'In India we are very specific that all customers use accelerated SAP." / "Microsoft may have the office desktop, what we have is a business desktop.'

Les

Hayman took over at the helm of SAP’s operations in Asia-Pacific in October

1999. He has spent over 30 years in the IT industry, holding positions as IT

manager in major New Zealand companies. He is also a member of the SAP Extended

Management Board.

Ruth

Connolly recently joined SAP Asia as Executive Vice President for the Indian

subcontinent and is leading a team of consultants, industry specialists,

software developers and marketing staff. She has 26 years of experience in the

IT industry. She graduated from the University of Colorado and has pursued

advanced management programs with Harvard Business School, US.

The two were present during the Indian launch of mySAP.com, where they talked

about the product as well as the dynamics of the Indian market. Excerpts:

Can you describe the basic functions built into mySAP.com?



We did a project called Enjoy that took over two years and 2,000 developers to
develop. That is now mySAP.com. It gives you the ability to have a user-based,

role-based, individual-specific, launch-pad on the screen that is capable of

being customized to any extent. That is, it has a front-end that gives access to

internal systems that can be SAP-based, non-SAP-based, traditional, proprietary,

in-house developed–whatever. And then at the next turn, we took up the

internet–but without integral multiple logons. It had to be transparent to the

user and role-based, to the point. Microsoft may have the office desktop, what

we have developed is a business desktop.

A few vendors including Oracle have stated that mySAP.com

is just a web enabled version of an older product. And since it was not

engineered from the ground up for the web, it may not be infrastructurally well

suited for real-life demands. Is this true?



What Oracle is saying is not correct. What you did not have, was access to

business applications–whether CRM, supply chain management or ERP. We

developed this open architecture–we are including CRM, supply chain, business

warehousing, and access to market places and electronic exchanges. If the

architecture is right, you can just keep adding new elements to that. It gives

you all the functionality. The customers can take the marketplace and replicate

the technology themselves. You do not have to go into a marketplace that SAP is

part of. The technology is current. We have a simple architecture, we can add

and delete to it. That is the issue–it is the simplest architecture. I do not

see how Oracle can be any different. It is still basing everything on its

database–everything is built on top of that.

How is mySAP.com structured, from the user’s point of

view?



The ultimate aim of business is collaboration–business to business
collaboration. That is where the real benefits lie. So, what we have developed

now is over a 100 C-scenarios–what we see as critical elements for two

companies doing some sort of interaction. How simple does it need to be? If two

companies want simple, buy-sell internet scenarios, they do not have to take

supply chain management, CRM, business warehousing–they can take the

C-scenarios.

The modular aspect of mySAP.com as a front-end still does

not appear to have been communicated suitably...



Somebody once asked that supposing we were a good marketing company, would

we be called SAP? Well, we would at least be called APS. The issue is if you

have Baan customers who need CRM systems, they can just buy SAP CRM systems. If

you have Oracle customers who just want the work place, they can buy the SAP

work place–somebody just wants a supply chain, he can separately buy the SAP

engines of supply chain. If you want to buy a system that really integrates the

front office with the back office, then you need mySAP.com. I think one of the

things that people do not understand is that a lot of these elements, when

implemented on their own, give only half the benefits.

So, a CRM system gives you a front-end benefit. But the real

benefit of a CRM system is analyzing customers’ buying patterns. That sits at

the back-end of your system. When customers have been buying from you for the

past 5-6 years, where is the data? It is in R/3.

Is mySAP.com scalable from small to large enterprises?



We have customers in India with 10 users, who have traditionally been looked

upon as the old Baan marketplace, or Oracle marketplace. Sixty percent of our

customers in Asia-Pacific, out of two and a half thousand installations, are

SMEs. I know everyone likes to position us just for large companies, but the

reality is, even globally, about 50% of our installations are SMEs. We went into

the SME market pretty early because in Asia-Pacific you run out of Fortune 500

companies really fast.

Is the implementation process of mySAP.com different from

R/3?



People believe that implementing SAP takes a long time, that is, it is a

large project. That might have been true in 1993 but not today. For example,

take Larsen & Toubro (L&T), which had one of the early mySAP.com

implementations in India. Taking L&T from standard R/3 to mySAP.com, onto

the internet, with 500 stockists and resellers plugged in, doing the things you

would expect from collaborating computing over the internet, took 29 days. We

have learnt things over the past 10 years that we have been bringing the product

to the market.

Take the case of Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL). It

implemented R/3 in six months. It is live in a large number of BPCL’s refinery

operations, which is in the process of rolling it out to all locations. The

reason why the project was able to have a short cycle was that BPCL had a good

design up-front and an excellent team, and we used principles of accelerated SAP

implementation and value SAP. These are new methodologies that look at

continuous life cycles of a company or a project. So, the big blueprinting

exercises that used to occur from 1993 to 1996 have really been compressed. We

have learned a lot in many respects from the horrors of implementation. In India

we are specific that all customers use accelerated SAP.

What is accelerated SAP?



It is really the use of internal knowledge. What was happening over the last

five years was that every subsidiary around the world was starting to put its

own template and use its own short-cuts to the system rather than starting from

scratch every time. When we realized that everyone was doing this we put

together a global team based in the US. That put together a set of methodologies

and processes that we named accelerated SAP. It covers every form of

implementation.

What are some of the other learning points from the

horrors of the nineties?



Our recommendation to most companies is to start with an implementation that

gives you maximum benefits and the ability to train users. Not everyone starts

with traditional financials. We did an implementation in Japan that started with

CRM. At Seagate in Asia-Pacific, we started with HR.

Some vendors have stated that mySAP.com cannot be used as

an ASP application, since it is not a suitably designed three-tier client-server

application. Any comments?



People are doing it today–I can demonstrate. In Japan, they use WAP

technology well. I can demonstrate using mySAP.com to do order management, order

handling and inventory management using a mobile phone. I have customers using

it in Japan. Japan is more of a mobile-based society than a laptop-based

society. I would love Oracle to show that. People said the same thing when we

took R/3 to the market. They said, "Hey, it is R/2 with web-speed."

Then they said it will never work–nobody has this integrated a system. But

what is Oracle talking about now? It is saying that it has an integrated system.

Two years ago, Oracle was saying that the best of brains was

the only way to go. Today, integrated systems is the only way to go. Why?

Because two years ago, it did not have anything that was integrated.