DECROSS1
Profile Answers by DECROSS1

Jan 31st, 2008

The first major issue you are likely to face is in deciding what the company will want SAP to do at first Go-Live and what they anticipate they will want it to do in the future. It is usually much easier to build things into SAP at the beginning, even if they will not be used immediately, than it is to change them later after postings are being made in a live system. To resolve this you need to make a full analysis of the current and predicted future needs of the organisation.

Your next issue is that SAP will probably work, and require users to work, in a different way to how things were done in the past. The way to resolve this is: 1) Minimise the differences where you can and where it will not detract from the advantages of changing to SAP. 2) Keep the users informed throughout the process. 3) Provide good quality SAP training before the system goes live. 4) Provide high quality support after Go-live until the users are competent with the new system.

During implementation you will almost certainly face the issue of how to bring data from the systems that an organisation is currently using into SAP. How difficult this is depends on how old the current systems are and how compatible they are with SAP. Sometimes you can import the data directly using tools built into SAP, sometimes you will need consultants to configure specific solutions and sometimes it is simply easier and more cost effective to spend the time transferring data manually.

There are many other technical and business issues you might face but those are common ones early in the implementation.