I consider teamwork to be one of the essences of SAP since the day I learned that five colleagues from IBM teamed up to pursue a dream which became a great success still in our days. Recently I lived one of the most rewarding experiences in my career at SAP in Barbados. In 2011, SAP signed a contract with the National Insurance Scheme of Barbados to replace their in-house developments with a reliable, maintainable and scalable solution which included licenses, implementation services and a custom development project to complement the standard solution and address the customer specific processes.
The National Insurance Scheme of Barbados provides social benefits to assist its citizens in coping with the various forms of difficulties that present themselves to humankind. The underlying philosophy of the scheme recognizes that the greatest asset of Barbados is its people, and it seeks to maximize their resources in national economic development, so this project would have a direct social impact in the life of the its habitants
The project started in 2012 with the implementation but beginning of 2013 it started to face a very challenging situation due to the lack of existing knowledge for the Social Services solutions since it was just recently released to the market, the lack of information from the customer legacy system, problems with remote connectivity and performance and workforce rotation.
After the initial calls with SAP stakeholders it became transparent that an alignment among the different organizations involved was required and a face to face meeting has been organized where each LoB sent their representative. After a two days alignment meeting between sales, Public Sector IBU, SAP consulting and Customer Development, the team overcome differences, combined strengths and left with a single common goal: provide all necessary support to bring the customer live. Since that meeting there were no longer different organizations but just a One team with a collaborative, non-blocking, integrated project with common goals which was perceived at the customer higher executive level creating a very trustful relationship.
The result of this collaboration is that since January 2015, the National Insurance Scheme of Barbados runs SAP solutions for the Public Sector, enhanced by Custom Development, to manage the social benefits and contributions of more than 280.000 Barbadian citizens. This is the first go live of the SAP’s Social Service solution. The team reached not only their common goals but their organizational goals at the same time. For me it has been simple great to be part of a winning team, to have supported our customer to use a modern solution which help them providing a world-class customer service with transparency and compliance, facilitating the life of those people in Barbados who somehow needs social assistance.
By José Roberto Kuplich, Custom Development
