What is a Center of Excellence (CoE)?

I was lucky to participate in a meeting with Douglas Shuptar and Patrick Bresnan where they were presenting to a long time SAP customer that is spinning up several new projects.  The customer has been extremely successful with SAP but they want to take their implementation to the next level.  Creating a CoE is the answer.

Doug’s definition of a COE is “a team acting across business units to align stakeholders, manage operations and deliver innovative solutions at the “right” price and quality.”

The following are four benefits of a CoE:

Drives Value from the SAP investments and provides the management and support for solutions as an integrated team using common processes.

Drives Accountability by assuring that all requests are balanced against a common resource pool, and prioritized by business value, current commitments and future plans

Drives Business Alignment through collaborative development of strategic plans, business cases, and requirements while involving SAP expertise early in the Demand Process

Optimizes Resources by focusing team members on high-value add functional and technical services while developing and maintaining a close alignment with their business counterparts

When building a COE, all decision should make sure they increase customer satisfaction, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and generate business value.

I would be interested in your experiences with creating a CoE.  What term does your organization call a CoE?  Please comment below or e-mail me directly @ mark.marcus@sap.com.