Top 7 Hidden SAP Support Expenses: #1 & #2

Today I will discuss the first 2 hidden expenses when it comes to supporting your SAP system. Before reading this, I would suggest reading my introduction to the Top 7 Hidden SAP Support Expenses series.

#1: Water Cooler Creep

When a company has an entire internal IT SAP team that maintains and supports SAP, the possibility of what we call “water cooler creep” will always happen. In their support roles, the SAP team might not have enough things to keep them busy 8 hours a day (if they do, this would lead to more questions). Business users come to them with requests, or it starts in a hallway discussion, resulting in a small project (under the radar) being started. In a lot of cases this work is not approved by management and can cause even more problems by negatively impacting their SAP counterparts who are working in the DEV environment on approved projects. People are now shaking their heads just thinking about what ABAP programmers can do to the system if not managed.

The resolution of this problem is to know exactly what you are paying for in support and what items are being worked on. In very large organizations they usually have these disciplines in place so we see this problem more in the smaller companies that have very good relationships with their business counterparts. Smaller companies are inherently not as disconnected from IT as the larger companies with IT organizations that appear as a wholly owned subsidiary of the company.

#2: Upgrades

As SAP has continued to evolve over the years companies that implemented SAP (over 5-10 years ago) could have upgraded at least 2-3 times. With the absence of any new functionality being added to the upgrade it should be just a technical exercise. When a consulting firm is asked to help in the upgrade they will propose having full time consultants for every module in addition to BASIS and ABAP programmers. This has caused many SAP customers to stop their upgrades due to overall costs that were difficult to justify.

In many cases, companies have retained an entire support staff internally knowing they will upgrade sometime in the future. Again these costs are being paid for with a future expectation that the company at some point will upgrade. It is not shocking that a very large percentage of SAP companies have not upgraded higher than 4.6C. What organizations need to do is have outside support for upgrades, to use only when needed as opposed to having a staff sitting and waiting for the next upgrade to happen - draining your budget and your bottom line.

I highly welcome any comments regarding hidden cost #1 and #2 in the comments section below. Stay tuned next week for expense #3, 4 and 5!

- Mike Kerrigan, Managing Principle, ERP Services