There are no authorized SAP training partners.

That seems like an odd claim to make given the large number of companies claiming to provide authorized SAP training–Genovate, for example, and dozens of other companies based in South and East Asia. But the fact of the matter is that SAP itself does not officially recognize, let alone authorize, any of these companies as training partners. The partner category closest to this function is “education,” which SAP defines more as the ramping up of existing SAP end users than as the generic training of aspiring SAP developers. Becoming an authorized SAP education partner is difficult; only one company in the U.S., RWD Technologies, is qualified in this category. Naturally, SAP training is provided on an ad hoc, on demand basis by consultants and integrators, but this service is also much closer to SAP’s category of “education” than to the current marketplace understanding of “training,” which is most frequently used in the aspiring SAP developer context.

Yet, somehow, companies such as Genovate continue to claim that they are authorized SAP training partners. Genovate isn’t even mentioned on SAP.com, but on the SAP Developer Network, SDN, the company is regularly described as being an “authorized” SAP training partner.

Either SAP countenances Genovate’s claims in some indirect way or SAP doesn’t bother to address the messaging issues raised by these de facto members of the ecosystem. Either way, it’s a disservice to the marketplace. Walldorf’s mighty legal machine should forbid companies from claiming to be authorized SAP training partners, because such claims do not accord to SAP’s own partner taxonomy or to SAP’s rigid standards for partner authorization. In fact, such claims exist largely to separate vast numbers of gullible Indian technology graduates from their hard-earned money by building the impression that SAP itself confers legitimacy on “training” companies.

The big news in the SAP world this week is the severe shortage of skills; along with Foote Partners, we’ll be exploring this subject in an upcoming podcast and articles. As far as SAP customers are concerned, the existence of shady training companies is contributing to the influx of inexperienced (and, in some cases, fraudulent) SAP techies into the marketplace. When SAP skills get diluted, projects fail.

So it’s really in everyone’s interest for SAP to hit hard at the so-called “authorized” training partners, particularly those in India. The point isn’t to stop these companies from operating, it’s to remove the impression that they have SAP’s mark of approval. At that point, let the marketplace decide their fate.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

Everyone knows about the bottom-up pressure on in-house IT — namely, that IT outsourcing has made it cheaper and more efficient to move basic functions such as maintenance and testing outside the four walls of the enterprise. After ten years, this can’t be called a trend anymore; for enterprises, it’s now a best practice to move tactical in-house IT employees elsewhere, whether to an IT outsourcing partner or to a captive center offshore. After all, most enterprises are not in the IT business, and especially not in the tactical IT business.

There are plenty of signs that there is top-down pressure on in-house IT as well. In three separate conversations — with consultancy Sapient, and with SAP executives Zia Yusuf and Richard Probst — we’ve heard that the top tier of IT discipline is going to be changing is well. This isn’t just an abstract notion; SAP and its partners are engineering real products in such a way as to change the discipline.

The change afoot is that higher-level IT people will have to gain increasing knowledge of business processes. To put it another way, t he business-IT war is over and business won. From now on, IT will have to speak the language of business.

SAP’s products are taking on a process-centric hue, with workflows, continuous refinement, drag-and-drop modeling, and other aspects of business process management. No matter how abstruse the technology at the core of these products, they speak business language and are designed to be usable by process experts, not coders.

As cyberpunk author William Gibson famously said, the future is already here, but it isn’t widely distributed yet. When we talk to people who used to refer to ‘IT departments,’ we are beginning to hear about ‘centers of business enablement,’ ‘process competence,’ and the like instead.

To IT people: learn your code, but remember that you have to learn the language of business processes. The old-style IT department is dead.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

A recent academic paper–Chan and Lui, “Rescuing Troubled Software Projects by Team Transformation…”–discussed the components of ERP failure. The paper presented a handy checklist for what to do to help ensure a successful ERP project. Here it is, in no particular order of importance:

• Top management support.
• Realistic project objective.
• Right ERP strategy.
• Suitable ERP software and hardware.
• Stable requirements or business processes during implementation.
• Alignment with specific requirements.
• Relatively rapid implementations.
• Remaining within budget and scheduling constraints.
• Good technical support from the vendor.
• Good project management.
• No task conflicts among team members.
• Lack of culture clash.
• Non-bureaucratic project organization.
• Correct estimation of staff learning curve.
• Positive user characteristics.
• User involvement.
• Honest information policy (no circulation of unfounded rumors).
• Timely data migration.
• Adequate technical know-how.
• Non-problematic technology base.

At a very high level, this serves as a checklist of ways to avoid ERP failure, which has become a hot topic again, thanks to the SAP-Waste Management imbroglio.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

In India, many IT newcomers, known there as “freshers,” are more eager than ever to break into the SAP market, and often turn to third-party SAP certification as a way of doing so.

Typical of the expectation that certification leads to SAP work was a post on SAP’s SDN that read, “I have a friend of mine…[who] has a functional expereince [sic] of 10 years in sales with L.I.C and he has done SAP SD Certification in the month of November, from Genovate Mumbai he has still not got placed and he is lookin for his first SAP Break.”

Anyone who follows SAP forums or mail groups will be intimately acquainted with variations on this message: Which certification will get me an SAP job? The question gets asked over and over because the answer is too unpleasant for people to accept: Only actual SAP experience is a valid qualification. For people who can’t get on an SAP team in their current position, or endure the prospect of waiting five years or more to transition to a company implementing SAP, this is a traumatic answer. Psychically, it is easier to believe that an SAP foothold can be bought instead.

This irrational optimism is part of the reason that third-party SAP training and certification companies like Genovate prosper. Genovate, which does most of its business in India, routinely charges $3,142 for single SAP courses lasting about ten days. That’s more money than the average Indian makes in a year, and the ten days of simulations are a far cry from the three years of actual experience that employers are seeking.

It’s important to note that, at least on the surface, Genovate doesn’t market itself as an SAP job placement service. Many Genovate trainees are working professionals who come for job-relevant training, a perfectly legitimate and value-added service. But many Genovate trainees are also “freshers” who think that certification will get them an SAP job. These people clearly haven’t done their research, or else they’d know that, in the SAP job market, Genovate certification (unlike actual project experience) doesn’t count for anything special.

This raises a question I’d like to ask our readers: In the end, does the SAP certification market function as a kind of tax on ignorance? Is there something shady about it, or does the fault lie entirely with the gullible freshers?

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

A recent article in Crain’s Detroit Business disclosed that DTE Energy Co. of Michigan posted a $120 million overrun in the cost of its SAP project. DTE, which had budgeted $263 million towards its SAP project in 2003, finished the migration in 2007 at a total cost of $383 million.

While only insiders know exactly why the project finished with such a large cost overrun, it’s possible that DTE could have paid more attention to preparation and training, which studies have revealed to be the most important factors in a successful ERP implementation. For example, DTE apparently elected to upgrade to a newer version of SAP in 2005. Leap-frogging its own original implementation plan suggests that DTE didn’t think hard enough about the project at its inception. Floating intentions can doom otherwise efficient projects.

That said, one shouldn’t minimize the difficulty that DTE faced during its SAP project. David Meador, the company’s CFO, explained on a conference call last month that, “We had systems that we’re replacing that were over 30 years old. In total, we replaced over 160 systems, and it caused some disruption in our operations.”

DTE’s overrun should be a warning to companies facing an SAP migration or upgrade that anything less than optimal training and preparation can result in a tough implementation experience. Educate yourself further by reading this tip on 10 things to watch out for during an SAP implementation and this explanation of the respective roles of SAP service and third-party consulting before and after an upgrade. Also feel free to browse our SAP upgrades and integration topic center for other tips and tricks. The more you know, the less chance you’ll have of becoming the next SAP overrun story.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

Did you know that SAP’s online events page is a resource for self-training on SAP? The page is not only a repository of live-event webcasts but also a collection of tips and techniques for SAP consultants, developers, and implementation team members. Everyone from executives looking to build an SAP business case to techies who want to learn about advanced functionality in individual SAP modules can take advantage of hundreds of indexed webcasts, and other supporting materials, to find more detailed information about their needs.

SAP’s online events pages are experiencing a surge in traffic, says SAP VP of Communications Bill Wohl. “Nothing against on-site events, but where we’ve seen the greatest growth is in the online world.” That’s no surprise given the high costs of attending on-site events and live training sessions, which simply aren’t in the budget for many members of the SAP ecosystem. This is particularly true outside Europe and the Americas. Consequently, SAP’s tips and techniques webcasts are attracting a great deal of attention from users in India, with China and Japan also contributing traffic.

Wohl explains that these webcasts, complemented by SAP online forums, are even being used as formal training tools in some contexts. “Consultants and staff people from solutions integrators are using the online environment as a training ground when they bring in new people,” he says. Picture new hires in India, where systems integrators such as Infosys, Wipro, and others run thriving SAP practices, downloading webcasts and hanging out on SAP’s developer forums as part of their professional development.

Accumulating experience with SAP’s online events and developer forums is a no-cost way for developers and consultants to make themselves more attractive to potential clients and employers alike. It’s also a way for executives in smaller and mid-sized businesses, which often lack budgets for conference or training travel, to attain a high-level understanding of SAP (for example, from very specific functionalities such as Bank Relationship Management all the way up to an architectural overview of SAP ERP 6.0) and build a business case for implementation.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

SAP trainers don’t make as much money as implementation consultants, as resident SearchSAP Expert Jon Reed has pointed out. For this reason, there isn’t as much interest in the field of SAP training as there is in implementation consulting and functional deployment positions. But is this a logical state of affairs?

In reading some of the academic literature on ERP implementation, I found two studies (Somers and Nelson, 2004, and Peslak, Subramanian, and Clayton, 2007) that isolated training as either the most important or one of the two most important (along with preparation) factors in the success of an ERP implementation. If so, it stands to reason that at least some ERP failures are due to companies’ failures to dedicate the necessary resources to training. It also stands to reason that more people — whether employees inside SAP-adopting companies or professional services providers — could stand to hone their training skills in order to mitigate the risk of ERP failure.

If training is as pivotal to a successful ERP implementation as the academic studies say it is, it may only be a matter of time before SAP trainers get more respect…and more money.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

Consultants seeking to acquire and further develop their SAP skills have long been limited to finding an accredited SAP training center close to them or simply learning on the job. Now, however, there’s a new service that lets consultants ramp up their SAP skills online. The service, SID (sidportal.com), costs £1,200 annually, and gives consultants access to an SAP sandbox environment. After purchasing a SID subscription, consultants can access the latest versions of SAP software online through SID’s servers.

This could allow consultants to become better acquainted with particular modules, customize their own SAP processes, or develop an online portfolio that can be shown to potential clients. While SID doesn’t replace valuable on-the-job SAP experience, it does allow consultants to polish their knowledge of SAP’s modules and processes, and to create customized tweaks, from their own computers.

SID would be more appropriate for consultants with a basic knowledge of SAP, as the service does not include training or e-learning (there are other several online companies that bundle online access to SAP modules with e-learning components). If anyone has signed up for SID, or for any similar online service, we’d love to hear from you about whether the experience is proving valuable.

Demir Barlas,
Site Editor