A tip to CIO’s: Select the Right SAP Consulting Partners

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A tip to CIO’s: Select the Right SAP Consulting Partners Mandeep S. Oberoi* 

March 08, 2010

Overview

Often the question is asked why should businesses choose to pay more and engage highly experienced SAP consultants instead of hiring less experienced people and paying less?

SAP software has so many functionalities inbred in itself, so it becomes very important to identify the right processes on the context to meet specific business requirements. On a broader note, 90 out the fortune 100 companies and 75% of fortune 500 companies run SAP. These companies are so diverse such as the shoe manufacturers Nike and Reebok; electronics manufacturers Sony and Intel, Johns Hopkins Medical School, automotive manufacturers GM and Toyota, Food manufacturers Kraft’s Foods and Barry Callebaut, top pharmaceutical manufacturers, and software manufacturer Microsoft, among others run SAP to efficiently streamline their business processes. These business processes relate to finance, production, materials management, human resources, sales and so on. These diverse business processes are integrated on a single information technology (IT) platform within SAP to share common data, to interact within the enterprise, and to interact with extended business partners such as the vendors and the customers. 

It becomes very challenging even for experienced consultants to identify and implement correct business processes, given the high complexity of the functional options offered by the SAP software; because of the complexity of the business processes themselves; and also because of the integration between different functional modules. Another issue of contention is that enterprise resource planning (ERP) can be done right in so many different ways. The challenge is to implement it most efficiently to improve operational efficiencies. And that is why it becomes so important for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to partner with right consulting companies and with highly experienced SAP consultants.