The Quality Management (QM) module from SAP is designed to help improve the quality of a company’s products from the planning stages through execution. However, many companies implement QM without a firm understanding of its capabilities — leading to painful changes, poor user adoption, and other problems. 

Doug TenBrock, an SAP QM/materials management (MM) consultant at Enowa Consulting, is an expert in the field of QM implementations. TenBrock blames an overall lack of consulting expertise for many poor implementations of QM, and says he’s seen first hand what can go wrong when a detailed roadmap isn’t used to guide an implementation. At several companies, TenBrock has been forced to take drastic action — including reimplementation — to fix faulty QM implementations.

Such fiascos can add extreme consulting costs to what is already a challenging project. The key to avoiding such messes, according to TenBrock, is to bring key project players together for an intensive roadmap session before the technical work begins. The roadmap session is a day-long event in which a QM consultant and the internal project team work through all the functionality of QM and map those capabilities to the company’s business requirements.

“Roadmap sessions can be difficult,” he says. “But the cost of not doing them is more painful.”

TenBrock has developed a formal approach to roadmap sessions to help clients plan for QM implementations. However, you could use the process for any SAP module implementation.  

Do You Need a Roadmap Session?

A roadmap session is ideal for cases in which QM has not yet been implemented. However, it is also helpful in cases in which QM has already been implemented but hasn’t been properly aligned to the business or the company doesn’t fully understand the capabilities of the module. Even if you’ve already begun a QM implementation, you may still find value in a rigorous roadmap session, says TenBrock. “The best case would be a company roadmapping QM prior to go-live, but if they didn’t, I still recommend they do it now.”

The planning and execution of a roadmap session can be hard work, says TenBrock, “It’s a full, full day. You’re starting at 8 a.m. and going until 5 or 6 o’clock. Doing the prep work is not that easy and then doing the roadmap work is not that easy.”

TenBrock says that planning, creating, and holding a roadmap session should amount to a two-week commitment for both the project manager and a qualified consultant: one week to prepare and one week to hold the meeting and present the plan to management. “I would not recommend a consultant commit to a roadmap session without having 40 hours before to prep for it,” he says.

Preparing Your Roadmap Session

Choose a Lead

In addition to a QM consultant, your company needs to appoint an internal team lead with a strong background in quality management to represent the company in communications with the consultant, says TenBrock. Before the roadmap session, the internal lead works with the consultant to determine what needs to be covered in the roadmap session, where and when it will be, and who should be involved in the process. Ideally, the consultant and team lead should meet in person during the planning stage. At the very least, they should be able to conduct an online meeting.

The internal lead determines which business areas will be involved in the roadmap session and the contact person from each department. The contact person for each department chooses which members of their department will participate in the roadmap session.

The internal lead helps the consultant run the roadmap session. A key function of the team lead is the ability to keep the project team from infighting, says TenBrock.

“It can get kind of tense because you’re talking about triggers within quality that should be there all along but aren’t — maybe purchasing and production have been going around them,” says TenBrock. “When we’re in these meetings, we’re talking about these hooks that can stop that from happening and integration triggers to make sure they happen.”

Other Roadmap Session Roles

During the roadmap session, make sure you have these three roles filled to facilitate a well-run and well-documented meeting:

• Whiteboard scribe: Takes down the notes discussed during the meeting on a white board high enough for everyone to read. Notes should be kept in organized categories.

• Paper scribe: Keeps notes on paper at a detailed level

• Time keeper: Ensures the meeting is kept on track and discussions remain on topic

Prepare Your Quality Business Initiatives

To map the QM functionality to your business initiatives, the business side should provide the following three quality business initiatives to the roadmap session (Figure 1):

• Quality manual: describes the current corporate quality policy
• Standard operating procedures: describes corporate processes
• Work instructions: detailed instructions on completing tasks

“Every business should have these documents already created,” says TenBrock. “If you went into a company that didn’t have them in place, take it as another sign you should be doing this roadmap, because their processes are not probably very good.”

Figure 1

Quality business initiatives should be brought to the roadmap meeting to align current and future business processes

You can use these materials to map existing or should-be-existing processes to the QM functionality. For example, most manufacturing firms have some variation on the vendor release process, in which those responsible for quality management must sign off on a new type of material received from a vendor before the purchasing department buys the material. Most companies can point to this procedure in their documentation, says TenBrock, yet very few follow it. QM includes triggers that prevent purchasing from buying materials until they have been released by quality management, enabling the company to enforce its own policies.

Conducting the Roadmap Session

The main part of the roadmap session is a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation given by the QM consultant that explains the benefits and functionality of QM. The PowerPoint presentation should cover both high-level concepts as well as the low-level, detailed functionality.

In addition to a PowerPoint presentation, the QM consultant should also be prepared to walk the team through demos of each piece of QM functionality. “The demos are a big part, because you’re showing them along with telling them how things work,” says TenBrock. “The internal team will have an opportunity to say ‘What is that?’ ‘How does that relate to what we do?’ or ‘Is that something we should be doing that we’ve never done?’”

You can record these demos using a generic QM system, or run them directly from an installed system at your company. TenBrock prefers the impact of using the company’s actual system. “Otherwise they get caught up on the material I used for a recorded demo that is different from their material, and it creates an unnecessary roadblock in the meeting.”

As the consultant explains and demonstrates the available QM functionality, the assembled team should discuss whether they think it benefits the business. If it aligns with the business quality manual and processes and procedures within the company, the scribe should add the functionality to the list of in-scope items.

The business side should be sure to bring up processes that still need to be discussed so the QM consultant can cover these, ensuring every process has been addressed.

Prioritizing and Saving the Notes

When the roadmap session comes to a close, the next step is to prioritize the paper and white board notes, says TenBrock. Separate out the in-scope items from the general notes and number them in order of importance to begin to create short- and long-term plans. The team can now begin to determine how many items should be completed this quarter, this year, or in the two- or three-year plan.

It is important that the QM consultant and the internal team members go through this together, says TenBrock. The internal members will know which capabilities are necessary to align with business needs, while the consultant will know whether specific functionalities should be implemented in sequence or at the same time. Together, you can determine the best schedule in terms of budget and functionality importance to create a strong QM roadmap.

TenBrock advises companies to save all the notes that are generated from the roadmap session. “Because when you go to budget, members of the finance group or management are going to want to see the details of who said what and where the requests are coming from.” Collecting all notes from the paper and white board scribes and typing them up guarantees all details are available if and when you need to go back to them.

Creating Roadmaps and Presenting Them to Management

Once the notes have been prioritized, you can begin creating short- and long-term roadmaps. While you can choose to create just one of the two roadmaps, Tenbrock recommends creating both to stress how important the future steps are. “Short-term just gives you more of the impact that this is right on our doorstep — you’re looking at 12 months now, not quarters. When they look at quarters I almost feel like they think it’s no big deal because it’s just two little boxes. When you open it up and you’re looking at six months, however, you get a little more serious.” See Figure 2 for examples of short- and long-term roadmaps.

Figure 2

An example of short-term and long-term roadmaps

When creating the roadmaps, be aware of other business initiatives and staff schedules to ensure that resources will not be double booked. Having an idea of budget plans for the coming years also helps when planning out how much money you’ll request for the QM initiative.

Finally, before turning over the roadmaps to management, have your team sign off on them to ensure everyone agrees on the roadmaps and no misunderstandings made it through to the final plan.

Once all functionality has been addressed and the short-and long-term roadmaps have been created, it’s time to present the plan to management. This meeting should include management from all segments of the company represented at the roadmapping session, says TenBrock. Typically these include production, purchasing, financing, quality, and, because the implementation will no doubt affect other areas of the business, change management. “You’re going to have a much greater chance of getting budget if mid, high, or upper management is in there,” says TenBrock.

Upper management may, after seeing the plan and budget laid out, reject part of the proposal or funding. “If they push back and say we can’t do all this, that’s fine, says Tenbrock. “That doesn’t mean that later, since we have the roadmap in place, they can’t come back around and readdress it.”

Laura Casasanto

Laura Casasanto is a technical editor who served as the managing editor of SCM Expert and Project Expert.

You may contact the author at lauracasasanto@gmail.com.

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