Art & Science of Being an IT Architect

Perils of Over-Customizing SAP-Broken Reports

Posted in Uncategorized, Project Management, Consulting Skills, SAP by artsciita on December 18th, 2007

I’ve been around clients for some great discussion on the perils of over-customizing SAP lately. I hope to collect some of the lessons learned here for your reading enjoyment and career enrichment.

Here’s a comment made by a country sales manager at a meeting I attended in May 2007.

“They told us that the new SAP system would have over 160 reports out-of-the-box that we could use to run our business and we didn’t plan on having to create a lot of custom reports. Now they tell us that’s not true. Almost all the out-of-the-box reports are broken. Almost every report we need must be a custom development.”

It seems this company made some customizations to their base SAP system (ECC) when they were only operating in a only single country and were focused only on a transactional, commodity type business model. They then moved into multiple countries and began to look closely at big, relational customers and value-added services. To support this, they planned to create a new CRM system running on top of their existing ECC. They were not happy to find out that their legacy of prior ECC customizations “broke” a lot of the standard SAP reports.

I’d love to hear from other people who might have an SAP over-customization lesson to share.

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