Remote functional consulting?
In today’s world the customer wants a consulting company to deliver SAP projects at a reduced cost. Cost of ownership is a big factor for customers.
I want to start a discussion on how to effectively use functional consultants work remotely in US and offshore to deliver a project for a customer. I am sure that many of us have done this a lot for technical development but I am not sure how many of us have tried this with SAP functional side.
Have you ever used SAP functional consultants in your SAP project who worked remotely, located at a offsite location in US? If so, I would like to hear about your experience.
I am talking about project models where a lead/anchor functional consultant works on site and offloads logical units of functional work to a consultant who works from remote location. The remote consultant comes on site for a week to participate in business process discussion with the client business owners and then works remotely to configure and develop the business process in SAP. While working remotely the remote consultant configures the business in SAP and also develops functional specs for any development that need to be done to support that business process. The remote consultant works with a offshore developer to develop and test the object. After the business process has been configured in SAP and all related development objects have been developed and tested, the remote consultant goes on site to deliver the piece of functionality to the client and help them compete the user acceptance testing and sign off.
Have you used this or a similar model in your project? How have you planned and managed such a project? What was your experience and lessons learned?
Please share your thoughts and recommendations.
Hello
First and foremost , let me thank you for coming up with this important document for discussion and comments. Offshore-Onsite implementation and support model has become a very common practice followed across mid size and even big organizations.
The good part is that companies can optimize on their running variable costs related to resources ,logistics and overheads expenses as sufficient amount of core work is outsourced to offshore teams.
However , my personal experience has been a mixed one which I will try to summarize in below bullet points.
This is purely my way of looking at Remote consulting ...and to conclude I agree that its a very useful model if implemented in a proper manner.
Cheers!!!
Shubham