A successful SAP project team is one that implements solutions on time and on budget. Francois Estellon, CIO and vice president of IT at Bucyrus, will tell you that a very successful team is one that learns from past experience and fine-tunes its processes to complete projects faster and more efficiently to reduce costs and speed return on investment (ROI).

Prior to becoming CIO at the mining equipment maker, Estellon was the company’s global SAP head and IT integration manager and built an extremely efficient SAP implementation team. Today, in addition to the traditional CIO duties, he still spends a lot of his time working with Joseph Micic, his successor as global SAP director, to guide and assist the company’s SAP project teams in accelerating their deployments. That could include everything from advising Micic on keeping teams adequately challenged to keying in purchase orders the night before a go-live. “We are doing projects in weeks that typically take months or years,” Estellon says.

Project Expert talked to Estellon and Micic to collect their thoughts and strategies on accelerating SAP projects and keeping project teams motivated. They gave us six tips that have helped them build the successful project track record they have today.

1. SAP Implementations Are Not IT Projects

“An SAP team should be an ‘implementation team,’ not an ‘installation team’ for your company,” says Estellon, explaining that the difference is the business emphasis on the former versus the IT emphasis on the latter.

Most failed ERP projects can be traced back to the gap between what the business needed and what IT delivered. Essentially, that gap is created through a lack of communication and knowledge sharing between the two sides. Estellon says rather than trying to find a way to bridge the gap during or after implementation, a more effective approach to minimize that gap is building an implementation team that includes internal business experts and consultants trained on SAP. By understanding the business side better, these team members can diagnose pain points succinctly and ensure they are addressed adequately with the right solution.

2. Executive Support Is Yours to Win or Lose

As important as it is to win executive support for an SAP project, Estellon points out it’s just as important to maintain that support after you’ve won it. For example, long, drawn-out technical presentations to executive team members that don’t ask direct questions or provide clear action items for them will almost surely result in fewer attendees at the next meeting. “Keep those presentations to two slides that focus on what’s going well with the project and areas in which you need their input,” he says.

Getting executive input and decision making up front can help minimize how often you need to provide status updates. “You need to identify early on what are the key decisions that executives will need to make about this project and present them with a clear list of those decisions,” Estellon says. “And you need to emphasize that once these decisions are made, the project is going forward based on them and changing them means halting the implementation.”

Executives must also understand their roles in the project decisions they make. “If they want centralized reporting under a single controlling office, they need to know they will be responsible for defining and maintaining those centralized processes,” Estellon says. “They won’t want to hear that, but making them understand it is a key factor to success.”

Micic says the key to maintaining executive support and accelerating ERP deployment is understanding the executives’ vision for the company and the role the ERP system will play in that vision. This knowledge will help IT project teams manage requests from the operating businesses that are in conflict with the executives’ plans. “At the end of the day the ERP system can have a large impact on the business’ ability to execute the executive’s vision for the company,” says Micic.

Regarding executive reporting, rather than ask executives what they’d like to see in their dashboards, it’s more efficient to do some homework up front and start discussions with a model. “Talk to the business leads because they have the time and really understand what their executive is after,” Estellon says. “Ask them what their executive complains about and what analytics they can’t show him. Then do a mock-up based on that so that their pain points and priorities are already reflected in the first iteration of the dashboards.”

Again, Estellon recommends keeping dashboards minimal. He says you know you have enough data on the dashboards when you get a “yes” to this question: “Could you run your business on just these metrics?”

Estellon says SAP project leaders need to prepare for the day their executive sponsors leave the company – specifically, how project teams will be protected. “That means being able to clarify the business case and the reasons behind everything you did to the new executive,” he says. “The first thing new executives do is meet with local managers where they may hear complaints about the way the SAP system is set up from a few malcontents at the local level. If you can anticipate the resulting questions that executives may have and have answers ready, you will be one step closer to winning over your new executive sponsor.”

3. Process Mapping: Pay Me Now, Pay Me Later

For most SAP implementations, a project team can take two approaches to process mapping. The first involves spending a great deal of time up front mapping all the company’s processes and data flows to create a detailed blueprint on which the implementation can be based. This approach can take two years in a large company. Estellon says this approach works best at companies that have mature and consistent processes across their businesses.

The second approach is to implement one business unit at a time, spending a few days understanding how that specific business unit works by following data flows and processes. From there it’s a matter of using SAP best practices to define processes and doing a gap analysis for processes that don’t fit into a template. If you know up front you’re going to be coming across a different version of each process as you work through the implementation, then this approach is far more expeditious than the first approach.

The gap analysis requires working with the local business managers to understand which of their processes cannot fit into the standard template. Micic says at first pass, all the process owners will classify their business processes as unique and vital to the business. So it may require a discussion with the business managers and process owners to compare their process with others in the business to demonstrate which processes are truly unique and which fit well into a best practices template.

“That’s where you need confidence in your executive support for the project, because there will be some complaining and groaning there,” Micic says.

4. Reuse and Recycle for Efficiency 

An added benefit of the aforementioned second implementation approach is that it also lets project teams increase process-mapping experience along the way and leverage their previous work in new projects. The team perfects the steps to understand what the local business does and becomes adept at following the data flows in a business.

“When you’re implementing the same business processes over and over, the implementation is routine, the test processes are already done, and the configuration is done,” Micic says. “Most of the data is the same, and you know the mechanism of the data loads works because it’s been done so many times. The only question is if it loads the right data set based on the legacy data.”

When a project team does encounter a unique process within the enterprise, SAP likely has a best practice available for it, so Estellon suggests checking with SAP first rather than going solo. Once the implementation is complete, the process and template go into the arsenal, available for future projects, should the need arise.

5. Once You Build a Good Team, Keep Its Members Happy

One of the drawbacks of developing a very motivated project team is it needs to be challenged often. “One thing is clear,” says Estellon, “once they go to an implementation team, they will never be happy going back to an installation team.” Good implementation teams work with the business to understand pain points and priorities and bring solutions that address them. Those skill sets make good business leaders or turnaround experts, not IT installation managers or support teams. So keep the project team members challenged and active if you want them to remain engaged.

“Of course recognition and compensation play into this as well,” says Estellon. “If a team is accelerating implementations, reducing your reliance on outside consultants and expediting your ROI, it is saving you enough that you can give the team members proper bonuses.”

Bringing new people onto a very successful project team can also be challenging. Once the team has a well-defined model for success, its members don’t take well to outsiders offering new input. A successful strategy, says Estellon, is to pull someone from a local business, even if that person has minimal SAP experience, because he or she understands a business’ pain points, and working on an SAP project team will give that person a broader view of the business. 

6. Slings and Arrows

As a last piece of advice, Estellon points out that rolling through a series of SAP implementations across the business can leave some “burned ground” behind. It’s important that project teams understand that in some ways, the more successful they are, the less popular they may be within the enterprise.

“Teams do what’s right for the business, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be popular,” he says. “The results will win respect, but maybe not a lot of friends.”