By senior consultant Niels R. Henriksen, ProfCon a/S

In general the SAP market is really not that transparent when you are new customer in this market. Each time that a new company starts up one of the first questions is how do we get the right resources? First timer starts up arguing we don’t have the knowledge so we have to buy. The decision is now what to buy – and because of missing knowledge a lot of companies choose one of the larger SAP houses. This might be the start of losing control of the project.

In the beginning was the word – SAP – and a lot of decisions have to be made. In this article I will only look at how to get the right resources. There is no doubt that the companies internal resources have the best business knowledge:

• What is the business?
• How does the organisation react?
• Who is the right person to answer different questions?
• How does this organisation really make decisions?

So the best idea is split the project management into

• A business project manager (has to be an internal person).
• A technical project manager (might as well be an external person).

The large SAP houses might be an easy solution – customers think because these SAP houses say they have all kinds of specialists they don't end up evaluating any of the individual consultants. But with 20 years of experience I have seen quite different things. Most of these houses have started as some really experienced consultants getting together; but I have seen a lot of examples where they were good – they had success – but as soon as they won too many projects they put in less experienced. Another way to compensate for the lack of resources is for the SAP houses to use freelance consultants – if they get these freelance consultants from professional agencies – then their skills are ok. But in some case the result is the customer not only pay a normal margin of 10% compared to what is paid to the freelance consultant – but sometimes the customer pay twice as much as what the freelance consultant is paid.

So my best recommendation is focus first of all on getting a senior SAP consultant, who primarily should take the role as technical project manager. Let him take care of getting the right resource:

• Right price.
• Right skills.
• Right time.

 This is the best way to compensate for the lack of  internal SAP knowledge. The most important characteristics for such a consultant are: 

• He has a huge network.
• Although he knows some of these people, he is ready to get rid of one consultant, if this person doesn’t perform in the individual project.

In this way the customer is ready to take the next step towards a successful implementation of SAP.