Yesterday, SAP The Netherlands announced the winners of the annual SAP Quality Awards (press release, in Dutch). Royal DSM, a global science-based company active in health, nutrition and materials has won a golden award for their Shared Services implementation project. Congratulations!
Now, why am I dedicating this blog to this particular event? SAP Quality Awards are predominantly an incentive for innovation and a recognition to those who drive innovation succesfully, putting innovators in the spot lights so they can act as a light house for all others struggling with similar topics. An implementation of Shared Services itself is nothing new, hardly innovative so to speak. However, implementing a Shared Service Center, whilst running a substantial change management process, on SAP's Shared Services Framework in a matter of months is quite an achievement. The true innovation lies in the implementation approach itself: DSM and SAP Consulting have implemented the Shared Services Framework using the Agile project methodology (ASAP add-on) leveraging the content of SAP Shared Service Framework Rapid-Deployment Solution for Financials.
Therefore, the Quality Award recognizes the value of SAP's Rapid Deployment Solutions, acknowledging the true acceleration of implementation, drastically shortening the time to value and reducing the total cost of implementation significantly. SAP's continuous investment in Rapid-Deployment Solutions has thusfar resulted in a comprehensive portfolio of over 150 solutions, covering all Line-of-Business solutions, industry-specific solutions and innovative topics such as HANA and Mobility. Our customers embrace the value of Rapid-Deployment Solutions, appreciate the concept of flexibility combined with the predictability of a fixed-price, fixed-time and fixed-scope implementation. The combination of software, best-practices, accelerators, documentation, enablement materials and implementation services form the key components of any Rapid-Deployment Solution. Where some customers leverage a Rapid-Deployment Solution to implement an on-premise CRM system in just a matter of weeks, other customers benefit from the speed and content of the HANA Rapid-Deployment Solutions. However, the importance of this particular award is underlining the added value of an Agile project leveraging Rapid-Deployment Solutions in an innovative environment. Therefore, adding Innovation (Capital I) to the list of added value of SAP's Rapid-Deployment Solutions.
Hereby, I congratulate DSM and the whole project team on this great achievement and I am looking forward to all innovations ahead. In the meantime, be sure to listen to and speak with other SAP customers benefiting from the value of SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions at the upcoming SAPPHIRENOW in Madrid (November 13-15, TechEd, November 13-16)
