Art & Science of Being an IT Architect

I recently attended a 3-day “Business Design Assurance” or BDA held by my client. On the first day it was clear that there were still a lot of unresolved issues and the desired delivery date of the rollout to the first country was a risk. There was a lot of talk along the lines of “we can’t go live without XXX!” A certain Senior Vice President could not attend the second day of the BDA but had the following as a message posted on the wall when everyone arrived for the second day of discussion.

“A good plan today violently executed is better than a perfect plan next week!”

General George S. Patton

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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.

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

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