Mar 10, 2026
•4 minute read
SAP Center of Excellence
What is SAP COE?
Centers of Excellence provide business and application expertise to support the effective daily operations and improvement of different business or IT functions. The SAP Center of Excellence (COE) focuses on these tasks for SAP systems and solutions in place at an organization. They provide functions such as implementing new SAP systems, designing new processes, optimizing existing processes, managing projects, providing user support and training, and keeping the SAP landscape running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
What is SAP COE?
Centers of Excellence provide business and application expertise to support the effective daily operations and improvement of different business or IT functions. The SAP Center of Excellence (COE) focuses on these tasks for SAP systems and solutions in place at an organization. They provide functions such as implementing new SAP systems, designing new processes, optimizing existing processes, managing projects, providing user support and training, and keeping the SAP landscape running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Some of the benefits that a SAP COE offers include: a repository of SAP deployment best practices; a central point-of-contact for all SAP-related matters; a place where strong competencies can be developed; a means to enhance the value of SAP solutions; improved SAP personnel retention; and improved service levels. While there is an investment involved in creating a SAP COE, with many organizations running dozens or hundreds of SAP systems there can be a significant organizational benefit to setting up a COE.
Key Considerations for SAPinsiders:
- Building a successful COE requires planning and investment, both financial and from a resource perspective. According to David Jantzen and Dan Haynes of Deloitte, some of the key steps to setting up a successful SAP COE include: ensuring appropriate leadership, defining how the organization will work, building tight relationships with business and IT teams, and defining appropriate metrics.
- You can boost the success of your SAP COE by developing and defining the right metrics. Many organizations view their SAP COE as little more than a support organization. However, given the value of SAP systems and the resources invested in the COE itself, this limits the overall value the team can provide. By developing the right metrics it is possible to transform the COE from a support team to a key part of the business. In this article SAPinsider spoke with Ken Grady of Novartis how they appropriately defined metrics to help transform their SAP COE into a valuable part of the business.
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