So as you saw in Holly's coming soon blog we have announced a new functionality for SAP. So I thought I would blog some of my thoughts on it.

People deploy SAP for many situations/reasons, with the primary goal of making their employees more efficient and productive. Typically when you make your employees more productive and efficient you create a situation where ROI is very easy to show.  According to Nucleus Research

"Companies achieving benefits from SAP in three areas:

• Increased employee productivity and reduced head count

• Improved operations management

• Improved information organization and access for decision making

In attempting to have a positive ROI companies are running into user adoption issues. Companies are ending up not having a complete deployment of SAP to all of its users.  Nucleus found that "Fifty-seven percent of SAP customers interviewed did not believe that they had achieved a positive ROI, after having used their SAP applications for an average of 2.8 years. Those who did achieve a positive ROI limited customization and project scope, and they focused on user adoption and repeatability."

According to Nucleus research

"A positive return on the SAP investment was achieved only when there was both a sufficient number of users and sufficient frequency of use (breadth and repeatability) to reap significant productivity based gains from the solution."

Finding situations where a company has all or even most of its employees licensed and using SAP is rare.  Some examples I have heard were in the neighborhood of 25%, are full active users.  Companies who are not making full use of the SAP system for whatever reason have a huge potential to dramatically increase their ROI by figuring out a way to increase the reach of the tool set. 

SAP does make great software tools that are focused on building in business rules and logic into the software.  However, what they are not good at is the presentation layer.  The user interfaces to SAP are to say the least not ideal. This situation creates a great opportunity for a strategic partnership with companies such as K2 and Microsoft.  It appears that both Microsoft and SAP have realized this in their partnership.  Most of the development work in this area is focused on how you can get these two product sets to work together.  The real first stab at this for Microsoft was Mendocino. They have since started working on other points of integration with BizTalk and the .Net connector(s?). Companies that deploy products such as SAP begin to realize that integrating with and interacting with people is the trickiest part of the solution. Making interaction with SAP easier and more familiar can be key to user adoption and, as a result, key to achieving positive ROI.

Microsoft and K2 can help companies more easily and quickly get value from SAP. With Microsoft and K2 companies can.

1. Reduce deployment time
2. Achieve greater reach and greater benefit of SAP functionality
3. Reduce training costs for training of end users

A key point in the list above is the reduction in training. Many organizations must spend a great deal of time on training their users on SAP interfaces.

According to Nucleus Research:

"Companies trained their users for an average of 49 hours and a median of 10 hours following their SAP deployments. The level of training required varied widely and depended on the technology implemented and the degree of change that the SAP application introduced into the user's work environment"

Imagine the reduction in training that you could achieve by exposing the SAP functionality in Outlook, InfoPath or SharePoint. Imagine using these tools that your users are already familiar with versus a completely separate interface. With K2 connect you can do this EASILY.

So what is K2 connect for SAP?  If you have seen some of the videos you see that there are really two parts to it.  

1. The building of the SAP service, interface or Service Object. This is very similar to our other interfaces in K2 blackpearl, the developer will experience our drag and drop declarative technology.  This is usually done by a SAP-knowledgeable person who knows what modules to use and what they provide etc.  They can then quickly publish this out to the .Net developers to leverage in almost any way they need.  This methodology allows the SAP developer to quickly address the needs of the requestor and move on to other things.  This makes him/her more efficient and dramatically reduces implementation time and resource utilization.
2. The .Net developer then uses this Service Object and builds applications with it.  Either automatically with the tool set or through any number of other methods such as MOSS. Once the core SAP work is done and exposed in a K2 and.Net world, the skill sets necessary to take this to the next level are far cheaper and more readily available.  Also since they are fairly standard they are also more flexible.

Now let's take the next logical step in the evolution of this type of solution.  What if this type of product now could tie into other suites such as People Soft, Siebel etc?  Then the true nature of SmartObjects takes the next leap, where the user is able to access the source data from all of these systems in an aggregated manner, providing a powerful picture into their work. Then when they update this data or take actions on it depending on which pieces are worked on, they can have this trigger updates to the proper source or kick off workflow that first requires approval before updates are made.  (ϋber solution)  Perhaps we can think of this and K2 as essentially a composite application builder…

Overall Key messages:

1. SAP makes powerful tool sets focused on the back end
2. Microsoft makes fantastic interfaces and tools that help on the front end.
3. Taking the best of both worlds and marrying them helps companies increase the reach of the tool set and dramatically increases ROI by helping them realize the promise of SAP and extending it out to the masses
4. Using K2 connect makes all of this a reality in a short time frame and with much less effort than it would normally take, allowing the SAP teams to focus on SAP and not the interfaces and display methodology.
   1. The skill set now required to focus on this is much more readily available and cheaper.
   2. Significantly reduces deployment times.

Wrapping up I want to leave you with a few points to remember.

One of the keys to achieving a positive ROI with an SAP deployment is broad user adoption. Utilizing K2 connect, you can quickly and easily expose SAP data and functionality in a variety of familiar interfaces, making user adoption quicker and easier and reducing the amount of training.

Another key hurdle to achieving ROI according to Nucleus Research was "Lack of breadth and repeatability in addition to often excessive customization." By utilizing K2 connect and the underlying technologies such as SmartObjects you can dramatically limit the amount of expensive customization done to SAP in favor of the much more palatable Microsoft interfaces. In addition utilizing these underlying K2 technologies allows for greater re-use of these interfaces across applications, processes, and environments.

The Nucleus research notes were taken from RESEARCH NOTE D23 at http://nucleusresearch.com/ Registration would be required. I actually found the full PDF at http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analystportal/insider/nucleus_real_ROI_SAP_2003.pdf