BCC’s involvement in SAP projects has spanned over 80 departments worldwide, with rollouts in neighbouring countries as well as in exotic locations, such as Indonesia or Egypt. They create SAP to meet corporate standards in international corporations and provide ongoing system maintenance. Michał Kunze, BCC Project Office Manager talks to us about the various roles of BCC and the challenges of working in an international environment.
What is the role of BCC in projects executed for foreign customers? What general rules apply to cooperation with these types of customers?
I would distinguish four basic forms of cooperation with foreign customers, although we often adopt several roles simultaneously, executing different tasks on the customer’s premises.
We often take part in project activities as task consultants, supporting the customer in a clearly specified scope of work. These are usually large projects, with a broad functional scope, involving many departments. The projects are executed by the IT departments of the corporation or its global SAP partner. It is not uncommon that the tasks we are given require expertise and competence, as in the case of migrating non-SAP Applications to SAP NetWeaver.
Another role BCC has been adopting more and more often, is executing and managing complete SAP projects for large companies. These are usually large scale development or data migration projects. We are running several large international projects at the moment, spanning a few dozen corporate departments in different countries.
In companies where the running of SAP is centralized for a large number of countries, it is always necessary, aside from the typical work involved with new projects, to carry out tasks connected with ongoing system maintenance, scheduled development works and reacting to change requests from various departments. When each local company submits a change request (related for example to a VAT rate change or considering a new method of holiday or business trip settlement) only once a month, this results in a substantial package of tasks per year. Currently we support these kinds of change requests for a high-tech corporation with branches in several dozen countries worldwide.
Another model of cooperation is the provision of help-desk services and reacting to the current incidents. Our resources are used by shared services centres of large corporations.
Our involvement and the nature of the tasks we carry out as part of our ongoing cooperation vary a lot. The tasks range from taking over the full remote system operation and maintenance for a fixed flat rate, to body leasing, which is settled according to the actual working hours spent on handling the requests.
What is body leasing?
It is a form of competence outsourcing, where we send our specialists to the customer’s premise for a fixed (usually long) period of time specified by a contract. These employees are selected with regard to their competence, consistent with the customer’s expectations, and carry out the tasks assigned by the customer. Most often they are task consultants or ABAP developers, but sometimes the customer requires corporate business analysts.
For example, our team of three experienced analysts is currently supporting a Dutch corporation, analyzing change requests from the departments worldwide and evaluating their influence on the central SAP system. These tasks are usually carried out by internal employees, but they have been sent on another project for six months, so we took over their responsibilities.
How does BCC acquire new international customers?
The key elements are a good relationship and satisfaction from our cooperation on the Polish market. This was the case of Decora, an international manufacturer of decorating products. Having executed projects in Poland, we were assigned the task of performing system roll-outs to the branches located in other countries.
Some companies are focused on looking for partners to cooperate with in Central and Eastern Europe, for example: Antalis asked us to implement the SAP system in four countries: Poland, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia simultaneously.
We are also a natural partner for those companies whose SAP competence centres are located in Poland. This type of cooperation often evolves over time and we perform development work for different branches of the group ourselves.
In recent years we have noticed that large companies look for partners to perform different kinds of tasks in different regions. For example, in Eastern Europe, where the SAP system has not been implemented yet at some branches of international companies, typical rollout projects have to be carried out, including the basic functions of the ERP system – supply, production planning, sales and accounting. On the other hand, companies located in Western Europe often need a partner to support the ongoing system development of more ”sophisticated” functions, with more stress on portal solutions, BI, BPM.
We perform more and more work for customers who do not know us from the Polish market, and engage us to carry out tasks directly at their headquarters. This is related to our increasing sales activity abroad. The changing attitude of large corporations towards cooperating with medium-sized SAP partners is also a favourable factor.
How would you describe this change in approach? What are the strong points of BCC in this context?
A lot of large corporations choose to execute their first SAP projects in cooperation with global implementation companies, as they believe that their brands and global presence (“offices in 100 countries”) not only ensures a high quality of work, but also enables them to transfer their knowledge of the system to all their departments worldwide.
However, over time, it has become clear that it does not always work as well as the marketing slogans promise; consultants working for a Spanish or Dutch implementation company do not instantly transfer their knowledge to their colleagues in Russia or Serbia. Passing on the understanding of customer specifics between departments of large service providers and the resulting efficient service provided by ”one global IT partner”, regardless of the geographical location, is, to some degree, an illusion.
The key to success is choosing the right people on both sides and effective cooperation based on trust. It is equally difficult with a global company as it is with BCC from Poland. If so, why not cooperate with a smaller and more cost effective partner?
There is one more element the customers often pay attention to: they are increasingly looking for a partner for whom they will be a large, often strategic customer, and for whom the cooperation will account for a large portion of turnover. It is a sui generis guarantee of the implementation company’s commitment. This type of strategic cooperation is more important to us.
Of course, the execution capabilities of the partner have to match the customer’s needs, so that the provider can react to the change in demand. For example, if additional project tasks turn up, the provider must be able to provisionally ensure a larger team. On the other hand, if any of the large projects is suspended for several months, the provider must have the resources to avoid bankruptcy.
BCC is a reasonable alternative for Indian companies, which execute projects at low cost, but communication problems and the resulting lower quality of works lead to an increase in the budget and execution time. We are also an alternative to large and expensive companies, which are not as flexible and are not always more competent.
Our flexible approach and a large team of competent and experienced SAP consultants enable us to adopt various roles in projects, and are considered our biggest advantages.
How do we use our potential on foreign markets?
What distinguishes projects executed for large corporations, and constitutes a major challenge, is the scale of the projects – uncommon in Poland and generally for companies working locally.
For example, one of the projects run in a large high-tech corporation, consisting of a migration of the FI data to a new SAP system, spanned over 80 countries. We carried out a similar project in the FMCG sector for departments located in exotic countries such as Singapore, Kuwait and Jordan. Our consultants were also involved, on-site at customer premises, in SAP rollouts in Indonesia and Egypt.
Projects of this kind are in many respects exceptional, in terms of the number of involved parties and consultants, the time of execution, as well as the distance and times zones we have to operate in.
However, in my opinion, our biggest achievement is the ability to build long-lasting relationships with customers. As a result, the tasks we are given, over time, are broader in scope and involve greater responsibility.
This is all related to our increasing presence at customer locations. Our cooperation with Heineken may serve as the best example. We started working with them in 2001 as a contractor responsible for implementing the SAP corporate template in Poland. Our role evolved over time and we became the partner responsible for carrying out rollout projects involving both the extension and the modifications of the SAP template in other companies of the group. Recently, after years of working together and several dozens of jointly executed projects, we have been given the task of creating new system templates in other business areas for the entire corporation.
We are going to use this model consistently, gaining trust and increasing the scope of our responsibility, when cooperating with new customers.
What is the biggest challenge when cooperating with large corporations, that use SAP in different countries?
Companies that have extended teams responsible for IT or even dedicated teams to run SAP projects, develop their own methodologies, employ different project tools, and use different terminology. For example, tests that we call ‘integration tests’ are referred to by our customers as ‘functional’ or ‘acceptance tests’, and are abbreviated as INT, UAT, FAT or in a different way. Everybody likes abbreviated forms, but they are often used in a different way in different companies.
These types of differences are a kind of barrier – especially at the beginning of cooperating with a large corporation. Nevertheless, we think that we are supposed to adjust to the customer’s organization. We treat that as an investment in our long-term cooperation. Customers appreciate this kind of approach – instead of bringing in ”the one and only right” solution or methodology, we are much more flexible.
In the case of mature organizations it works both ways. The standard is that in the case of extended cooperation, so called ”lessons learned” sessions are organized on a regular basis, in order to exchange our observations and opinions on the state of the joint project. We are actively involved in the process and our proposals are often accepted. For example, one of the companies used our Go Forward methodology, adopting a division of the prototype execution phase into several stages, with tests in between, after we suggested such an approach and proved its value in a project.
Another major challenge – banal though it may seem – is the organization of work and choosing the right proportions of those tasks executed at the customer’s premises and those carried out remotely. After many years of experience we have worked out a pattern for implementation projects, in which about 40% of the work is performed onsite at the customer’s premises regardless of the geographical location of the company. This includes meeting at the beginning of the project, when we demonstrate the system, followed by testing and, of course, training and two weeks of support after going live.
This proportion (40:60) is optimal in terms of work performance; it also strikes a balance between the need for lowering the logistical costs and the requirements of efficient communication.
It also worth noting that, by working at the customer’s premises we mean not only working at the headquarters (with the owners of the global business process), but also in local departments as well as with the end users. That means that within one project, the ”customer’s premises” may refer to several locations in many countries. It is a big challenge.
If the scope of cooperation involves ongoing system maintenance and development, we often work at the customer’s premises for the first several weeks, which lets us get to know each other better, agree on the method of communication and procedures and gain the customer's trust. Then we start working in a ”shifting” mode: one week of remote activities, followed by one week of meetings, discussions, tests, and specifying new requirements for the next set of activities.
Changing the proportion in favour of remote work is possible with helpdesk support, which then requires only occasional meetings in order to discuss some selected, most complex issues from the current task lists.
What are the most common strategies of performing SAP rollouts in many countries?
Companies usually group projects according to the type of production or business characteristics of the various departments. The implementation of the system is usually performed first in the production part of the corporation, and then in the distribution companies.
Rollout always has to include local requirements and the common template is supplemented with specific solutions. The readiness of a company to take into account the local specifics and the degree of commitment of the end users to the project work – these are the areas, where we see the largest diversity of attitudes.
I think it depends to a large degree on the organizational culture of the company, its history and the degree of centralisation. There are companies, such as the Heineken Corporation, where each local brewery boasts its long history and has its own, tradition-honoured mode of operation. These differences are respected and taken into account in SAP roll-outs.
Younger companies, usually found in the high-tech industry, and companies that have evolved through an organic development, are by definition more reliant on centralised corporate management rules. In these companies local specifics are taken into account just by differentiating VAT rates or printing invoice forms according to the local legal requirements, but system menus and screens are displayed in all departments in one ”corporate“ language, usually English.
In many companies the overriding goal of the centrally managed system is ensuring the easy introduction of the future ”common” changes of the corporate solution. The problem is that it is not easy to come up with useful suggestions on a global and abstract level. The best method of system optimization is to collect useful experiences from different countries, for example: transport reporting works well in Egypt, the Bulgarian department have excelled at invoice approval workflow, customer services are most efficient in Belgium – these developments are worth sharing with other departments of the group.
However, central system maintenance with numerous local variations (which allows local departments to operate with this type of autonomy) is also much more costly and labour-intensive than maintaining a homogenous system.
How are corporate system templates developed? What are the biggest challenges associated with such projects?
A template is usually created on the basis of the experience we’ve gained during the execution of earlier projects. It is rather uncommon that a company implementing an SAP system for the first time creates a template for an entire corporation on the spot. It is usually done after the system has become well-known and the company is ready to start the generalization and standardization stage.
A template may include a specific functional range, a business area or it may apply to different solutions, such as SAP ERP or CRM, BI. While carrying out such a project, a lot of technical, integration and configuration problems must be addressed.
The biggest challenge, however, is not connected with the technology, but with appointing business process owners, people who are trusted and supported by the Executive Board, who will be responsible for defining and adopting common solutions, for example standard sales, controlling and procurement processes, on a company-wide scale.
Such a strong role is necessary. There must be a stakeholder who defines a template and ensures it is not a collection of all variants of a given process from several dozen countries, but includes two or three most typical variants, that can be adopted by all departments.
Developing such a model and ensuring it is accepted by the departments that it is intended for, is the most laborious part of creating a template and it has to do more with the business side of things than with IT.
When participating in such projects, especially within a long-term working relationship, where we are acquainted both with the system and the customer’s business, we can assume the role of an advisor or of a party responsible for preparing the proposals of template processes. However, these proposals can be included in the solution only on the condition of obtaining business approval from the customer.
We work for the biggest companies in the world; these relations are often long-lasting. How does it influence the organization of cooperating with a company and relations with customers?
The first stage of working together is a period of getting to know each other and gaining trust. These relations become more partner-like over time and our responsibilities increase.
Again, I will take the example of Heineken. We started cooperating with them as task consultants configuring concept solutions that had already been well defined. Currently we are executing entire projects from scratch – we plan the project together; its scope and schedule. We work hand in hand with the customer’s employees to define the system implementation strategy, respecting one another’s competence and the availability of consultants on both sides.
The customer benefits from our experience gained by carrying out earlier projects for the corporation. Sometimes BCC consultants have worked for the customer company longer than some of the corporation’s employees. From our point of view this type of work is also more interesting as it requires more creativity.
This synergy of activities ensures that the project is a joint undertaking, for which both sides feel equally responsible. In the case of this kind of model of cooperation, mutual trust is larger, and communication more open. This enables us to achieve better results more easily, at a lower cost and in a shorter time.
What changes are to be introduced in the BCC Project Office after implementing the new strategy BCC +international?
A lot of organizational changes have already been introduced as a result of the ever-increasing scope of our activities. We use many IT tools to support our work. Our project portal has been made available to our customers. Some time ago we introduced a Project Coordinator function. The coordinators take over many administrative tasks from project managers and are responsible for project accounting governance, tracking the status of work and reporting.
Preparing to execute the BCC +international strategy, we include foreign project experience in our methodology Go Forward. We pay a great deal of attention to the organization of work in order to avoid some traps of remote work. For instance, the project execution may not meet the requirements of the customer if we work for too long without direct contact and verifying the results. We are looking for a way to strike a balance between working remotely and working at the customer’s premises to maintain healthy proportions and a high performance while keeping costs at an acceptable level.
Another issue related mostly to the scale of ventures we participate in is increasing the responsibilities of Project Managers. In many cases we manage large SAP programs spanning numerous projects and scheduled for several years. The Program Manager’s role is a promising concept we want to develop in the future.
With our new strategy execution in mind, we are also planning to recruit Project Managers. We are looking for people who will regard spending a year or two abroad as a challenge, an interesting stage in their careers and professional development.
Interview by Mirosława Huk, BCC Group
