As the director of services sales in North America for SAP Rapid Deployment solutions, I’d like to address a common misconception about SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions, which I hear about often. And that is: SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions are limited in scope, which somehow limits our customers.
Quite the opposite is true. SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions do not limit our customers - they open up possibilities for our customers - and the rapid-deployment process enables them for long term success with SAP. When you think of SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions, think Predictability, Integration, & Choice.
Each SAP initiative starts with a business issue or problem that we wish to address. It might be that we wish to improve a process by automating it, or we wish to gain insight about our business by gaining access to information. Whatever it is, we seek to find a technology – in this case SAP software – that addresses that business problem. Often times, the perception is that we can’t just simply use the software right out-of-the box. There is a new user interface that will require training. There are other systems that the technology needs to integrate with. There are slight variations between how the software works out-of-the box, and how our business needs it to work. This is where millions and millions of dollars have been spent over the years… matching the software to our business processes and vice versa. This process has come to be represented by the term “transformation”. For years, the message to SAP customers is that their project is not just adopting a new tool under their control, but a “transformation”, which is a long, labor-intensive, expensive, and risk-laden process.
In this day and age, most potential customers in the SAP marketplace do not have an appetite for transformation, instead opting for the adoption of innovation in waves, where each wave is swift, certain, is consumable by users, and – most of all – has a payoff. SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions offer you just that; a low-risk, predefined method for setting SAP software up to provide business benefit in the short term, in bite-sized chunks, without trading off long term integration.
It is true that they do not accomplish all that is possible with the software. After all, SAP software is almost infinitely adaptable; over the past 40 years, SAP has been used by nearly 200,000 organizations and today SAP touches more than 63% of the world’s financial transaction revenue. However, you also don’t need to start with a white sheet of paper in your task of configuring software that has been configured 200,000 times before you; just use what’s available to you in the SAP Rapid Deployment Solution as the first step. It makes sense. Why reinvent the wheel? SAP ourselves are using the rapid-deployment approach (click to here read the blog from our CIO’s office).
So how does this process enable you? First off, your business is literally enabled by the new capability; each rapid-deployment solution gives you a software platform that delivers business benefits. Second, there is the content and enablement that is included in every rapid-deployment solution deal. These are assets - step by step guides, business process documentation, configuration guides, etc. - that will assist in the initial set up of the software as well as its long term use. Lastly, your users use the solution, become vested in it, and can help direct future enhancements and innovations they’d like to see. And the really good thing is that after a rapid-deployment solution, you have not spent a ton of time, effort, or money!
Finally, there’s nothing to say you cannot have elements of both a classical delivery and a rapid-deployment delivery in your plan. In today’s world, we are combining a rapid-deployment delivery with more classical delivery components so that we accelerate the parts of the program that can be accelerated, while taking a more classical approach with the rest.
Either way, SAP Rapid Deployments never limit what you do… they only help you do it better!
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