Did Massive industrialisation back in the day slow the SAP move to being seen as a digital platform

Back in the day (I always start blogs like this) I worked on JDE projects, it used to be me on my own turning up in a factory, asking a few questions and filling in forms and configuration and a supporting team that did interfaces, data loads and dealt with payroll.

A smallish factory took a few months to implement, and you know what it worked!

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Whan I saw an advert to work a bit nearer home it turned out it was for SAP and I applied, my knowledge of business processes and how a three way match and product costing worked was enough to get a job in SAP, I honestly thought that I would be out on my own again implementing SAP but was immediately informed by my boss that I would not be alone and I would land in a large team on a client site with business analysts, EM’s architects testers etc.

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So, I went overnight from a one-man army of one to an army of over 50 achieving roughly the same as I did before on JDE, but with more friends to talk to.

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In all truth, the firms we were working for (I was aligned with a nameless big 4 - at the time one of 5 - accountancy firm), were really taking the micky out of clients with squads of young management consultants putting sticky labels on the wall and writing specifications for things that ultimately would not work.

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The drive to be able to measure project progress and quality led to a huge amount of documentation and duplication and looking back how crazy was it to think that a project was half complete when all that had happened was that a lot of documents had been written and signed off by a user community who had no idea what they were reading.

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Also, the rates were higher, the blended rate on my project in 1994 was twice as high as I expect now!?

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It’s not hugely surprising that something had to change, and that was industrialization and the drive to off shoring, the arrival of low-cost delivery centers in the early noughties led to a massive reduction in blended rates, imagine reducing day rates by two-third?and maybe adding a few more days for extra coordination effort.

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The issue was however that as rates were driven down and margins up the obvious approach was not to employ better (and possibly more expensive people) but to massively industrialize and drive down the unit cost, as well as maintain a constant stream of freshers to be worked into projects to feed the machine.

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As we became more industrialized, we also became more risk averse. Additionally, we added more administrative steps to the design and approval process (a characteristic, I believe, unique to SAP). Consequently, the empires built around the SAP solution grew larger, with the inclusion of managers and other roles.

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So where did this end up, avoiding P1’s etc. became the main obsession, not actually improving things for the business and governance became the new industry.

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It’s a little surprising that when asked to change something or innovate, an SAP leader would ask for clear business cases and design documents before starting and in most cases had to fit any work in a release schedule and lots of approval boards. Meanwhile in the world of agile and digital someone said, “Okay let’s have a go, I will build an MVP and see if it works using a non-SAP solution (without the governance)”.

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SAP of course remained the most functional solution with the most robust tools etc., but somehow this got hidden behind all the paperwork and management, it’s a little surprising that some of the areas on the edge of SAP drifted off, and it was reduced to a core that added things up very accurately.

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Now I appreciate that SAP is hugely integrated and important, so there are more governance and integration topics, but not as many barriers are there in reality as long as you knew what you were doing, had a good solution team that understood what they were doing.

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So finally my call to arms, don’t make things so complex, keep the core clean, trust the teams, buy more quality and less industrialization and keep the MVP’s and new stuff away form the CORE (making the changes minor) and let’s see things come back to SAP , let’s not make it hard to work with , make it the easiest solution to work with.