As a business, you probably spent hundreds of man hours and thousands of pounds implementing SAP, but since Go Live has anyone actually checked whether all of the impressive functionality within the system is being utilised to fully benefit your business as it exists today?
When speaking to SAP businesses, we're constantly surprised to discover that they often aren't using or simply don't know about many of the powerful features within their SAP solution. To get around this perceived lack of functionality, employees often create "off system" methods of dealing with business operations, that don't integrate with SAP and slow order throughput, as a result.
This is often no-one's fault per se. Maybe the original project manager or SAP partner left the business or new functionality has been introduced by SAP in updates. Perhaps the business has grown and now requires functionality that it didn't previously require. But either way, it's an issue that prohibits productivity and ultimately business growth.
This exact issue was demonstrated to us in a recent visit by one of our consultants to a customer running SAP S4/HANA. Whilst discussing a new project, the Warehouse Manager brought up an issue she had maintaining a large Excel spreadsheet she had created for a specific customer. As luck would have it, an SAP Technical Consultant was present at this meeting, and he quickly pointed out that all of the information and functionality she required was actually in SAP and she didn't need the cumbersome spreadsheet at all. Two minutes later, the consultant had made a few amendments to the layout of one of the screens, which enabled a function that presented the customer with all of the required information.
As a result, the customer has asked us to go back in to review and re-evaluate other aspects of their SAP system, to see where transactions or screens can be reconfigured to meet changed or poorly understood methods, or where there is simply a better way of doing things.
So, this got us thinking about how many of our SAP customers might benefit from this kind of "system health check"? We suppose we could call it an "SAP Sanity Check", but in reality it’s just an expert in SAP working with users to make sure that the ERP is working for them rather, than them working for it. It's a perfect marriage; the users understand the business processes and our experts understand exactly what the SAP solution is capable of.
Could your business benefit from this kind of "Sanity Check" on your SAP processes? Or do you have questions about functionality that you think is missing from SAP, as there's a good chance that it exists in some form, but you're just not aware of it! Contact our experts on 01200 441977 to discuss options today.
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