SAP regional and global implementation otherwise known as rollouts can be achieved in two ways:
- Rollouts starting from relatively small markets
- Those that start from a bigger market
Both cases present the IT professional with unique challenges, as well as potential advantages. Big, established companies like multinationals have both struggled in their system management and gone through using the two methods. It is imperative to think about the best option for your company when it comes to SAP implementation.
Nowadays, system integration is a crucial competitive advantage for smaller enterprises offering workday consulting services and system management, and so companies and organizations have to base their operations on reliable and apt system platforms. For many large companies, SAP is the choice. This is because it is considered the best tool when it comes to standardization across departments world over. The companies want to achieve this by using the same software standard business processes as well as best practice in a corporate template. These corporate templates usually contain centralized standards, maintenance, and support which is availed to the company’s IT headquarters. Subsidiaries who are in foreign regions are also included in the template through adopting the core, the corporate model then after that adding their localizations.
Some companies in the consumer product industry usually have large SAP implementations and complex agile development. Typically, they would choose the corporate template and had it implemented in small markets where there was a small risk of business disruption. As well, they had simple, but representative, business practices. Having a defined cooperate template instituted in a small market, and after that, building on it as you roll it out into larger markets has a myriad of advantages which aided in the implementation success by these companies. One advantage is that each new market was able to bring in more functionality as well as testing the template solution. In essence, when it reaches the time to roll out the template in offices in foreign locations, it would be as complete as it is mature, and therefore, reduces the risk of impacting operations negatively.
At this point, the implementation team of computer programmers shall have gained a lot of skill in the maintenance and implementation of the entire system including service oriented architecture hence providing more prompt and accurate responses. One setback of this tactic is that large markets will have to wait before they can gain access to the most recent software, thus restraining this potential competitive advantage. Moreover, when it reaches the right time for the large market to put the system to use, some IT professionals who implemented the previous SAP would likely have been transferred to other departments, or may simply be unavailable.
This would turn out to be a critical blow to the successful completion of the project.
The same team facilitating system management may have developed more skills over time and has thus become more expensive. So companies would need extra efforts to try to retain them. By the time the larger market kicks off its implementation, there might have been changes to the software making it more complex to avoid affecting departments in foreign countries which have already incorporated the system into their production environment. This results in the project moving at snail speed which eventually affects the implementation cost.
Enter Global IT Services. We are the experts that help companies implement and properly utilize SAP the way it should be. Learn more on how we can assist you today.
