As announced in my last post, the ERPCX is adding a third member category — users. Why users? Because every “solution” needs them.
Have you ever sat in a meeting of SAP consultants and users — like when the users are giving feedback on a system the consultants just designed? It can be painful, especially for the consultants. No matter how great the consultants think their new system is — even if it is “bug free” — users will have their own opinions. They have a perspective and knowledge that no one else does — not the consultants and not the customers (unless the customers are users too).
Users also have the most to lose. Like the decision-makers who actually buy SAP, users’ careers and incomes depend on how well the software performs. But SAP buyers don’t have to live with the software every day. It’s not facing them every morning when they come to work. With few exceptions, senior executives don’t sit in front of a computer screen all day. If something about the software is slow or hard to use, it’s the user who has to make up the difference by working harder or finding workarounds.
We want to tap into that knowledge and perspective, because we think our other members — consultants and customers — will benefit. So we invite users to participate in our blogs and online discussion threads.
But the ERPCX also offers benefits that users will like. For example, they can use the same career tools that consultants use – like resume posting, job boards, and access to SAP systems for training. They can also use many of the same services we offer SAP customers, like help desk and operations support (e.g., sales order entry).
And because this is an “exchange,” our SAP user members can even “exchange” roles to become part-time virtual consultants themselves — like working on the virtual helpdesk, in operations support, or as a virtual consulting team member. We think that by bringing all three sides of the SAP project together — consultants, customers, and users — in an ongoing exchange, each side will benefit enormously from the other two.
There is strength in numbers. That is why there are SAP user groups like ASUG and partner groups like the IA4SP (International Association for SAP Partners). They exist because members have shared interests they can advance better collectively than they can individually. For example, groups are better than individuals in their ability to:
Bargain for preferred rates of payments and discounts
Create political support for government or industry actions
Establish standards of member performance and certificates of compliance
Evaluate, approve, and in some cases deliver, services of value to members
Offer educational programs that promote member professionalism
Educate everyone on the good work done by members
This concept obviously isn’t new. During the Renaissance, independent craftspeople organized guilds for precisely the same reasons. Take apprenticeship. The guilds invented apprenticeship as a way for customers to recognize certain people as masters of their craft — not for any altruistic purpose, but simply so masters could get paid more. The guild’s stamp of approval meant something — because the guild meant something — for members and for customers. Guilds knew that one of the best ways to raise rates was to protect customers from amateurs and frauds. And they also knew they could only do this as a collective group, not as independent freelancers.
So why not have an association for independent SAP consultants? The answer is that, in their hearts, most independent SAP consultants still don’t believe they need one. All they know is a culture that says the best way to win is for their competition (i.e., other consultants) to lose. Those days are long gone, of course, but old thinking dies hard.
The objective reality today is that consultants would do much better if they belonged to an independent association with strong leadership, high standards and high-value services for members and SAP clients. But such an association can’t be imposed from outside by a vendor. It has to come from the consultants themselves. They need to organize it if the association is to attract members and have any real authority. Members might wish to hire professional management, sure, but at the end of the day the association would have to truly be “by SAP consultants for SAP consultants.”
Does anyone want to talk about how to get this started? Comment here or send me an email.
In the rush of day-to-day business it is instructive to take a step back and see how much progress was achieved in a year.And so as we close out this year I’d like to reflect a moment on how far we’ve come.
In 2009 the ERP Consulting Exchange really took shape.Some significant milestones include:
We published 70 blog posts by eight contributors mostly about the work life issues facing SAP consultants, a subject that had previously received scant attention despite this industry’s unprecedented economic and career challenges
We launched our newsletter (look for the Winter edition coming in January 2010)
We rolled out a resume writing service specifically focused on the unique talents, backgrounds and opportunities of SAP professionals
We designed and implemented the industry’s first database allowing employers to search for consultants by skill, language, years of experience, countries worked and other criteria
We more than tripled membership — now over 3000
We greatly expanded the hardware and software resources supporting our SAP system landscape
We established a successful relationship with Winshuttle as part of our Solution Referral program
We relocated our corporate headquarters to a new state-of-the-art facility at the University of Central Florida incubator campus
We launched Herbert’s Team, an elite group of SAP consultants and the first global virtual consulting practice
We started the Country Ambassador program to sponsor in-country entrepreneurs who represent the ECX locally and coordinate our virtual consulting engagements with the global team
We partnered with cumulusIQ with whom we launched the first SAP Virtual Helpdesk
We started the ECX because we saw the need for a more open supportive environment for SAP consultants and customers, allowing them to work together more productively during this turning point in our industry.Clearly 2009 was all about foundation building.In 2010 we will see how much of an enterprise we can construct on top of of that foundation.Our goal is to become a well-established provider of virtual consulting services to the SAP customer base.
Happy Holidays to all our members, partners, customers and friends.May we all see great success in the coming year!
If ever the time were right for an industry anti-vendor conference this seems to be it. The tagline for Sapience2009 (Cambridge, MA, December 8th and 9th) is “a journey of independence.” Speaker after speaker (who each pay $10,000) will describe the benefits, strategies, and enabling products for those seeking “all possibilities outside the original vendor’s scope.”
Tradeshows built around a single vendor typically and implicitly promote that vendor — and can falter if the vendor no longer supports the event (think Macworld, which Apple has famously decided to abandon). Not so Sapience2009, whose organizers apparently know a pretty full bandwagon when they see it coming.
So what of SAP’s own efforts to reach beyond the corporate moat? Nowhere on the conference website does the phrase “SAP ecosystem” appear.
The approach is pure genius. On the one hand this is an SAP conference — and thus reaches SAP’s very blue chip audience. On the other, it makes a virtue out of not having SAP’s support. As such, it is essentially the marketing version of the very strategy its speakers and attendees will advocate. Or to paraphrase Kris Kristofferson, “if you can’t afford ‘em, you got to beat ‘em.”
SAP’s high prices and lock-in practices may have reached a tipping point. It is not only good business now to beat up on the vendor, but it is also fashionable — which, from a brand value standpoint, may actually hurt SAP more.
It’s great to see that cloud-based services are starting to attract more general IT media attention, as in Monday’s InfoWorld article called “Startups take SAP consulting to the cloud.” The article focuses on a couple of companies, one of which is our partner cumulusIQ. Herbert’s Team and cumulusIQ have been working hard to make cloud-based SAP support a reality.
The article reinforces many of the things we’ve been saying for months: SAP customers won’t waste resources (time or money) on traditional consulting models for any issue that can be resolved faster, less expensively, and more easily by a virtual helpdesk — especially one populated with world-class consultants like those on our Team. It doesn’t matter whether customers are large or small, or whether this is a good or not-so-good economy. Companies won’t spend more money or wait longer for support just because they can — regardless of the environment. Furthermore, all companies want access to the same tier-1 consultants previously available only to those companies willing to pay the most.
Which brings me to the point raised at the end of the article where Jon Reed is quoted as saying that services like ours are “creatures of the recession.” That’s like saying that technology only gets less expensive because of recessions, rather than because of innovation. Of course, SAP maintenance and support prices are not going down — in fact, just the opposite. However SAP’s prices do not reflect innovation in the underlying support model. Ours do.
If you read Rimini Street’s October 6th press announcement, two messages come through loud and clear: 1) the company can actually perform the services it promises; and 2) customers save lots of money. According to the press release: “Rimini Street has responded to and successfully resolved hundreds of client cases for SAP systems . . . ” while also (now quoting a customer) “significantly reducing operating cost . . . .”
This is news? The company is in business to save customers money on SAP maintenance — and it actually does that?
What is different about Rimini Street is not that it provides discounted support. Lots of firms do that. Rimini Street provides an SAP-like support experience that is equal to or better than SAP itself. That better-than-SAP SAP experience is the real killer — so why doesn’t Rimini Street position itself on that basis?
Any marketing textbook will tell you that positioning yourself as a cost cutter is a slippery slope. It leaves you vulnerable to discounting. But it also hurts the market as a whole (that’s the rest of us, folks!) by making the work itself seem cheap. So, I guess anybody can do this stuff, right?
What would be more helpful is if Rimini Street brought the value add into the headline — rather than simply say they didn’t screw up. Don’t devalue the fact that you solve customer problems that SAP could not solve; or that support was “ultra responsive.” A lot of good content is actually in there — if you read down far enough. The problem is that they’ve buried the lead, and buried a lot of good consulting value along with it.
The ECX headquarters has moved.We are now at the University of Central Florida Seminole County/Winter Springs Incubator.Opened in 2008, the incubator is a partnership between UCF, Seminole County Government, the City of Winter Springs and the Florida High Tech Corridor Council.
What’s got me excited is not just the state-of-the-art facility here (super fast Internet, conference rooms, etc.) but also the ability to interact closely with students.As a collaborative community of ERP consultants worldwide, there is much we can offer them — like the opportunity to see firsthand how an emerging virtual consulting practice grows from the ground up.
Students can become virtual interns on consulting assignments, assist senior ERP consultants, collect project status information, help check software functionality, work in our datacenter maintaining our SAP systems and perform other tasks.
In exchange for this learning experience students earn class credit.
But students are more than a source of labor.They bring fresh insight and enthusiasm into our organization; and their very presence validates that we do indeed offer a forward-looking environment that benefits everyone involved (like our members).
The future of ERP consulting unfolds faster every day.The sheer energy of a university environment can only help keep us in front.
The news reports sent shockwaves through the IT industry:Siemens, the German electronics and engineering giant, has fired SAP, the German software giant, as a provider of SAP software maintenance.Forget notions about national pride and loyalty — this (as yet unconfirmed) move would test a lot of longstanding conventional wisdom:
Third-party maintenance is too risky, especially for very large SAP implementations
Companies with strong ties “in a multitude of areas” (Jim Dever, director of SAP Americas media relations, as quoted by CIO) have too much invested to sever any of those ties
Credible third-party alternatives to SAP maintenance don’t exist
Customers are hostage to SAP maintenance contracts and price increases
Huge economies derived from recent trends like virtualization, cloud computing, and software as a service don’t impact software maintenance
Every day there is increasing evidence that these beliefs are becoming more myths than reality.How else would you explain the growing popularity of third-party providers like Rimini-Street?Other players will emerge, and so will alternative forms of service delivery.See for example the recently announced partnership between the ECX and cumulusIQ to provide on-demand cloud-based support.
True, some software-specific issues (e.g., bugs) may still require SAP support.But for a growing number of SAP companies, and a growing number of service issues, one question is increasingly relevant: If Siemens can do it, why can’t we?
Today virtual consulting takes a big step forward as the ECX partners with my company, cumulusIQ, to launch of an “SAP helpdesk in the cloud.”(See the press release here.)Called KaaS HelpDesk Excellerator™, the new service lets SAP customers receive on-demand support from experts based anywhere on the Internet.
Helpdesk resources — the consultants answering clients’ questions — are members of Herbert’s Team, the virtual consulting arm of the ERP Consulting Exchange.Herbert’s Team is an elite group of SAP consultants handpicked by ECX founder and CEO Herbert Goertz.
KaaS stands for Knowledge as a Service, the cumulusIQ concept of bringing knowledge on demand from cloud-based experts to enterprise technology users.Both Herbert and I view KaaS as a natural extension of Resources as a Service (RaaS) — the ECX concept for delivering consulting resources virtually from the cloud.
Because they are cloud-based, resources are available over the Internet anytime anyplace.For example, you could potentially have 20 experts looking at an SAP issue anytime day or night; whereas with a traditional dedicated helpdesk, you might only have one person helping you at a time.
I believe today’s launch holds great promise, not only for our two organizations, but also as an example to the consulting industry of new service delivery paradigms especially suited to a period of severe economic challenge.I am especially excited to be working with Herbert and the ECX.Having someone of his stature as a partner goes a long way to ensure that cumulusIQ clients receive the highest level of quality and service.
Monty Kalsi is founder and CEO of cumulusIQ, an on-demand knowledge marketplace offering helpdesk services, training and business solutions to the enterprise from cloud-based subject matter experts.
Yesterday was Labor Day here in the U.S. and so naturally I was thinking about the job market.It occurred to me that how a consultant looks for a job is probably a good indicator of how they would approach other challenges — like maybe a client project.
So what are some consultants thinking? On the one hand, they know this is the worst job market they’ve ever faced.On the other, they go into this job market with resumes obviously written by amateurs (themselves).
That fact alone says a lot about them as consultants.If they looked at their own situation analytically — like they would for any client — they would know the first thing a good consultant does is attack the “small” problems (like the resume) — the problems with clear solutions. Only then do they attack a big problem like the job search.Just because a solution is easy to find, doesn’t mean you should live with the problem.
Why run a race with excess baggage you can unload first?
A good resume should convince me you can solve my problems.But how can I expect you to solve my problems if your resume says you clearly don’t know the first thing about solving your own?
