SAP’s on-demand solutions – what if I am offline ?


Over the last couple of weeks, there has been an overload of news about cool stuff happening on SAP’s On-demand and mobile world, especially the sales on demand solution. From what I have read so far, SAP should be genuinely proud of every thing they are doing in these important areas. But, in all this frenzy – from SAP and from the folks who commented on it – I wonder why I don’t see anything about the offline aspects of the sales function.

A sales person is usually NOT connected to internet all the time. A good many of them actually do data entry stuff  on plane  rides etc.  And only a small fraction of planes have internet connections. So, these people  have to put information into spreadsheets etc – and then if their boss pushes them hard, they will grudgingly type it into a system of record some time.  Some of them I know will probably do it only if their commission is predicated on such data entry 🙂

Which reminds me  – does sales on demand also have a place for sales guys to do their expense reports? I seriously think it should. If not for anything else, at least it will be enough to get these people to use the on-demand solution, and then might have an interest in trying the “sales” part of it too.

On-demand solutions also need an offline feature to it to make them successful.  Otherwise, however nifty a solution is, it just won’t get used by sales people. Can sales on-demand system sync with excel sheets (or some other data store) in a drive on  a laptop and keep itself updated?

The necessity of offline capability is not just true for transactional use – it is equally true for analytical use too.  A lot of sales people use excel as a BI tool – precisely because they cannot access required info all the time when they are traveling.  Most them have a (painful) process to dump data into excel periodically into their PC – probably on weekly basis.

So question for SAP – what is your plan to address this? Does sales on demand have an offline reporting tool that keeps information offline on a device? Since these devices have a lot of memory and processing power these days, why not give a powerful offline reporting solution that can periodically sync with the on-demand system?

Finally, about bandwidth. It is a big constraint for making business work on mobile devices. Not all countries have the luxury of high bandwidth wireless connections. And I doubt if that scenario will grow at the speed memory and processing power improves. So, my question here – what are you doing to harness the power of client side machines? With HANA – SAP has a clear idea on what to do on server side. But what about the advances in mobile devices – how is SAP planning to harness that?

Since SAP is big on design thinking, I am sure they have got good answers on all of this. I am looking forward to getting better educated on this topic.

Change Management – Why haven’t we solved it yet?


It is not new news that Change Management is a big deal, and all transformation projects – probably “all” projects – need to invest in it.  We knew this decades ago – and for the most part, we still fail to do this. WHY?  I have worked in various roles on ERP and non-ERP transformations.  And I have also had the opportunity to formally and informally review projects that I did not work on directly. Here are my very biased five thoughts on this topic. They are not discrete – they are all intertwined.

1. Enterprise software is built assuming that users have to be formally trained in it

Some of the newer solutions have shown us why this is not an optimal solution. If software is built assuming that user should find it intuitive, incorporating training aids and simulations into the framework, a lot of change management challenges will go away.  From a sheer usability perspective, many established enterprise vendors have made big advances – but that is true only when you compare their new solutions to their own older versions, and not on an absolute scale.  This needs to be fixed on product development and project execution fronts – and it needs serious paradigm shifts in how we do both.

2. My best practices are not the best for you if you “blindly” copy mine

Instead of using best practices as a template, a lot of projects use them as holy grail and force fit business processes into it. ERP vendors and SIs and independent consultants are all culpable. This was the big selling point for ERP – we already have everything, just make your business run according to “our” model, and all will be well.  Even though we have seen a million times why this does not work, we still do it.  There are valid reasons to take this route – it costs less project budget spend and only needs a shorter time line, it minimizes support costs etc.  We just conveniently forget that this is akin to tail wagging the dog.

3. Business is not static – things change ALL the time.

Debits and credits still show up where they showed up before we were born, but these are a minority. They are an exception to the rule, and not the rule itself.

For example, in the world of financial planning – people who run a business might change how to do planning every so often. If you always had done operating income at product line level, and gross margin at customer level – all your allocation rules will need to be changed if you suddenly need a net margin by customer. Most ERP type solutions cannot respond to such changes in real time. Is there any wonder that spreadsheets still rule the world despite an army of vendors and consultants advising against them?

Same thing for logistics – you might have always sold in a “sales order, delivery, billing, payment” order. Now the new VP wants to change it to “Get payment first and then deliver” . Traditional ERP needs time to respond to this – config changes, code changes, testing etc. And by the time it hits production – sales clerks might not know how to do the new model for sales. These same “dumb” users can figure out 5 changes in an iPhone App after an upgrade, without any one telling them what to do. Why?

My bank has changed its website features at least 10 times in last 5 years. I never once had to call the bank to find out how to use any of them. Then why is it so hard for a company when it comes to giving a system or process for employees without making them pull out their hair?

4.  You get what you pay for. No more, no less

The primary reason, I think, is that the people who control the purse strings for a project usually think of change management as a “nice to have”.  Whether it is to train users, or to communicate changes, or to make software that is intuitive – it costs time and money. You get what you pay for. If the axe falls on change management budget, then it is also falling on the chance of success.  Sending blast emails to all users, you know – the proxy-written for a big wig type mails, is not a substitute for change management. I don’t read them, and neither does any one else I know.

5. As size of a company increases, the lesser your chance of getting a representative sample to make decisions

A senior executive from logistics is probably the wrong person to address the requirements of the shipping clerk. But often, requirements workshops are usually filled with people far removed from actual business process.  As size of a company increases, it becomes very complex to get a sample of people who can make good decisions that affect all of the company.

Does a leader really succeed only if most of the followers are dumb?


My cab driver yesterday was of Bulgarian origin. We had quite an interesting chat driving from PHX airport to my home.  He was quite upset with the state of the union, and had a curious listener in me as his passenger, and we had a half hour to drive. His perspective somewhat amazed me – on two counts.

 

His first point was “The root cause of America’s problem is a lack of focus on education”. This in itself was not exactly new to me, as I have heard this from several people before. His next sentence was “And no government will do anything serious to solve this. Why? because it is easier to rule over people who are either uneducated, or who are not capable of thinking for themselves”. Apparently this guy got so worried about the system, that he sent his two kids back to Bulgaria to live there, primarily to “learn to think for themselves”. I could not help but ask him “So why are you living here then?”. He burst out laughing and said something like “because it is easier to survive here with just my average skills , unlike back home in Bulgaria”.

 

He also gave me his view on the state of his homeland. In his opinion, Bulgaria had been under Turkish rule for many centuries – and that any one who had been courageous to question the rulers have been systematically eliminated from the society over several generations. So, as a result – he thinks the remaining gene pool primarily is of people who could adapt, and get things done by going around rules, and cutting corners without getting caught.  He predicted without certainty that his country does not have a bright future.  I didn’t push him a second time on why he sent his kids there if that is the case. I am planning to do some reading on Bulgaria this weekend, and will reserve comments on this topic till then.

 

I have been thinking about this throughout yesterday evening and today “Does a leader really succeed only if  most of the followers are dumb?” .  My instinct is to say this is absurd , but the cabbie is probably not totally wrong either.

 

We don’t always question the information that we get, and as time progresses – I think, at least in general terms, we are mostly dealing with opinions and less on factual analysis.  In enterprise software space, where you would typically expect people that hang around to be not all that dumb  – often, you can see tweets and blogs along the lines of “I am right, you are sooooo wrong” about stuff that is yet to hit the market.  And if a big name fella says so – then it gets mindlessly repeated by his/her followers.   If you miss the sequence of events, it will become impossible to distinguish fact from opinion.

 

What is worse – the concept of self appointed leaders who scratch each other’s backs, and they hunt in packs. They remind me of an old story which goes like this.

 

There was this bully in a village market who used to go around asking “I am the strongest, is there any one here to challenge me?”. Well, it so happened that there was this other dude standing at a corner who had enough of this nonsense, and he stepped up to say “I challenge you!”. Next thing – the bully walks up to the challenger, throws his arms around the challenger’s shoulders and asks the gathering “Who is there to challenge us?”.

 

This behavior amongst people I follow online gets to my nerves very quickly these days, and I almost immediately remove them from the list I follow.