customers getting performance out of those applications that’s now justifying the use case for adoption, or they are willing to migrate to the new HANA instance because of the business value it’s giving them,” McMahon says. “An example is using BPC, CFOs are now able to do some month-end closing and planning scenarios that they just didn’t have the window to do at the end of quarter or month previously.”

www.insidesap.com.au 39

SAP HANA TECHNOLOGY

To a certain degree, we may have held back some of our partners to make sure we have got the right migration methodology, the right use case testing and the right project management.

Anthony McMahon The slicers and dicers The third use case is where organisations are able to build a customer datamart powered by HANA specifically to overcome previous limitations around deep analytic ability, particularly for large data volumes.

“It’s actually a new customer datamart that’s put in often between the enterprise data warehouse and analytics tools.

These applications might be built specifically for customer segmentation, supply chain visibility or decision support for credit risk scoring in the fi nancial sector,” McMahon says.

“Most of those we are seeing are non-SAP customers, using other ERP data.”

Getting more bang for their buck, some customers are adopting all three use cases to justify the HANA investment.

Keeping a low profile Though more and more Australian and New Zealand customers are adopting HANA, few are willing to speak publicly about their implementations and the expected business value. Companies such as steel fabricator OneSteel, beverage company Frucor, construction equipment manufacturer Komatsu and the Super Cheap Retail Group have all become customers, but there are also adopters at the small to midsize end of the market.

Footwear distribution company Aqueo became an early stage ramp-up customer for SAP Business One on HANA, and spare parts distribution company, ANPR, has also gone down this path.

“ANPR has been able to get significant advantages around how much inventory they carry, the service that they are delivering to customers, repeat business and customer management, that they couldn’t experience before they deployed HANA,” McMahon says.

While businesses seeking acceleration benefits are generally more open about their use of the in-memory technology, where business cases are driven by initiatives to gain competitive advantage, the level of secrecy is much higher.

“Customers are using it for new use cases in the way they might be analysing their customer base, or changing business processes around decision-making to customerfacing staff instead of market, or taking decisions around capital investment on inventory management, because they can now predict more accurately,” McMahon says.

Building the right partnerships While some of SAP’s existing BW partners have been quick to get on board, McMahon acknowledges that there

40 Inside SAP magazine

is much more work to be done by SAP on developing the ecosystem for HANA. “We have probably been overly cautious – we want to make sure that for any of the early projects done by our partners, the experience and the deployment goes perfectly because we really want HANA to deliver on everything that the customer believes it can do, as they have evaluated it,” McMahon says.

“To a certain degree, we have maybe held back some of our partners to make sure that we have got the right migration methodology, the right use case testing, and the right project management. Then over time, we will free up some of that IP and build out the ecosystem, because we have to do that if we want to scale. Many customers want that choice as well – they have got an existing partner that they trust and work with.”

For SAP to achieve the desired scale, gaining the support of the developer, database architect and independent software vendor communitities is also a critical part of the plan, to encourage further development and innovation on the HANA platform.

“To us it is very important that the industry and many other customers see HANA as a real-time data platform, not just a real-time in-memory database for SAP use cases,” McMahon says. “You can write innovative applications, real-time applications, because all the underlying services you need to deliver that, whatever the data source, whatever the decision support layer that you are using can be done in HANA in real time.”

Though winning the allegiance of these markets is outside SAP’s usual oeuvre, McMahon says the company benefits from having brought Sybase, BusinessObjects and Syclo into the fold.

“Those businesses were all about an ecosystem of application developers that had nothing to do with the SAP landscape. So we have people that have done that in the past, we just need to learn from them and make sure our programs drive that,” he says.

With these ambitious plans in play to win over both SAP and non-SAP customers, McMahon is positive that the rapid growth seen in ANZ will continue.

“Look at what some companies have been spending historically in the space and not getting the business value they expect. We have got customers really wanting to work with us on this because they do see this as a way to unlock some of the money that they might have been spending on maintenance or upgrades or duplication of infrastructure and data sets, and turn that into a very nimble, flexible solution like HANA. We don’t need the economy to grow, we just need to redirect some of that spend.”

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

SAP HANA TECHNOLOGY

Communicating customer value

Stuart Dickinson

Irene Hopf

Irene Hopf, consulting architect and IBM SAP global alliance leader for analytics and SAP HANA, based at the IBM International SAP Competency Centre in Waldorf, Germany, visited Australia earlier this year. Together with Stuart Dickinson, CEO of Oxygen Business Solutions, she gave her views on how customers are making the case for investing in SAP HANA. ISAP: Do you see SAP HANA as a strategic opportunity for better engagement with clients?

Stuart Dickinson: We see HANA as the next wave. What are organisations looking for today? It’s about faster decisionmaking and getting business insight to people who need it so they can make those decisions. In the contact centres and in the field, they have traditionally been quite dataconstrained in terms of getting the information out there and allowing them to have those conversations. What we see HANA doing is unlocking the secrets that are sitting in the corporate repository of information and making this information available for people to turn it into better customer conversations.

The analytics and speeding up reporting is very interesting, but to me I see the real opportunity is to move SAP in the long term from the system of record to a much more dynamic platform where it becomes the system of engagement – it becomes an opportunity for people to have real conversations and leverage that.

From an integrator’s perspective, it’s about being able to demonstrate value much faster because we don’t have to go through this whole process of putting in an ERP and reporting system.

ISAP: Does that make the investment decision quicker?

SD: It is a big investment. The investment will get cheaper over time as the technology gets cheaper and the consulting gets more packaged. I think the investment decision can be more grounded in fact because you can do a proof of value fast, demonstrate that value, and that can result in a business case. Often decision-making around ERPs and business warehouses will be longer term, whereas what we are seeing globally is a lot of clients who are doing these proof of concepts can see real value almost within months. So the business case in some ways becomes a lot easier to do.

Irene Hopf: The decision for SAP HANA, if a customer identifies the business scenario where it would be an advantage, will be different for every single customer. I agree

that we can demonstrate value easier, due to the fact that in established database-based SAP systems, you’re working off different data sets or databases in the sense of the foundation layout for the transaction and analytical systems. To bring that eventually back together again will provide enormous value, because then you are working off one data foundation again. From a vision point of view, that is very appealing to a lot of customers.

What I have seen so far for those customers who adopted the technology and went into proof of concept projects, many of them didn’t even create a business case, they just trust SAP or they like the idea. What happens with business users is they say, if I could get that result in five seconds, I can do all kinds of different variations of those analyses. In fact we can make other business decisions than we were able to before, because sometimes, in classic systems you would probably shoot off a query and then it takes hours before you get a result back, or a query would time out because the system is not capable of running it, and then you don’t need the result any more or it’s out of date.

On the other hand, we see a concern of our customers not only on the business side, but on the IT side. You need to have the systems in the standard service management environment and integrate it. So in terms of things like scalability, high availability, back-up restore, set-ups of dual data centres, for example, all this needs to be maturely covered. We have good solutions there and good approaches, but due to the fact that SAP HANA is a very young product, concepts are still evolving.

ISAP: For customers who have adopted HANA, what is the best way to successfully yield that value quickly?

IH: From an infrastructure perspective, we have had tremendous success around the world with a powerful infrastructure solution for SAP HANA where we have specific components in the appliance. There is a specific fi le system in there which is coming out of the high performance computing area, called General Parallel File System (GPFS),

www.insidesap.com.au 41

SAP HANA TECHNOLOGY

and that is the ‘secret sauce’ for built-in high availability and scalability on a building block basis. That is a game-changer, especially if customers need highly available systems, if SAP HANA is used in a business critical system.

SD: The key for us is understanding that it’s not about just making things go faster. It’s about being really clear around why in a business value chain you might want to make something go faster, because you can push a decision closer to the customer, you can make a better commercial decision.

Once you’re clear about that, the technology can unlock that process.

ISAP: Are customers sceptical about the ‘HANA hype’, or are they becoming believers in the technology itself?

IH: Some of them are doubtful. But there are also customers who are clearly early adopters and are running after the next new technology wave. It can be a complete gamechanger for a company, and we have those use cases, where they either use SAP HANA as an accelerator to an existing Business Suite system or as the database under SAP Business Warehouse. It’s also dependent on what region you are in.

SD: I think it’s a concept that changes the sceptics to believers very quickly when they see something happen in real time. So it demonstrates well, and when you see it used in real business scenarios, you can take the logical leap and

say, ‘within my business, how could I use that to make my business run better?’.

IH: Crucial though is that customers want to see it with their own data. They don’t want to see a generic demonstration.

ISAP: Where do you see the future for HANA? SD: For the last 10 years we have been talking about this concept of a real-time enterprise, and this is another step in the journey, taking us closer to that. I just see that accelerating – we can make real decisions in business supported by factual data and ask questions of that data on an ongoing basis. That to me is incredibly powerful and exciting, because it’s where we really start to unlock some of this corporate knowledge that’s being captured in these systems, and use that in truly meaningful ways.

IH: I would expect the focus of SAP HANA to stay for quite a while on the analytical side. I have customers who are investing into SAP HANA not for reasons of speed, but for data consistency, because they have many systems which contain certain data, and that data is reflected in different formats in different systems. If they bring that into one system and have the analysis running from that one system, that is going to make a big difference for those businesses.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

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ERP RESEARCH

Next generation ERP Why do ERP systems have to cost so much money? Will ERP follow the traditional lifecycle for new technologies? A new research project by the CSC Leading Edge Forum (LEF) is asking just those questions, and here David Moschella and Warren Burns outline their research.

The market for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is one of the more unusual segments of today’s information technology business. The typical IT industry pattern is that as the market for a new technology expands, it tends to become standardised. Competition emerges, prices fall, and the product eventually becomes a commodity, a service, or even an open source option. We have seen this cycle with servers, operating systems, CRM and many other hardware and software marketplaces. Identifying and anticipating these lifecycle changes is a major area of LEF research.

The story with ERP thus far has been quite different.

Certainly, the market has grown impressively. Today, almost every large firm – especially in Europe and North America – is a major ERP customer, as the software (mostly from SAP or Oracle) is widely seen as an indispensable tool for controlling large global businesses. The market for ERP megaprojects (those over $200 million) continues to rise, and the demand for ERP expertise is as strong as ever.

But the rest of the cycle hasn’t really kicked in. Yes, there has been competition and supplier consolidation (a form of standardisation), but prices haven’t fallen, installations have not been commoditised, ERP as-a-Service offerings remain modest, and open source alternatives are used primarily in smaller businesses. The result is that large firms continue to spend a great deal of money establishing and maintaining their ERP environments. Few multi-billion-dollar IT marketplaces have been so stable for so long.

This situation raises two main questions: 1. Do ERP systems really have to cost so much money? Many executives inside and outside IT are still shocked at the high price tags, constant schedule overruns, and hard-to-calculate ROI. The issue is less about the value of ERP than whether there are less costly options.

2. Will the cycle of commoditisation kick in, and if so, how and when? Software-as-a-Service firms are clearly succeeding in moving into new markets faster than ERP vendors can evolve, but they are still mostly picking around the edges.

Because client interest in these questions is high, we have launched a new area of research headed by Warren Burns, who has joined us recently in Australia after many years as head of innovation at Unilever. Our initial thinking and overall research direction are described in more detail below.

Why is ERP different?

To understand why ERP has not yet followed the traditional industry pattern, we need to understand how it actually works

44 Inside SAP magazine

in large organisations today.

The core functions of an ERP system are relatively similar across the market – finance, HR, CRM, supply chain and so on – all with many parts. In each of these areas, vendor offerings come with a standard set of logic, which is customised to match the business process defined by the customer.

The customised logic, tables and data inputs/outputs interact via thousands (or even tens of thousands) of transaction codes that can be assigned variables to determine how the user can control them – for example, making them read-only. There is also the ability to add structural authorisations to make the codes behave differently depending on where the user sits in the business. Finally, the transaction codes are grouped into roles; these roles are then divvied up into parcels called composite roles that can be assigned to users. Composite roles can then be linked to a master role but also modified for individual users.

This is where we start to see why ERP projects are some of the most expensive IT projects in the world. The level of complexity involved in giving this amount of flexibility is massively time-consuming to set up and maintain. It is now common for large ERP projects to exceed US$100 million and take five years or more to complete. This is for a set of technology that often seems like a basic cost of doing business.

Specialised skills The complex nature of ERP also makes change extremely difficult. Individuals spend entire careers implementing ERP systems, but often only have deep expertise in a handful of modules, of which there are many dozens. Recruitment firms looking for ERP talent spout a raft of acronyms that make little sense to anyone outside the industry. To quote a recent advertisement on an Australian career website: “Looking for dynamic leader with FI/CO, BI, SD, XI and MDM experience to start immediately.”

The fact that it is unlikely that any single person would actually have the above combination of skills shows that even the ERP industry itself is struggling with its jargon. This complexity also explains why so much ERP work has migrated to consulting firms, who can leverage their expertise. Removing at least some of this complexity is an essential requirement for the standardisation/commoditisation cycle.

Possible evolutionary paths We should never forget that the reason ERP systems have become so ubiquitous is because they are necessary. No Fortune 500-sized business can operate the way it did in the pre-ERP

era: the labour cost of paper accounting and supply chain processes would eclipse today’s ERP budgets; the loss of speed would result in a lack of competitiveness; the loss of control would worry investors.

We do not challenge the necessity of ERP, but we do ask what is next? Are we headed David Moschella toward ERP-as-a-Service, a revolution in business process management software, a disruptive market entry from another industry, or mostly just the evolution of current ERP vendor offerings?

Our research will track these alternatives as they evolve, and each is briefly described below. One thing is sure: many firms would be very interested in a simpler, lower-cost alternative that sufficiently meets their back-office needs.

Disruptive scenarios The most obvious potential source of disruption is today’s Web 2.0 industry, and there are already a number of browser-based ERP-as-a-Service offerings, including those from Salesforce and Workday. Perhaps the most innovative comes from Openbravo, which has taken the additional step of making its software open source. All three of these firms have had success in small and medium enterprises but have yet to become significant ERP players in large organisations.

Future ERP disruption might also stem from the realisation that the cost of developing one’s own software has fallen so much that buying expensive vendor software and then doing extensive customisation doesn’t always make sense. Given the customisation that takes place during most ERP projects, it’s not completely far-fetched to suggest that some large ERP installations could be custom-built on a flexible, modern platform more cheaply and easily.

The first example we know of was the 2009 Japan Post project undertaken by Appirio. This large-scale consumerfacing project shares many characteristics of an ERP deployment but was custom-built on the Force.com platform.

It delivered considerable savings in an implementation time that would have been unthinkable prior to the availability of Platform-as-a-Service offerings.

The PaaS concept also mitigates many of the traditional risks of custom application development. The structure provided by the platform gives rigour to the development process by providing a secure and stable framework. The main benefit from this approach is the ability to develop truly custom processes that provide competitive advantage to the fullest extent possible. Examples are the Coca-Cola RED (Right Execution Daily) and LoS (Look of Success) processes.

Finally, the most disruptive (and thus far least developed) possibility is a shift in industry boundaries. Consider the mainstays of financial ERP, procure-to-pay (P2P) and orderto-cash (OTC). Both processes have characteristics similar to those that financial services firms have mastered for monetary transactions; so perhaps in addition to clearing payments, financial services firms might some day also clear invoices.

This isn’t such a stretch when you consider the value this

Warren Burns would add to the relationship between an enterprise and its financial partner. The idea of running cost and profit centres as bank accounts is an analogy that the consultants have long used to describe ERP financial processes to business stakeholders; this would just be the next step.

Evolutionary approaches Of course, the major ERP players aren’t standing still. In recent years, SAP and Oracle have made a series of acquisitions and product improvements to expand their presence beyond traditional ERP. Both firms now have broad offerings in areas such as business intelligence, visualisation, risk management, workflow management and big data.

Similarly, these firms are working to make their systems more real-time and user-friendly. We still interact with some ERP processes the way we used to interact with DOS and Unix. For example, if you want to maintain a currency transaction table in SAP you type OB08. Should a user really be expected to remember such things in order to make a process work? Future ERP systems will certainly be more visual and browser-based, with much better mobile and tablet support.

Another evolutionary approach is suggested by the work of Cordys, the latest venture of ERP pioneer and serial innovator Jan Baan. Here, the idea is to push the ERP system into the background and deploy a different platform that can call services from ERP when needed, and then blend those services with other internal and external systems before presenting them to the user.

Research directions Over the next few months, we will be investigating such issues as:  How current ERP offerings will evolve;  How businesses are measuring the value that ERP represents;  What innovative practices in ERP implementation and operation are emerging;  How the ERP landscape will look in 2017;  How ERP budgets will look in 2017;  How cloud computing will change the delivery of ERP;  What effect open source will have on ERP;  How the ERP user interfaces will change;  How mobile devices will affect the way we design ERP processes;  At what point ERP spending becomes poor value, and  What ERP is worth to a business.

Interested clients can email wburns@leadingedgeforum. com to participate in this research project.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

www.insidesap.com.au 45

CHANGE MANAGEMENT TRAINING

“If you think training is a waste of money, calculate the cost of not training.”

– Anonymous

It’s business as usual Training and change management for SAP is never ‘set and forget’ – it requires ongoing maintenance. Thanks to new approaches, though, it’s more cost-effective than ever, as Lynton Howes writes.

You’ve just started with a new employer and have had the safety induction, been introduced to the key people and have been shown your workstation. You’re excited, nervous and wondering what to expect next.

The company runs SAP, so applying your initiative, you search through the intranet for support content, but you are unable to find any online SAP training materials, guides or any useful information. You have been assigned a buddy, Joe, who gives you some old printed materials, which he advises are about 40 per cent out of date.

Your boss asks you to get going in SAP. As you have no access yet, Joe lends you his user ID… and he lets you

46 Inside SAP magazine

watch him, as part of the two-day handover. Joe’s very disenchanted with the company, seems to be disorganised and does not seem to follow the correct processes.

You’re very nervous to transact in the live system, as you know that you will be held responsible for any mistakes once Joe is gone. The only form of support is an online helpdesk service, but requests for help take days to be answered and only provide a transactional answer – without explaining the process.

After a week, your level of confidence hasn’t improved.

It seems like everyone you meet has their own system ‘workaround’. People openly grumble about SAP, and

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the quality of data is poor and getting worse by the day.

Excel is being used to produce management reports.

You are surprised that even the most basic tasks in SAP seem like an enormous challenge for people, and yet, you’ve seen the system work so well elsewhere. What makes the situation even more astonishing is that the implementation project concluded only a year ago, and was reported to have cost around $50 million. You wonder whether this company is really for you…

This all-too-familiar scenario arises easily, and it starts with the project handover. Training is the item most often identified as the single greatest determinant of success during post-implementation project reviews1, yet it’s still the item which is most likely to have funds de-allocated during an implementation. If training and change management is not done effectively for go-live, the project obviously suffers. However, it is the Business As Usual (BAU) training environment that is the key to realising the return on the investment over the long term.

Providing quality, ongoing training does not have to be expensive. By applying the latest learner-centric approaches, it costs less than ever before. The ubiquity of screens (PCs, laptops, tablets and phones) in today’s workplace means that users are more comfortable with training content and support materials being accessed online and printed only when required, or never. Content is thus more easily updated as the system is enhanced, compared to the ‘printed manual’ approach of 10 years ago.

The latest tools for recording eLearning simulations, such as SAP Workforce Performance Builder, are all about rapid development of content, requiring less expertise for developers, and also permit field-level, context-sensitive help and process guidance. This means that process and business rule help is pushed to the user directly when they are populating fields in SAP, without having to invoke help menus. The result is better training support for learners, integrated in the system, demonstrating the ‘why’ and the ‘how’. A linked learning management solution (LMS) or training portal (such as KnowHow) further enhances the overall learning experience, delivering relevant courses directly

to users, and participation and completion can be easily monitored. And by capitalising on the use of social media, wikis and forums, users can generate and update shared materials; such as a user forum where upcoming changes can be announced, or questions asked. This enables self-help and cultivates engagement, while ensuring that the management team has visibility of process adherence.

All this is cheaply available, now. And rather than incurring the overhead and inefficiency of permanent training staff, expert trainers can be called in for ondemand sessions only as required, for example, when there are multiple new starters or a process has changed.

This provides a training ecosystem which is targeted, easily accessible and up-to-date; as a result, users will use it and be effective in the system. Calls to the helpdesk go down, user productivity goes up, data quality is retained, and you have a platform for future enhancements. In short, the very benefits the project was intended to deliver in the first place.

Clearly, the maintenance of BAU training content and business processes is critical to achieving the return on your SAP project spend.

Attending to upkeep using the latest approaches will deliver years of productivity gains from your systems and people, at a fraction of the cost of inaction.

Lynton Howes is a director of Adapt2 Consulting (http://adapt2consulting.com.au). Together with his business partner, Marié Lambrechts, they have over 20 years of experience delivering successful change and training solutions for SAP clients across a diverse range of organisations and industries.

Reference 1. Mark J. Sweeney, Jr. Education Account Manager, SAP Global Accounts (quote used with permission)

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CAREERS ON THE MOVE

On the Move Here we bring you our regular round-up of who is going where in the industry. If you have changed jobs recently or hired some new staff, email us at editor@insidesap.com.au. By Eleanor Reader.

Darren Shearer, EPI-USE Australia After carving a successful career as a senior research consultant at SuccessFactors, Darren Shearer has made the move to EPI-USE as the head of workforce analytics and planning in APAC. Richard Potash, managing director of EPI-USE Australia, says Shearer’s previous experience makes him a valuable asset for the company.

“In today’s world, organisations are faced with ever-growing challenges in understanding their workforce and how to ensure that they have the right people in the right place at the right time,” he says.

“Drawing on Darren’s experience has EPI-USE in a unique position when working with our valued partners and clients.”

Shearer’s new role sees him working with EPI-USE partners, including SAP and SuccessFactors, to deliver workforce analytic insights and assist global organisations make workforce decisions with workforce planning.

“My expertise is driving customer success and adopting better processes and practices by taking a hands on approach in working closely with organisations,” Shearer says.

“In recognising that analytics and planning success needs both the data and the ability to tell the story behind the data, I truly believe EPI-USE are in a great place to serve the industry.”

Send your ‘On the Move’ news to editor@insidesap.com.au

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48 Inside SAP magazine

David Hillman and Mark Finlayson, Oxygen Business Solutions Now in his tenth year at Oxygen Business Solutions, David Hillman has been appointed the new role of general manager, program delivery.

Hillman joined Oxygen in 2003 as a project manager working with large manufacturing customers and has just progressed from the position of Australian national lead for program management.

Oxygen chief executive, Stuart Dickinson, says Hillman has continuously demonstrated his ability to manage and deliver large and complex programs of work for Oxygen and has built up trusted advisor relationships with key Oxygen clients.

“He has done this while continuing to build and develop the Oxygen IP associated with bidding and winning complex solution-based opportunities. I look forward to him continuing to make a positive contribution as we grow and transform our business,” Dickinson says.

Mark Finlayson is another Oxygen veteran who has taken up the position of general manager, consulting, Australia.

After joining in 2004, his latest role with the company was as Oxygen’s national platform and technologies practice leader.

Finlayson, who has previously held senior positions at a number of blue chip consulting firms, was praised

by Dickinson for the “significant level of leadership experience and business knowledge” he would be bringing to the position.

“Mark is a very experienced technology executive.

He has been a senior member of the Australian consulting leadership team and has been integral to building Oxygen into the successful organisation it is today,” Dickinson says.

Shane Morgan, Acuity Search Shane Morgan has brought his recruitment expertise to Australian shores, joining Acuity Search as a recruitment partner for Asia Pacific.

With over 12 years of SAP recruitment experience in areas such as contract, permanent and retained search strategies, Morgan’s achievements are impressive.

Beginning his career being trained by Europe’s largest IT recruitment conglomerate, SThree Group, he attained particular expertise in building large SAP teams for consulting and end-user clients.

Since then, he has worked on some of the most prestigious SAP projects across markets in Europe, Middle East, North America and the Asia Pacific and recruited across a large variety of industries, including utilities, defence, FMCG, banking, leasing pharmaceuticals and telecommunications.

Sam Vargas, director of SAP resources at Acuity Search, has praised Morgan for his “fresh approach” to the SAP market.

“Shane is a highly experienced SAP recruitment partner who brings a depth of experience that is unmatched across the region. The instant impact and successes he has already achieved under the Acuity Search banner are testament to his growing footprint in the SAP recruitment domain,” he says.

Carolina Postadas, Everjoy Consulting With a wealth of experience across numerous industries and SAP solutions, Carolina Postadas has joined the team at Everjoy Consulting as a senior consultant in the SAP recruitment team.

Carolina has previously worked at Luxottica, Woolworths, Komatsu and Forward Media in senior SAP technical and functional roles.

“The appointment of Carolina to our established SAP recruitment team is a tremendous opportunity to strengthen our ability to provide our customers with dedicated partnerships and innovative recruitment solutions,” says Adrian Everett, director at Everjoy Consulting.

“Carolina has over 13 years of SAP experience in Basis, Security, Portals, SCM, CRM, BI and more. With the addition of Carolina to the team, Everjoy Consulting has the most experienced SAP team in the ANZ recruitment marketplace.”

On her appointment, Posadas says, “Everjoy Consulting is a truly consultative recruitment consultancy which allows me to utilise my

Greg Harbor, SAP Asia Pacific Japan Greg Harbor has been given the task of strengthening SAP Asia Pacific Japan’s (APJ) cloud presence even more in his new role as regional vice president, cloud sales and go-to-market.

Harbor is now responsible for the go-to-market and sales delivery of the SAP cloud solutions portfolio covering all customer and financial line of business solutions, excluding human capital management solutions.

“Playing a leadership role in cloud across the Asia Pacific and Japan region is an outstanding opportunity. Having spent close to a billion dollars on acquisitions of leading cloud companies like SuccessFactors and Ariba to complement our existing cloud services, SAP is extremely well positioned to drive success,” says Harbor.

“Cloud solutions are a vital ingredient to our customer success and our own growth aspirations, and APJ is a significant part of this growth expectation.”

SAP’s latest cloud strategy focuses on cloud solutions for four lines of business to manage people, money, customers and suppliers.

Harbor’s role sees him held accountable for the development of the regional growth strategy, ensuring the expansion of the SAP cloud business in India, South East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, North Asia, Japan and China.

His previous role was as vice president of ondemand solutions for SAP Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) and was a member of the SAP ANZ senior leadership team.

Inside SAP online For all the latest news in SAP, check out www.insidesap.com.au

extensive hands-on SAP experience to ensure the highest quality of candidates to our clients, having truly understood the project and business requirements surrounding SAP solutions.”

www.insidesap.com.au 49

CAREERS ON THE MOVE

John Chen, Sybase After 15 years as the president and CEO of software vendor Sybase, John Chen made the decision to leave the organisation just two years after its integration into SAP. Chen, 57, says that while it was time for him to “relinquish the ownership of the franchise”, he knew he would be leaving what he built in good hands.

“The integration of Sybase into SAP is complete and the business is in great shape,” says Chen.

“Combining the organisations made sense and I am pleased with the direction of the mobile and database business of Sybase within SAP. The Sybase assets are contributing significantly to SAP’s success and benefitting from technology such as SAP HANA as well as the global reach of the company.”

SAP co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe say they respect Chen’s decision and thanked him for his extraordinary leadership over the past few years.

“The acquisition and integration of Sybase is a best practice for driving growth and innovation. Together with John, we have expanded the Sybase business significantly since the acquisition. Today we are the market leader in mobility and the fastest growing database company in the industry,” they say.

Send your ‘On the Move’ news to editor@insidesap.com.au

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50 Inside SAP magazine

Dr Alexander Zeier, Accenture Dr Alexander Zeier brings over 20 years experience in SAP technologies and solutions to Accenture as the managing director of in-memory solutions.

Dr Zeier is a well-known fixture in the SAP community, responsible for SAP’s first large in-memory application and as a contributing developer of SAP HANA. He holds 10 patents related to inmemory technology and applications for enterprise systems, and is co-author with Hasso Plattner of the recently published book, In-Memory Data Management – Technology and Applications.

“Alexander brings an incredible and unrivalled depth of expertise in the areas of analytics and in-memory technology,” says Christophe Mouille, global managing director of SAP business for Accenture.

“Alexander possesses a truly unique understanding of the business value that can be unlocked through the power of inmemory computing. Our clients will benefit from his extensive experience in researching and developing in-memory technology that turns massive amounts of customer data into actionable insights.”

This expertise will be put to good use as Dr Zeier works with Accenture clients to develop in-memory solutions and provide sales support to global industry teams, while serving as director of programs for the SAP HANA platform within the Accenture Innovation Center for SAP solutions.

Dr Zeier says he is excited to join a team that has been committed to developing solutions based on in-memory technology.

“Companies are relying on transactional and analytical data more than ever. The capabilities enabled by in-memory computing combined with Accenture’s vast industry knowledge will result in better, faster insights and new innovative business processes for our clients,” says Zeier.

Since March 2012, Dr Zeier has been a Visiting Professor in Residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), lecturing and conducting research around innovative enterprise applications and business process optimisations that leverage in-memory technology or SAP HANA. He was also deputy chair, Enterprise Platform and Integration Concepts, at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany, focusing on real-time, in-memory enterprise systems and RFID technology.

COMMUNITY

Racing to raise money for Redkite In only its second year, the SAP Ecosystem Foundation’s Regatta for Redkite managed to nearly double the funds raised from last year’s effort to just over $60,000. Held on 2 November, the day was a huge success, filled with sun, sailing and a healthy dose of competition – all for a good cause.

The premier event of the SAP ecosystem calendar brought together a host of companies for a yacht race that started at Middle Harbour Yacht Club, headed down Sydney Harbour and around Fort Denison. All money raised went to Redkite (www.redkite.com.au), SAP Ecosystem Foundation’s (SAP EF) charity of choice, which provides financial assistance, emotional support and education assistance to children, young people and their families experiencing cancer. Stream, an Oxygen company, provided support as the major sponsor for the event, which will see 24 children and their families supported by Redkite through their cancer journey for up to a year.

Adrian Everett, chair, SAP EF, says there is no better way to entertain customers, partners or employees than a day’s sailing on the harbour in the name of a good cause.

“The SAP Regatta for Redkite is a unique and highly enjoyable way to raise funds for Redkite and is an opportunity for the SAP ecosystem to give back to those in need,” he said.

With 17 yachts competing and some strong breezes, it was a hotly contested race this year. Taking out the honours as winner of the 2012 Regatta was Oxygen Business Solutions, narrowly beating Open Text and March Networks, who finished within seconds of each other. The fastest boat of the day was the America’s Cup Spirit, entered by Everjoy Consulting, which made it around the course in just one hour 28 minutes 46s. A highlight of the day was spotting the Australian Navy’s HMAS

Parramatta on its way back to Sydney Harbour. SAP Solutions had an encounter that was probably too close for comfort with the ship as it cut off their boat, Felix, resulting in them taking last place. Overall there was only 19 minutes between first and last place.

What began as a sunny, beautiful day turned a little chilly as everyone converged once again on the sand at MHYC for the post-Regatta function to enjoy food, drinks and to participate in the charity auction and raffle, which helped reach the impressive fundraising total.

Everett encourages everyone to get involved in next year’s event and to visit Redkite’s website to learn the extent to which the charity changes lives across Australia with no government financial assistance.

“Ultimately this is why Redkite is such a great charity to support. The team at Redkite provides vital support to the families of children undergoing treatment for cancer. It is not until you have experienced this that you can truly appreciate the value of Redkite,” he says.

“It was amazing to hear the positive feedback on the day from all entrants, ensuring that for year three of the event we can reach a target of $100,000 for Redkite.”

The next event is scheduled for Friday 1 November 2013, and interested organisations should contact Adrian Everett at adrian.everett@everjoy.com.au.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

www.insidesap.com.au 51

COMMUNITY

52 Inside SAP magazine

EVENTS

What’s On Each edition of Inside SAP includes a diary of upcoming events for the SAP community around Australia and internationally. To have your event listed, email editor@insidesap.com.au.

SAUG Canberra Forum 2013 13 March 2013 Canberra Park Hyatt, Yarralumla More than 150 public sector professionals come together for this one day annual event to discuss challenges unique in their SAP landscape. Attendees will include representatives from Australian federal, state and local government agencies. Whether you are an SAP program director, a business process manager or a solution architect, this event will hold information that is valuable to your role. w: www.saug.com.au/events/event/ canberra2013 Mastering SAP HR & Payroll 19-21 March 2013 Crown Promenade, Melbourne Learn how to use SAP HR and Payroll functionality in new and different ways to get business results in this uniquely curated three-day program. This program gives you answers to current challenges and will help you fi nd the inspiration to embrace future opportunities by way of 30 presentations and sessions in six tracks over three days. w: www.masteringsap.com/hrau

customer-driven education and best practices to visionary technology and business strategies, the conferences offer a unique platform for attendees to see their business from all angles providing invaluable knowledge sharing and networking opportunities for SAP customers, partners, business team members, and industry experts.

25-27 March 2013 Crown Promenade, Melbourne This is a training, education and networking conference for IT professionals who implement, develop, optimise and upgrade SAP systems. A vibrant community where people learn from international experts and from each other about the latest SAP innovations and to build practical skills on a wide range of SAP solutions in hands-on workshops, case study lectures and demonstrations.

SAP TechEd Las Vegas 2013 SAUG 41st Plenary

October 2013

7 May 2013

Las Vegas The SAP TechEd conference empowers and connects you and your team with the essential training and community support needed to gain instant value from your IT investment in SAP. Develop practical skills through hands-on workshops and demoenhanced lectures focused on the SAP NetWeaver technology platform and SAP BusinessObjects solutions. w: www.sapteched.com

Hilton Hotel, Brisbane Each year, the SAUG Plenary in Brisbane covers pertinent local topics including innovative customer experiences and the latest SAP updates. Hear about new concepts and exchange ideas with 200+ delegates representing more than 90 Queensland companies. As users of SAP technology, the daily challenges you face are an opportunity to learn and grow. This event is a great way to discuss how you face up to them. w: www.saug.com.au/events/event/ brisbane-plenary Mastering SAP Financials Melbourne If you want to discover new and different ways to use SAP for fi nancial reporting, planning, compliance and governance to get business results then this is the event for you. Return to the offi ce with new knowledge, enhanced skills and a renewed sense of confi dence in your abilities and your organisation’s technology direction. You’ll hear essential tips and techniques from leading experts, designed to help sharpen your skills and accelerate your career growth.

w: www.masteringsap.com/techau

w: www.masteringsap.com/ fi nancialsau

Sapphire Now + ASUG Annual

Mastering Analytics with SAP and SAP

Conference

BusinessObjects BI

14-16 May 2013

August 2013

Orange County Convention Center,

Melbourne This program has been specially designed to enable organisational performance and decision making. Where business and IT people from organisations using SAP and SAP BusinessObjects BI for Business Intelligence come together in

Orlando, Florida SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference bring together unparalleled insights and opportunities from the world’s premier business technology conferences in one place. From

w: www.masteringsap.com/ analyticsau

w: www.sapandasug.com

May 2013 Mastering SAP Technologies

the same place for three days. Someone in this community has the answer to your most pressing business or technical challenge. Includes presentations and sessions from international and local companies, roundtable discussions and special sessions.

Mastering Supply Chain Management with SAP September 2013 Melbourne Specially designed to enable supply chain excellence, this event is where organisations using SAP for Supply Chain Management come together in the same place at the same time for three days. Using a uniquely crafted research methodology and expertly guided by a Conference Advisory Team, the agenda has been developed to provide you answers to current challenges and the inspiration to embrace future opportunities through presentations and sessions in six tracks over three days. w: www.masteringsap.com/scmau Mastering SAP Plant Maintenance November 2013 Gold Coast A vibrant and thriving community where maintenance, reliability and IT people have important conversations, form lasting relationships and pinpoint new and different ways to use SAP EAM/PM tools to get business results. w: www.masteringsap.com/pmau

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PARTNER DIRECTORY

Acuity Search Acuity Search is one of Australia’s leading SAP specialist recruitment firms. All of the consultants at Acuity Search have over 10 years of exclusive SAP domain recruitment experience and have a real passion for their work, this depth of experience is something that is unique in the Australian market. We have huge networks of pre-qualified SAP consultants across the Australian region and throughout the globe.

BPSE Consulting BPSE Consulting consists of a team of people who are all passionate about improving our customers' experiences with their SAP ® solutions. We provide SAP solution design and implementation services and have developed intelligent solutions to address key issues all customers are facing with their SAP solutions.

Ciber Ciber is a global information technology company with nearly 40 years of proven IT experience, worldclass credentials and a wide range of technology expertise. Nearly 97 per cent of our clients say they’d recommend Ciber to colleagues and use us again on future IT initiatives.

EPI-USE The EPI-USE ® Group provides software solutions and related services. These, primarily, take the form of SAP add-ons and include the implementation of SAP ® Human Capital management (HCM), SAP NetWeaver ®, Business Intelligence solutions based on SAP Business Objects™ and off-theshelf software products that add capability to SAP ERP, HCM, SRM and CRM systems.

Esker Australia Esker is a recognised leader in document process automation solutions for SAP. On premise software solutions and SaaS solutions include: sales orders processing; accounts payable; e-Invoicing; e-Procurement; and enterprise faxing and mail services. Customers achieve significant operational efficiencies, cost savings and measurable ROI in less than three months. Since 1997, over 1,700 companies in ANZ have trusted solutions from Esker Australia.

Everjoy Consulting The leading SAP recruitment specialist in the ANZ recruitment marketplace. As an SAP specialist consultancy, you can be sure that your recruitment consultant at Everjoy has a deep understanding of the roles that you require and can work with you to meet your organisational goals and targets with effective people solutions. For the best people or the best opportunities in SAP, contact Everjoy Consulting today.

IQX IQX provides SAP customers with packaged and bespoke business solutions delivering enhanced business insight, collaboration and productivity benefi ts by leveraging Microsoft Technologies. We improve the user experience across all core functional areas of SAP for all user types. IQX solutions include Excel add-ins, SharePoint Web Parts, SharePoint Forms, K2 & Nintex solutions and native mobile apps for SAP. See, Share and Do more in SAP via IQX.

Kuiper Publishing Kuiper Publishing is a technical publisher, creating both books and online journals for IT professionals, software developers and business users. Our philosophy about books is very simple. We find passionate subject-matter experts who are willing to share their expertise and experience, and work with them to create unique titles that deliver books that bring their real-world experience to bear.

54 Inside SAP magazine

PARTNER DIRECTORY

Lodestone Management Consultants Lodestone is a global management consultancy, committed to designing and delivering solutions that enable international companies to thrive in today’s complex business environment. We help our clients to define the measurable business benefi ts that we will achieve together, using our teams of client-focused consultants, who combine a passion for excellence with strong process and SAP skills and deep experience of transformational change in their industry.

Prometheus Group Prometheus Group is an enterprise application software company specialising in improving the usability and user adoption of SAP plant maintenance. Developed jointly with end users, our software enhances the customer experience with intuitive functionality, graphical visualization, and simple processes. Our certified solutions 'live' inside of SAP and enable companies to increase productivity, reduce costs and improve reporting.

Prometheus Group S A P® S O F T W A R E S I M P L I F I E D

Prometheus Group

ReadSoft ReadSoft is a world leading supplier of Document Process Automation solutions, specialising in Accounts Payable Automation for SAP. Their AP automation solution seamlessly integrates with SAP and has been selected by an impressive range of multinationals seeking to improve control, efficiency and overall performance, along with an attractive ROI. We invite you to contact us for a free consultative workshop and to “squeeze more from SAP”.

Prometheus Group

Redback Consulting Redback Consulting is an IT Consulting organisation whose primary focus is the provision of implementation, support and value added services for Enterprise Resource Planning solutions for the public and private sectors, focusing on SAP and SAP-related solutions. Our service offering includes Human Resources (SAP HCM and SuccessFactors), Financials, Procurement (SAP SRM and Ariba), CRM/Grants and associated enabling technologies. We have a strong solution design capability with a dedicated solution lab and team dedicated to the provision of bespoke design services for ERP.

Systems and People Systems and People specialises in providing SAP resourcing solutions for SAP-run organisations across Australia. We offer a complete SAP resourcing service encompassing SAP Recruitment, SAP Consulting and Contractor Management. Systems and People can help you to unlock the true value of your SAP investment with the right SAP people, build your internal SAP expertise with experienced contract and permanent SAP resources and reduce overhead with a contractor management solution for your contingent workforce.

To get the best in the business working for you – call Systems and People.

Windsor Business Solutions Windsor Business Solutions (WBS) is an asset management company with deep SAP capability. We understand the business of maintenance and asset management and we understand SAP. Leveraging from our experience in R/3, Enterprise and ECC6, you can optimise the usage of your SAP system utilising SAP Best Practices or targeted solutions, specific to your business strategy. Whether it is mobile solutions, a need to ‘publish’ completed master data or manning the support desk, WBS are here to help, professionally and capably.

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Passion for Excellence.

Commitment to Delivery.

Lodestone specialises in: Strategy and Business Process helping clients create customer value, improve operational excellence and manage risk.

Solution Definition turning established business strategies and objectives into pragmatic solutions which can easily be implemented. Including the Implementation of our newly SAP Certified Expense Management Solution.

Lodestone is a global management consultancy, committed to designing and delivering solutions that enable international, national and local companies to thrive in today’s complex business environment. We help our clients define measurable business benefits that we will achieve together, using our teams of client-focused consultants, who combine a passion for excellence with strong process and SAP skills and deep experience of transformational change in their industry.

Solution Implementation designing and delivering solutions by leveraging our extensive knowledge and expertise in the delivery of complex programs.

IT Transformation shaping IT to optimise the ability to deliver measurable value to the business during and after Business Transformation.

To find out more about Lodestone call 02 8571 8300, email info@lodestonemc.com or visit us at www.lodestonemc.com