We are a new Customer and do not find this software as intuitive as we thought and would like to know if others experienced the same growing pains with setup and implementation?

[Former Member]

We are in the process of setup and implementation for the past two months with the anticipation of going live on January 1 2015. I thought the software would be intuitive but find it more difficult to comprehend and understand the setup process. We are planning on testing the software during November and editing the setup as required, but Project Management and Finance/Accounting (Account determination groups) are not doing as well as I expecting with setup and their learning curves. We do not have anyone on staff that has used this software and I am having a difficult time finding experienced Users.

Did any of you experience the same issues and if so, what solutions did you use to assist with? Did you implement in a similar time table or was it a shorter or longer duration.

Any insight you may have would be greatly appreciated!

[Former Member]

Ed,

You are not alone.  We are also new to the SAPbyDesign.  Even we hire a consultancy firm (recommended by SAP), we are facing a lot of problem as we are new in the region.

Some parameters are irreversible.  Once you set that up, you can't change them even though you found them inappropriate. 

Currently, we found the below in our testing environment which have fundamental issues but we cannot change it back.

1. fiscal year

2. country (we are those so called "non-localized" countries. We were trying to pick a "localized" version and fine-tune it but we found issues in VAT and problems in functional currencies)

We are so frustrating too.  We are trying our best to study the system by ourselves.  Could someone help give us a list of irreversible steps that we should be aware?

Regards,

Norine

[Former Member]

Ed,

Account Determination Groups tends to be a hurdle for most customers that haven't used them before, but they key to understanding them seems to realize that, compared to certain customers current processes, account determination groups were designed to handle significantly more complex scenarios.

Fundamentally, they exist to provide consistency for financial postings in an environment with multiple sets of books. What this can do is only have the staff entering transactions have to know the Account Determination Group, but for two (or more) different sets of books, the exact same transaction can actually hit two (or more) different G/L Accounts in order to meet reporting requirements. Or, for example, if staff handle transactions for multiple companies, they do not have to know that G/L Account XXXXXX is applicable to the Company A, but G/L Account YYYYYY is the one to use for a different Company B. They just have to know the appropriate Account Determination Group and the postings will happen correctly.

We had the usual series of questions with customers that only operated in a single country with one chart of accounts ("why can't I just enter a G/L account?"). To make their lives easier, we specified the Account Determination Groups with the same ID as the G/L they were assigned to. This works (provided you don't expect to expand into multiple charts of accounts, otherwise you’ll have to change everything)

As for Project Management, the key to understanding that is that there is a distinct separation between the different portions of it. For example, in Customer Projects with Sales Integration, Revenue is based on the Sales Orders – it is not controlled on the Project. Likewise, the Costs must be linked to Sales Orders to correctly recognize.

As far as the operational aspects of Project Management, staffing seems to be a major one. To ensure the smoothest process, Projects must be staffed correctly, and the start/end dates of tasks must be set correctly. Otherwise, people will be trying to enter time and will not find the tasks they need on their time sheet.

It's a pretty aggressive time frame, but i think it's doable - they key is to reduce confusion as much as possible early in training.

[Former Member]

Ed,

The last intuitive application I used was Candy Crush. Outside of that everything has a learning curve and ByDesign is no exception.

Account Determination Groups gave us a bit of trouble during implementation and I can't say that we fully understand their purpose and use even today. But we don't revisit them very often post-implementation. Project Management is not overly intuitive either so you have picked a couple tough areas to get stuck in.

There are some really smart and experienced users on here. You might get some specific answers to more direct questions you have. Many of the questions and answers on this forum go over my head but someone here can probably help.

Jim