By Dan Wilhelms

In every movie involving a natural disaster or an invasion by space aliens, there is always one scientist or person of authority who spots the impending calamity early and sounds the alarm. Of course, everyone ignores him – it wouldn't be much of a movie if they didn't – until it's too late. Then, once catastrophe strikes, the rest of the world turns to that person to solve the problem, which she proceeds to do.

Hopefully, life doesn't always imitate art – because there is an impending cataclysm in IT that can be avoided if we act now. The alarm is being sounded today. The question is, "Will anyone listen?"
What is this event threatening such upheaval? Essentially, many organizations that depend on SAP for ERP, PLM, HR and other functions are living on borrowed time. Especially for thinly staffed mid-size enterprises.

To understand why, you first have to look at how SAP is integral to the enterprise. It is a very large and complex system that is thoroughly ingrained into the operations of those enterprises. It may have taken a while for organizations to fully harness its power, but today it is the enterprise's most mission-critical system.

Despite SAP being an integral part of the fabric of business, when the economy took a downturn, enterprises began making deep cuts into IT budgets. IT staffing and operations budgets have been pared to a minimum. Especially hard hit are the internal SAP support teams. Many original core team members have gone back to their business units or moved on. Too many IT organizations are supporting their mission-critical SAP applications with under-staffed, poorly trained, cobbled together internal teams.

So now you have a situation where business units rely heavily on SAP for day-to-day operations and strategic information, yet there is now too often only a skeleton crew - in many cases without adequate knowledge and training - to support their most mission-critical IT application. In these environments, urgent system maintenance is being deferred or worse, simply overlooked. Enterprises with loosely coupled IT "silos" of operations bear a greater risk as the cumulative sum of critical competencies in multiple SAP related IT disciplines (e.g. OS, SAN, database, Basis & functional) are lost or diluted.

It is all too likely that these factors are creating an environment where SAP is going to go down and down hard. Enterprises have grown so used to trouble free SAP operations that manual work-around procedures in the absence of SAP are lost. A prolonged outage of SAP can affect hundreds of users, and bring the enterprise to a grinding halt. And given the Just in Time (JIT) nature of business these days, one company having an issue can affect everyone else up- and downstream.

As with any good disaster movie, however, there is a solution. It's a technical managed services model designed for the realities of 21st Century business.

Unlike the managed services models of the past, which took an all-or-nothing approach to managing SAP, the 21st Century model provides a flexible approach that allows enterprises to blend outsourced management of their SAP technical services with internal IT staff to provide reliable, cost-effective, SAP operations. This yields an optimal combination of knowledge of your business and access to deep, broad SAP expertise.

Having a dedicated team is a key factor. In the past, technical managed services providers would have a pool of SAP experts who would field calls as they came in. Often, there would be a lag in responsiveness as the expert familiarized himself with the client's specific SAP system. Hours of frustration would be lost explaining and re-explaining a SAP production issue to some stranger(s) half a world away.

In today's JIT world, that lag-time is no longer acceptable or practical. When a client calls with an issue, it needs an immediate response from someone who knows her SAP environment intimately. This is not to say the front-line expert can't tap into a deeper pool of knowledge as-needed; that is both advisable and desirable. But quality support must start with someone who knows the particular SAP landscapes, and knows the client-side team.

The real benefit of this approach – and the ability to avoid disaster – comes not with specific issues but in the day-to-day management of the SAP environment.

Let's face it. No one really likes doing day-to-day SAP production support, like monitoring systems. It is necessary, but isn't as exciting as a major project initiative. It's also not the most efficient or profitable use of an already minimal internal staff. Yet keeping the SAP environment running, and averting preventable outages, is critical to any enterprise.

By engaging with a 21st Century technical managed services provider, enterprises can offload day-to-day SAP production support, freeing the internal team to support more value-add, business facing innovation. The goal is to convert internal IT staff's time from just "keep the lights on" operations to supporting more strategic initiatives.

At the same time, because the provider works with multiple SAP systems, they have the critical mass to build a world-class SAP support organization; to create automated tools to monitor them; and then supplement that with pro-active human assessments to see what the business rules didn't catch. It is this combination of technology and human decision-making that yields superior results – and minimizes downtime, which is sure to please the CFO as well as the rest of the C-suite.

Of course while that all sounds well and good, enterprises today must also be conscious of budget considerations. Fortunately, the 21st Century model for technical managed services is less expensive than 20th Century models for total out-sourcing or conversely fully staffing with internal resources. There are documented cases where enterprises which moved to a 21st Century SAP model were able to fund an upgrade from the savings in production support costs. In others, they were able to bring innovations and ideas to the table – all because they had the time to pursue innovation rather than "just keeping the lights on" managing their existing SAP landscapes.

One other financial consideration is how the partnership is structured. In the 20th Century model, technical managed services providers were paid by the hour. They could afford to quote minimal hours to achieve a low price, because they could always claim "scope creep" later to justify a higher total cost.
In the 21st Century model, however, providers offer, and are held to, flat fees. As a result, the true cost is predictable, and the provider is incented to complete the work quickly. They are also incented to do the job well since any fixes to a Band-Aid solution will come out of their own profitability, not the enterprise's IT budget.

For SAP enterprises, it really comes down to one of two choices: They can either follow the disaster movie formula, and ignore the very serious warning signs facing them today. Or they can listen to the rumblings now and move to a 21st Century technical managed services model before the Big One hits. Because it's not a question of "if"; it's only a question of "when." And you can bet the "when" will happen when it hurts the most.

Dan Wilhelms is President and C.E.O. of Symmetry Corporation (www.sym-corp.com), an SAP® hosting partner that provides technical managed services, security administration and project consulting for SAP customers in the U.S. and around the world. He can be reached at  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .