Inside SAP issue 25: Autumn 2014

Issue 25 | Autumn 2014

www.insidesap.com.au

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

SAP maintenance TAKING A NEW DIRECTION WITH RIMINI STREET

CAREERS SPECIAL > OUR ANNUAL SAP SALARY SURVEY > ROADMAP TO THE C-SUITE

ENTERPRISE TECH TRENDS: What to watch in 2014 CASE STUDIES AFFINITY, REDFLEX NZ DOC

PARTNERSHIP WHAT IT MEANS FOR HCL AND CSC

TRAINING LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT www.insidesap.com.au 1

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CONTENTS

5

8

15

27

37

45

4

Editor’s note

5 CSC and HCL strike strategic partnership

Hot Topics 8

Nine trends to watch in 2014

SAP Leaders 12

Getting off the support treadmill

15

ocial collaboration next frontier S for automation

17

On the Move

Careers 21 2014 SAP Salary Survey 25 Need a date?

27 Roadmap to the C-suite 30 Sponsor profile

Technology 40

Planning for a successful financial year-end

42

Training: the silver bullet for benefit realisation

44 Getting social with Sitrion

Case Studies 32 Green lights all the way: Redflex Traffic Systems

35 Hitting the ground running: Affinity Education Group

Events 45 Behind the pit wall 46 Events calendar 47

Vendor spotlight

37 Going mobile in Middle Earth: NZ Department of Conservation

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EDITOR

From the Editor 2014 has thankfully seen the pick-up in the IT market which followed last year’s Federal election continue, though with the return of market confidence has come a shift in the demand for SAP professionals. Large-scale upgrades and implementations have become thinner on the ground, but demand in functional areas remains strong, with a number of new skill areas also popping up on recruiters’ radars.

This edition includes our annual salary survey, expert advice on how you can stand out from the pack, and some new insights into what it takes to pave a path to the C-suite.

Our cover star for this edition is Andrew Powell, who is managing director, Asia Pacific and Middle East, for third party maintenance provider Rimini Street. He and David Rowe, CMO and SVP of Rimini Street, discuss how more organisations are making the case to move to third party support, in many cases to free up funds for further investment in SAP. We also look at the essential enterprise technology trends to watch in 2014, and feature case studies of the Business ByDesign implementation at Redflex Traffic Systems, New Zealand’s very first implementation of SAP Work Manager at the Department of Conservation, and how Affinity Education Group got up, running and ready to pay its 1500 staff in just nine weeks.

All good things come to an end As we flagged in our last edition, we are making some changes to our subscription model.

Since the magazine kicked off in 2008, providing the Australian and New Zealand SAP community with a unique, local publication, we have produced 25 editions and published thousands of articles in the magazine and on www.insidesap.com.au.

We have loved every minute, and are proud to see Inside SAP established as the go-to SAP resource in the Asia-Pacific region. If you have been receiving Inside SAP for free over the past few years, we hope the magazine has kept you up to date with valuable, independent information on what’s happening in the ecosystem. But all good things must come to an end, and we are moving to a paid subscription model from June this year. That means this is the last edition you will receive for free.

So we can continue Inside SAP through another 25 editions, we are now asking you to support the publication by taking up one of our annual subscription options.

You can continue to receive the magazine in print for a whole year for just $24.99.

To subscribe, simply visit www.insidesap.com.au and click ‘Get Inside SAP’ or call us on 02 9929 5465.

All of us here at Inside SAP would like to thank you for being a part of our evergrowing community. With your help, we look forward to many more years of telling your stories, sharing your successes, and answering your burning questions, as the trusted and independent ANZ SAP industry magazine.

Freya Purnell Managing Editor, Inside SAP

4 Inside SAP magazine

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

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

Contributors Adrian Everett, Sue Foster, Anne Furlong This edition of Inside SAP is sponsored

by Rimini Street.

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CSC & HCL NEWS IN FOCUS

CSC and HCL strike strategic partnership The two IT giants have partnered up on application modernisation and transition to the cloud. Is it just a marriage of convenience, or a sign of a longer-term relationship?

In January, HCL Technologies and CSC announced a strategic partnership aimed at addressing the market opportunity created by the need for enterprise clients to modernise their applications and transition to the cloud.

According to Gartner’s 2014 Market Forecast for IT Services, the addressable market for applications services is $210 billion.

Under the auspices of the partnership, the two IT giants will create a world-class application modernisation delivery network to enable enterprises to shift from legacy technologies to cloud-enabled platforms such as CSC’s ServiceMesh.

Leveraging the companies’ existing facilities, the first delivery centres will be launched in Bangalore and Chennai. Both partners will share dedicated employees and technologies, as well as production and development work, and a new governance board will provide oversight of the relationship. They also intend to share equally all cloud application modernisation revenue and direct costs.

The offering will also be enhanced with vertical-specific initiatives starting with banking and financial services through the creation of a banking center of excellence.

Mike Lawrie, president and chief executive officer, CSC, told a press conference in New Delihi that the competency centre would help banks and financial institutions modernise their applications and make them much more visible in the cloud environment.

HCL will also white label CSC’s BizCloud private cloud offering for the enterprise. HCL and CSC will benefit from the increased scale of this offering, expanded coverage in new markets and incremental revenue opportunities.

On the alliance, Lawrie said, “Our strategic partnership with HCL is a new and innovative approach to delivering next-generation IT services which enable enterprises

to achieve greater operational agility and significant reductions to operating costs. It is a recognition that IT service providers and delivery models must evolve from traditional tools and processes to more rapid application innovation, enabling businesses to compete in an everchanging world.”

Anant Gupta, president and chief executive officer of HCL Technologies, said the company was pleased to be “joining hands” with CSC on three core pillars of application modernisation, enablement of cloud technologies and other technologies.

“The company’s strong technology portfolio and client base coupled with HCL’s robust system integration capabilities will be a formidable combination in the application modernisation market,” said Gupta.

“Application modernisation forms the first phase of HCL’s Digital System Integration strategy. Enterprises today view digitalisation as a route to business model transformation. Organisations have not been able to accrue the potential benefits from digitalisation, as they are shackled by legacy technologies,” Gupta said.

The alliance has reportedly already snagged AT&T as its first client.

Implications for enterprise buyers While some analysts were surprised by the move, as the companies have often gone head to head over major contracts, others felt the alliance makes more sense from HCL’s perspective than for CSC. HCL stands to form relationships with larger client accounts, whereas CSC will gain access to offshore delivery capabilities and gain an additional channel for its BizCloud offering.

Ovum analysts saw the announcement of the

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NEWS IN FOCUS

CSC & HCL

partnership as an unexpected yet strategically smart move for both companies, as it brings together complementary skills and resources in application modernisation and cloud – areas where continued growth and opportunity is expected. This will help them serve customers throughout various vertical industries.

“Through acquisitions and partnerships, including this unique alliance with HCL, CSC is demonstrating a serious commitment to its primary strategy – namely, to put enterprise-class cloud services and offerings such as its BizCloud at the centre of its portfolio,” said Ovum IT Services practice leader, John Madden.

Margaret Goldberg, associate analyst, Ovum IT Services, believes that the offering has strong potential, particularly in a market where the majority of vendors have only gained moderate traction.

“Now, beyond the obvious benefit of a broader network of delivery centres and resources, we believe that HCL’s rationalisation and business logic-led approach combined with CSC’s cloud capabilities (boosted by the acquisition of ServiceMesh) places their combined service offering

6 Inside SAP magazine

among the most competitive and comprehensive in the market,” says Goldberg.

“That said, it will be crucial for the vendors to ensure they are coordinating on several levels, particularly skillsets aligned to verticals as application modernisation is just as much about business needs as it is about cost and IT. The newly created ‘banking center of excellence’ is a logical move in that respect, as we see BFSI as a key growth market for this service.”

According to Everest Group senior analysts Kiranjeet Kaur and Pallavi Saxena, some of the key questions that now present themselves around the alliance are whether HCL will be demanding a premium price from its buyers now that it has access to CSC’s strong competencies, if it will establish HCL as a formidable competitior to TCS and Cognisant in application-related services, and if HCL and CSC will be successful in scaling the alliance.

The move has also encouraged speculation that it could be the first step towards a merger between the two companies.

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RIMINI STREET SAP LEADERS

Getting off the support treadmill For many years, the large ERP vendors have enjoyed the benefits of a virtual monopoly when it comes to maintenance and support. But with independent maintenance providers such as Rimini Street gathering steam, enterprises in growing numbers are moving to save precious budget dollars on support, to redirect to other areas of investment and innovation. Freya Purnell reports. www.insidesap.com.au 7

SAP LEADERS

RIMINI STREET

Launched in 2005, Rimini Street faced an uphill battle – trying to convince Oracle and SAP customers to break with the status quo and take their maintenance contracts away from the vendor. Fast forward seven years, and it has built its customer base to more than 500, including 49of the companies on the Fortune 500 list.

One of the factors driving the company’s 40 per centplus year on year growth for fiscal 2013 has been an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with increasing support costs and service levels that fail to delight.

In February 2013, when SAP announced it would be increasing its standard support rates on new contracts from 18 per cent to 19 per cent, Forrester analyst Duncan Jones disputed SAP’s claims in a blog post that the increase was necessary to continue high-quality support, and that it would fund increased value through Enhancement Packs (see http://blogs.forrester.com/ duncan_jones/13-02-14-saps_maintenance_price_hike_ should_concern_sourcing_professionals_and_their_cios).

Instead, Jones posited that much of the maintenance revenue would instead be directed towards other key innovations in its portfolio – such as HANA – which are only accessible by customers for further licence fees. He warned CIOs to examine carefully what they were getting for these increased costs, and consider looking further afield.

Likewise, in a report released in 2013, Constellation Research’s principal analyst and CEO Ray Wang urged CFOs and CIOs to, at the very least, consider bringing an independent maintenance provider to the table when undertaking contract negotiations or planning their applications strategy.

“Failure to explore this strategic option may result in higher costs for less value with existing vendors,” said Wang.

The critical challenge for CIOs is that while these support costs expand, budgets may not, and an increasing proportion could end up going towards simply ‘keeping the lights on’, rather than being invested to provide true business value.

David Rowe, SVP and CMO, Rimini Street, says while many CIOs have traditionally renewed vendor-provided support without exploring alternatives, CIOs now have new approaches to managing support costs while still delivering results to ever-more demanding businesses.

“There is some perceived risk, but these are issues that CIOs have to address. You can’t just keep paying the vendor increasing fees and all the overhead that goes with it, because you are not going to move the business forward, and you are going to lose your competitive advantage,” Rowe says.

Far from deserting SAP though, for many customers, freeing up additional budget by cutting their support costs in half, typically, means they can then reinvest with SAP in other areas.

8 Inside SAP magazine

You can’t just keep paying the vendor increasing fees and all the overhead that goes with it, because you are not going to move the business forward, and you are going to lose your competitive advantage.

David Rowe, Rimini Street

“Our customers love their software. They just want to run it longer, and they want to run the release they have more efficiently,” Rowe says.

He points to the experience of Alexandre Baulé, CIO of Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer, recently named IT Executive of the Year by InformationWeek. He had championed a switch to Rimini Street for support, cutting his SAP costs by millions of dollars a year, avoiding an upgrade and finding other efficiencies.

“He used that money to fund expansion of SAP within Embraer on a global basis, and then also for licensing other products, using the savings to fund innovation,” Rowe says.

Even for customers who don’t end up using an independent support provider, Constellation Research analysis showed that companies that used the option as leverage in their negotiations with Oracle and SAP, received a discount of 13.7 per cent on average.

“It doesn’t sound like a lot, but this would have been impossible a few years ago. So the fact that we are here is impacting positively even for customers that don’t use us,” Rowe says. “We have already seen this happen in Australia.”

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SAP LEADERS

RIMINI STREET

Some [customers] are happy with the version of SAP they are running, paying millions of dollars in maintenance, and not logging virtually any issues with SAP either.

Andrew Powell, Rimini Street

Avoiding the pain of an upgrade Rimini Street can make a fairly compelling case purely on the basis of cost for customers running newer and older releases, but many enterprises are attracted by the ability to support older versions of SAP, thereby avoiding upgrades.

“A number of our customers are running versions not currently supported by the standard support programs or even extended support, so you are into the customerspecific maintenance which can be custom and expensive,” Rowe says. “It’s a fair amount of uncertainty for customers and you are at the whim of SAP in terms of how that’s going to work.”

Andrew Powell, who joined Rimini Street as managing director, Asia Pacific and Middle East earlier this year, says the upgrade issue is particularly relevant in the ANZ market. Many organisations haven’t been able to justify the cost of an upgrade, because of the limited business value it would bring.

“For smaller SAP sites, upgrades could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but for organisations on the larger side, it’s all in the millions. And they are paying millions of dollars in maintenance per year as well. So some of them are happy with the version of SAP they are running, paying millions of dollars in maintenance, and not logging virtually any issues with SAP either,” Powell says. “The only way they have been able to justify [the upgrade] is on the basis of staying under support, and now they don’t need to do that any more.”

Expanding into APAC Powell joined Rimini Street to help build the company’s presence in the region. While it already had 11 customers in Australia, these were primarily subsidiaries of customers based in the US and elsewhere, such as Jones Lang La Salle

10 Inside SAP magazine

and Toys R Us, with around 40 similar contracts in place with customers throughout Asia.

Up until now, Rimini Street has been able to achieve its impressive growth purely focusing on the SAP and Oracle customer base in US and Europe. And while that well is far from running dry, the move into APJ is a strategic one.

“Obviously over time, there are going to be more players that will enter the market, and so it’s important to establish that beachhead and be the number one player in Asia Pac,” Powell says. “There’s some very big maintenance markets here. There are hundreds of millions of dollars being paid in both Australia and Japan to SAP and Oracle, so it’s a big part of the global market.”

Because the company was already providing local support, Rowe says it made sense to get a formal foothold in the market.

“We already had developers here providing service on a global basis, so it was straightforward to add Andrew and build the rest of the business,” he says.

Though Rimini Street still only has a tiny proportion of the overall support market, the company is also working hard to build this by providing better value to customers, through the quality of its service offering.

“When you have a captured market, companies try to minimise the money they put into support. The people on the support desk are sometimes compensated based on how few calls make it through to an actual engineer,” Rowe says.“Really you end up supporting yourself in a lot of respects, because they push you through their internet portal. Oftentimes you have got to prove that it is SAP’s issue or Oracle’s issue, not due to customisations that you may have implemented.”

Rimini Street promises far more responsive service, citing an average callback time once an issue is logged of under five minutes, with support staff having an average of 10 years’ experience. The company also provides support not just for vanilla SAP code, but also for customisations.

“Many Australian organisations have done a lot of customisation over the years, and that’s actually where most of the issues arise now,” Powell says.

With aggressive expansion plans for 2014, Powell says the company has recently signed several new contracts in Australia and Japan.

“One of these new customers is an ASX Top 10 and two are ASX Top 50. Some are attracted to the 50 per cent cut in annual maintenance, some want to avoid upgrades, and others are looking for better service.”

And with every new customer, the independent support story becomes easier to sell.

“Rimini Street is now a proven solution with a nineyear track record and over 500 active clients,” Rowe says.

“Today, it’s a lot easier for CIOs to choose independent support because there is a reference in your industry, with your product line and the version of the product you run.”

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

LEADERSHIP CAREERS

Roadmap to the C-suite A new report by professional services firm Deloitte asked leading CIO and IT leaders about the personal and external factors that contributed to their career success. And while all the leaders interviewed were women, their advice should resonate with anyone with ambitions for the CIO chair. Freya Purnell reports.

Think you need to be a technical whiz to be CIO? Think again.

According to those in the hot seat, an ability to understand the whole business and the issues it is facing is more valuable than just technology expertise for those seeking to become a successful CIO. In 2013, Deloitte undertook in-depth interviews with leading female CIOs and IT leaders, and their insights were compiled in the Women in ICT – Perspectives and perceptions from some of Australia’s most successful female technology leaders report.

Kaylene O’Brien, senior technology partner, Deloitte, says employers thinking about the need to build a diverse workforce should heed the issues raised by these successful women.

“Quite often the same issues and obstacles that women face, why women are attracted to IT, and how they progress their careers, also apply in a similar way to men. In the 21st century, men are also looking for the workplace flexibility that women are expecting,” O’Brien says.

The anatomy of a CIO: attributes and skills The CIOs interviewed pointed to a number of personal qualities and beliefs that have been instrumental to their success, including confidence and self-belief, courage, flexibility and resilience, tenacity and relationship building.

They also outlined the diverse skill set needed for today’s CIO. Top of the list was broad business knowledge. With technology now a crucial tool for improving business performance and efficiency, a holistic understanding of the business is essential.

“Great CIOs understand the technology trends, they understand what’s new, and they can interpret the organisation’s business strategy and business model, and look at ways to best exploit those trends, influence strategy and potentially change the business model,” O’Brien says.

While an understanding of technology is of course a musthave for a CIO, several of the interviewees felt deep technical knowledge is not required.

Jane Treadwell, who is now CEO of DesignGov, an experimental initiative to improve the Australian Public Service, says when she was CIO of Centrelink, her IT skills were not always at the same level of the staff she managed, so she enlisted the help of mentors to advise her on various disciplines.

“The challenges around CIO-dom are not in the technology, but in the seven S’s surrounding it: strategy, style, systems, structures, skills, staff and shared values,” says Treadwell.

“People who do really well in their IT career are often entrepreneurial, they have great communication skills and they are very people focused. They don’t necessarily fit the traditional image of an IT person,” says O’Brien.

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CAREERS

LEADERSHIP

Having strong communication skills, to be a conduit for fostering communication between IT and the business, is another key attribute. This works two ways – both to translate IT jargon for the benefit of the business, and to effectively convey IT’s contribution to the business.

An empowering leadership style helps leaders to build trust and enrol their teams in their vision, as well as develop and retain talented people.

“Be consultative but firm on what you want and fair on the approach to get there,” says Queensland Urban Utilities CIO Nina Meyers.

Finally, CIOs must have the ability to think and plan strategically, and execute on a long-term vision in collaboration with and support of the CEO. VicSuper CIO and executive manager of member and employer services, Clare Tam, says, “You need to understand your industry and envisage what it will look like in the future to ensure your technology doesn’t lag.”

One trap CIOs must be careful to avoid is getting bogged down in simply providing IT operational support, and allowing other C-suite members, such as the COO, the Chief Marketing Officer, and increasingly, the Chief Digital Officer, to take over the technology agenda.

“The key is remembering that that is where your biggest valueadd is. The core part of your job is obviously keeping the lights on and doing that cost-effectively, but the strategic part of your

job is influencing the organisation and its strategy,” says O’Brien.

“Allocate your time and do your own prioritisation to make sure that your own strategic role is covered, that you have support within your organisation and that all your interactions are credible and value-adding.”

Career defining moments They’re the make or break moments, the times when you step up or it all falls in a heap, the roles that catapult you to the next level. Every career has them, and the CIOs interviewed identified some of the career-defining people, decisions and opportunities that helped them to get to their current positions.

Some of the commonalities were: • Working for great bosses.

“Capable people can do amazing things if their bosses let them have a go and give them safety lines to come back,” says Treadwell.

• Carefully selecting mentors.

More than half the interviewees had mentors during their careers, and they weren’t necessarily always female.

“The main focus to ensure people can progress their careers in IT is making sure that they have really strong mentors. It has to be more than someone you just connect with – ideally it is the most powerful person in your organisation,” says O’Brien.

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• Building peer networks.

The report says peer networks are crucial at any stage of a successful career, and ideally include peers inside and outside the organisation, to provide knowledge, feedback and support, and also open doors to new opportunities.

“CIO networks are brilliant for gaining insights and understanding, and also affirming some of my gut instincts,” Treadwell says.

• Following a passion.

A number of interviewees began their careers in different fields such as marketing or medicine, but were attracted to ICT by an interest in technology and how it relates to business strategy.

While Clare Tam undertook an accounting degree and stayed on this path to a COO role, she never lost her interest in technology.

“My passion for technology-empowered business strategy extends beyond financial measures and encompasses using technology to develop an inclusive environment that encourages personal and professional growth,” says Tam. “Bringing people along on this journey is not only critical to business success, it is my greatest privilege.”

responsibilities and accept a variety of opportunities – even if some of these efforts end in failure. Meyers advises young ICT professionals to keep their horizons broad and gain experience across the business as well as in four key areas of IT: strategy, architecture, projects and technology.

2. Market yourself to build credibility.

The IT leaders interviewed believe it’s important to regularly report back to management on successes and measureable results such as return on investment.

3. Be open and flexible.

“Aspiring professionals who can take unexpected opportunities or obstacles in their stride will develop resilience and selfconfidence – two of the five common CIO virtues and values,” the report says.

4. Ask for support.

Whether it is through formal mentoring, or input from peer networks, colleagues, or role models, networking and seeking advice can be crucial to carving out a brilliant career in IT.

Advice for aspiring CIOs 1. Embrace change and seize opportunities.

To eventually find yourself in the top job, you have to step outside your comfort zone and skill set to seek new

To read the full report, visit http://www.deloitte.com/assets/ Dcom-Australia/Local%20Assets/Documents/National%20 Programs/CIO/Deloitte_Women_in_ICT_2013.pdf

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CASE STUDY

NZ DEPARTMENT OF CONSERVATION

Going mobile in Middle Earth

Images courtesy of New Zealand Department of Conservation

New Zealand is home to some of the most stunning wilderness areas in the world, and its Department of Conservation is charged with maintaining and protecting this sometimes harsh environment. Freya Purnell found out how an implementation of SAP Work Manager is making this job easier for the Department and its infield rangers and inspection staff.

Background

Implementation

The New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC) is responsible for the protection of all the natural heritage of New Zealand. This covers over 72,000 recreation, historic and fence assets, which are used by hundreds of thousands of domestic and international visitors each year.

Mike Edginton, manager partnerships, historic and visitor management at Department of Conservation, says, “We’ve got a pretty large responsibility to ensure that New Zealand’s biodiversity is protected, but also to ensure that the public have access to those places. Our mission is really around making New Zealand the greatest living space on earth and that is pretty inspiring for those of us who work here.

“IT is an essential part of the department’s infrastructure and it forms the foundations of what we have to do.In my area of work, managing assets is all about managing the data that is associated with them. We have got approximately 15,000 inspections to do each year, and we have around 100,000 work orders that we manage each year.”

DOC was already using SAP Plant Maintenance as the basis for its asset management system, alongside SAP Financial Asset Management.

DOC in fact already had a mobility solution to collect conservation data, using SAP Mobile Asset Management (MAM). However this solution was clunky and slow, caused frustration amongst the rangers who needed to use it in the field, and was nearing the end of product maintenance, so it was time to upgrade.

DOC needed a more efficient and quicker means of collecting and managing field data, and to improve the user acceptance of the mobile solution. Having access to accurate data is important for DOC to inform its decision-making and to report to Parliament on its operations.

According to Soltius, other drivers for the project included a need to lower administration overheads through efficiencies in synchronising and loading devices, increasing the flexibility of the mobile platform, and the opportunity to extend the functionality to suit other asset classes and work areas within the Department.

DOC chose to implement SAP Work Manager 5.3, with the support of SAP Services, Soltius and Vesta Partners. The project was significant as the very first implementation of SAP Work Manager in New Zealand.

According to Craig Bennett, mobility manager, and Rikardt Louw, SAP technical architect, Soltius, while the standard SAP Work Manager solution largely supported DOC’s standard maintenance work processes, there were some unique factors that influenced the implementation.

DOC’s assets cover a broad range of items, including buildings (huts, toilets and shelters), structures (such as bridges, viewing platforms and wharfs), tracks, roads, amenity areas, sign and fences. The diversity of assets also expanded the types of measures and measuring techniques used.

Many natural heritage areas are not covered by mobile network coverage, so when in the field, it may be several days before DOC’s rangers are able to synchronise data.

“As a result, DOC’s mobile solution had to be capable of taking a large amount of data into the field and have a robust solution to synchronise back to SAP when connected,” say Bennett and Louw.

To cope with the sometimes harsh infield conditions, DOC uses ruggedized units with integrated GPS that can be used one-handed and for extended periods without recharging. To interface with a large number of legacy devices, the solution had to use the Windows Mobile 6 operating system.

With DOC responsible for the maintenance of assets from both a service delivery and safety standpoint, the solution had to integrate its asset inspection process, as well as be able to download and transmit data from Bluetooth-enabled ‘counters’ embedded in tracks to monitor visitor numbers.

Bennett and Louw say some of the challenges encountered and solved on the project included: yy The limitation of the Windows Mobile operating system and memory restrictions, particularly given the data volumes involved in having large numbers of equipment masters, work orders and functional locations available on devices, yy The mobile application handling of memory issues, yy UI design conflicting with user expectations, yy The performance tuning of core SAP ABAP add-in, yy A change control process covering multiple international developers, and yy A lack of an active SAP support community, which has since been resolved.

Staff adoption key to success A crucial element of this implementation was the adoption of

www.insidesap.com.au 15

CASE STUDY

NZ DEPARTMENT OF CONSERVATION

the new solution by the 350 rangers and 25 inspection staff who are using it day-to-day to manage the 100,000 work orders and 15,000 to 20,000 asset inspections that are issued and conducted each year.

The Work Manager solution has vastly simplified in-field reporting, with data transfers taking minutes instead of hours.

It also enables the flow of real-time data, informing better datadriven strategic decision-making, and provides complete accuracy in reporting.

“It’s really changing the lives of these rangers. It’s removing the frustrations of data management that we had before. Data transfers were taking too long and so they didn’t actually like using it in the field,” says Edginton. “Their job is to manage assets to ensure that the visitors are safe out there and they have a good time. They can focus on them and keeping themselves safe because these are dangerous places to work.”

DOC services ranger Emma Dunning agrees that the intuitive solution has transformed the way she and her colleagues work.

“It allows me to work seamlessly in and out of wireless coverage and still have the confidence that all the work I have completed will be captured and sent back to the office backend systems,” she says.

“SAP Work Manager has helped us be more effective by reducing the downtime and delays of transmitting data and give us a platform to make sure that other people know what is required out on this island.”

Organisational benefits In addition to field employees being much more positive about the new solution, it is also contributing to a much more comprehensive and timely picture of data across the Department.

“Data is at the heart of what we do. Managing the 72,000 assets in our portfolio is all about managing the tremendous amount of data that is associated with them,” Edginton says.

“SAP Work Manager has enabled us to capture the volume of data flowing through out organisation accurately and enables us to efficiently communicate it throughout our organisation. Not only are we able to more efficiently deploy our resources, the solution also helps make my job easier.

“I am now able to gain a 360-degree view of our operations to help me provide strategic advice and ensure we have accurate information when we need to report to Parliament.”

From a risk perspective, maintenance now also has a clear audit trail, showing the necessary due diligence if required following any incident.

The next phase of the journey for DOC will be to extend the capabilities of SAP Work Manager across the entire organisation.

As a part of the New Zealand Government’s move towards more cloud-based solutions, DOC is also considering the benefits of SAP cloud solutions with a view to reduce overhead costs and further move towards a mobile future for the organisation.

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Contact us: 0427 173 203 www.sapphirecommunications.com.au 16 Inside SAP magazine

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

CHANGE MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY

Training: the silver bullet for benefit realisation Dr Susan Foster discusses how a focus on human factors when implementing an enterprise system, with the help of a Training Management Lifecycle model, can deliver post-project business success.

The term ‘silver bullet’ derives from a combination of folklore and fairy-tale. The bullet cast from silver is the only weapon that is effective against a werewolf or witch; in one folk song, a Bulgarian rebel leader invulnerable to normal weapons was felled by a silver bullet; the ‘Lone Ranger’ used silver bullets as calling cards to represent symbols of justice, law and order. The idiom ‘silver bullet’ has now become a general metaphor for a straightforward solution that is shown to be extremely effective against a major prevailing problem.

This article focuses on two issues: the recognition that an effective preventative measure – training is shown to be the ‘silver bullet’ against a major prevailing problem; the failure by organisations when implementing an enterprise system to achieve business benefits.

When implementing an enterprise system, organisations often experience failure to meet implementation deadlines and budgets, causing substantial financial losses and leaving them unable to achieve business benefits. However, failure to build

a business case prior to an implementation has been partly responsible for many companies not fully knowing the extent of their return on investment. Deloitte reported that implementing companies could expect a dip in benefit realisation after go-live, with the length and depth of the dip dependent on how well the implementation had been managed. Deloitte identified the top barriers to benefit realisation and major challenges to ERP implementations as being people-related issues, with the main issue being the management of change, including training and communication.

Interestingly, although many companies go through a number of enterprise system implementations, change management issues still prevail leaving a significant impact on the potential success and benefit realisation of the company. Change management places human performance at the core of business success. Therefore change management practices that target a positive culture shift and individual skill and knowledge transfer engender individual readiness for change, and promote a successful project and business outcome.

The model of training success and business value provides a formal continuous process to evaluate business success and value and is based on management consultant Peter Drucker’s approach: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Value is created when the implementation is successful; that is, if it is on time and on budget, and all staff are trained, while training success is assessed against user attendance, staff understanding of the trained content, user satisfaction and user acceptance of the system. User satisfaction is the

www.insidesap.com.au 17

TECHNOLOGY

CHANGE MANAGEMENT

extent to which users believe the information system meets their information requirements; if they understand how to use the system, they are more likely to accept the system, thus reducing resistance. This has a flow-on effect to operational and business success, where operational success is expressed in terms of users using the system successfully; leading to system productivity improvements, process efficiency and effectiveness, and error reduction. Business success is measured against return on investment, economic value-add, revenue increases and productivity cost savings with intangible benefits accruing such as increased customer satisfaction.

To achieve operational and business success, I turn attention to the importance of training users. So often I hear staff saying: “The trainer did not pitch the training to my level”, “Why are we changing?”, “The old system worked!”, “I don’t understand the new business processes!”, or simply “I don’t have the skills for the change”. Bersin & Associates identified the biggest training issue was not in developing new content, but rather building the organisational learning culture and understanding the new skills and disciplines needed to be effective. Bersin argues that the need for ‘formal’ training is greater than ever; ensuring staff get the right information presented in the right way.

The importance of training as an intervention rests in its ability to bring about skill and knowledge transfer, thus

supporting business transformation. Hence, when designing training interventions, consideration to factors that enable skill transfer are important.

These include: yy The trainers’ skill in knowledge transfer, yy Individual characteristics, yy Work environment,

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An all-important interactive technique to identify what needs changing is to adopt Design Thinking. Design Thinking is an approach to observe actions, identify what needs to change and establish an interactive process to involve users in the change process. This approach answers such questions: yy “Why is the change needed?”, yy “What needs changing?”, yy “How will the change be achieved?”, and yy “How will the change be assessed?”.

Involving users in the change process is an important component to effective change.

Once the why and what of change has been identified,the next step is to identify the how of change. Establishing an effective training strategy is important to ensuring training is effectively managed. A comprehensive training strategy developed by Foster Consulting and designed from key learnings is the Training Management Lifecycle (TML). The importance of such a strategy is that it can be adapted to anytraining requirements, such as system implementation, upgrade or for updating training needs and covers all aspects of training. The TML visually depicts an ongoing cycle of training activities and provides the opportunity for the training to be assessed and managed pre- and postimplementation. The Lifecycle includes nine iterative phases.

The TML also includes training governance and training ownership. Training governance is important to establish training guidelines such as principles and policies which are used to manage the way the training is designed and conducted; while

training ownership ensures a level of responsibility is placed on trainers for the training. This is especially important where a ‘train-the-trainer’ approach is adopted.

In essence, change management practices are based on a range of core concepts: 1. Human performance is placed at the centre of business performance.

2. Communication is identified as a core construct in the change initiative.

3. Effective training practices are imperative to ensure staff effectively move through the change.

4. Effectively managing these concepts ensures the change process can optimise an organisation’s revenue and profit delivery after the change has taken place.

It should be noted that how effective the change management strategy will influence users to accept or reject the change efforts.

Clearly, for companies to achieve benefit realisation, they must ensure an effective change management approach where its core focus is firmly placed on training.

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Dr Susan Foster holds a PhD covering enterprise system implementations, as well as higher degree qualifications in enterprise systems, information technology, education, and psychology. Dr Foster has been heavily involved in developing SAP related curriculum and consulting for the last 10 years and has a number of SAP solution consultant certificates. She is engaged in working with the SAP User Group and is currently the SAP SIG lead for the Organisational Change and Training group. Email: sue.foster@monash.edu

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