CASE STUDY

Business Case for SAP and Application Roadmap

industry

Consumer goods

background

The Client is a Consumer Goods company with Global presence. The Client had largely followed a best-of-breed approach and the resulting application landscape was making it increasingly difficult to scale and adapt to the growth plans.

solution

  • Business cases developed by solution providers or vendors associated with selling services have a bias towards their solutions or services. Typically, a high level approach to business case is taken where client organization is benchmarked against competitors or industry leaders and certain KPI’s are benchmarked for comparison purposes. The tangible benefits that need to be quantified for financial measures like ROI, Payback Period, etc. are computed using potential improvements touted by best-in-class KPI’s. The biggest fallacy in this approach to developing business case is the assumption that the new ERP implementation will result in these improvements.
  • Having implemented ERP systems over 25+ years in different industry verticals, we firmly believe that tangible benefits cannot be accurately determined prior to ERP Implementation (in a business case). ERP systems are complex and encompass core processes of the organization. Hence, direct payback must only be one of the criteria in business case justification. Furthermore, detailed investigation and analysis must be done, to link KPI improvements to process improvements and capabilities at a granular level to justify the potential tangible benefits.
  • We did a detailed business case using Gartner’s 5 Pillars of Benefits Realization – Strategic Alignment, Business Process Impact, Architecture, Direct Payback and Risk. The process involved interviewing Executive Management and Business Leadership, Business SME’s, IS Architecture Teams, IS technical leads, IS Support Teams. Furthermore, detailed analysis of entire Application Landscape including Analytics Platform was performed. Only realistic and achievable benefits that could actually be achieved were quantified and included in direct payback. The entire process was completed in 8 weeks culminating in a comprehensive unbiased business case for new ERP Implementation and Application Roadmap.