Measuring and Maximizing ROI on SAP Projects

With the move to SAP S/4HANA in full effect, SAP organizations are searching for the best strategies to justify their ERP investment and maximize the value and innovation they can drive with these technologies.

Yet not every company is making the move to SAP S/4HANA just yet, and the expense is the top reason why. SAPinsider’s recent SAP S/4HANA Migration report found that 62% of companies who had not yet started making the move cited the high cost of the project as a reason why, making it by far the most selected answer.

Determining the Value of IT Projects

Organizations have broadly indicated that they want to be able to quantify ROI from SAP S/4HANA, yet they are unsure if this is possible because of their experience with SAP ECC. Measuring the value of an IT project can be difficult for several reasons. These explanations include:

• Projects can be influenced more by the budgets and timelines that teams are given to work with, rather than the business outcomes they are trying to achieve
• Resources often change from original teams, budgets, and timelines
• There are often diminishing returns on new functionalities

To help optimize SAP applications, many companies are turning to trusted advisors like Titan Consulting. Working with experienced third-party consultants can help businesses identify both processes and technologies that allow them to generate measurable ROI in their SAP projects that justifies investment and drives the companies towards achieving their business goals.

Customer Success Story – Little Hinges Swing Big Doors

To illustrate the importance of finding a trusted partner for important projects, Titan Consulting highlighted the story of a mid-sized bakery that needed some EDI enhancement work. As the bakery’s business grew, it needed to update its SAP ECC functionality to support new processes. The bakery had worked with Titan Consulting in the past and brought them back once again to help.

After one of Titan’s Supply Chain Solutions Architects met with the bakery, they noticed a few areas that could be improved. These pain points were:

• Materials planning and scheduling was still done manually on spreadsheets
• The bakery had unreliable data on its raw and immediate inventory levels
• Lack of best practices for subcontracting processes

Once identified, Titan Consulting helped educate the bakery’s leadership – this included moving on from manual spreadsheets and teaching key users which best practices to adopt for inventory tracking. Eventually, the client was able to enhance EDI processes, ensure the correct quantity of materials were purchased, and shed the legacy practices that held them back from achieving success.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

There is never a bad time to implement best practices. Companies often fall into bad habits within their critical workflows. Whether that is manual spreadsheets, data integrity issues, or workers being spread too thin. Though it may be difficult in the short term to overhaul deeply entrenched workflows, implementing best practices will pay dividends for years to come.

IT projects can be challenging. Fortunately, you don’t have to do them alone. As the costs for IT projects increase, companies often look for ways to save and sometimes opt to go it alone. Though this can be slightly less expensive in the short term, it often results in inefficient processes and missed opportunities as companies do not have the expertise needed to oversee an expansive IT project. Companies in this dilemma find that a trusted third party like Titan Consulting can offer an external perspective, identify bottlenecks, and help businesses run more efficiently.

Building better business cases builds better businesses. Companies of all sizes have competing priorities for investment and limited budgets. In order to get the funding, they need to continuously improve operations, companies must demonstrate that their SAP projects will deliver measurable ROI. Understanding which projects to target and how to show the value of these projects is essential to securing continued investment in ERP improvements. These projects, when successful, deliver significant value throughout the organization and help drive innovation so companies can meet their business goals.