With my current role of managing global virtual project teams, I have been asked repeatedly by my what are the key success factors of implementing SAP for plant start-up in Asia, especially since the users have no previous SAP experience and business process knowledge ,and English is not their first language.
As you can see, global project teams have several unique characters and challenges, such as multi-functional, constantly evolving to meet business and resource constraints, matrix structured, culturally diverse and geographically distributed. These challenges resulted in that corporate culture is not very conductive for effective communication and cross-team learning. Many learning opportunities are missed and corporate have price for repeating similar mistakes. Thus, capturing and sharing lessons learned as must-to-have project management processes project costs and increase customers and users’ satisfaction.
If you are responsible for global SAP rollout, here are some lessons learned that can benefit your team and your company.
Lessons Learned - Local Leadership Buy-in event
More often, global project team encounters issues like roles and responsibilities of extended team* are not well defined, local support team resources are not committed after project started, there is no go-to person on site to between site, business team and project team, etc. In order to get full support from the local leadership team, a project buy-in event needs to carry out by change management team 3-6 months prior to kick-off to help local leaders to understand that SAP implementation project is not only an IT implementation, but a business project as well; to help local leaders to understand the importance of aligning business to with local leaders clearly about organizational structure, business processes and business units that will be impacted resource requirements, etc.
Lessons Learned – Decoding Email Messages
As many companies are moving their business effectively in a cross-cultural work environment can ensure companies’ international business success. Due to the language different vocabulary systems, core team and local users are having difficulty understanding and decoding email messages. result, misunderstanding often arises and issues do not get resolved on time, which affects activities schedule affects the rollout schedule.
The recommendation is to conduct a Cross-Cultural Communication session during the Kick-off period to the local users and project team to recognize specific cultural differences, to aware of communication differences and minimize the cultural communication barriers to high quality communication.
Lessons Learned - Local Site Coordinator
Global SAP ERP project team normally is referred to as “virtual team”. Team members are working on remote and scattered all over the world. For example, my team has about sixty members and they are located in Germany, Budapest, Mexico, US, Canada, Singapore, China. A lot of times, core team members do not know who to go local business-related activities and issues; users do not know who to go to bring up project issues; and local site management does not get the latest project status therefore unable to provide
The recommendation is to nominate an experienced site coordinator onsite to act as a local go-to person SAP-related issues. The role is responsible for communicating to all appropriate parties on overall project status, issues, successes, and barriers to keep the members engaged in the project.
Lessons Learned – ERP concept and Global Business Process For most international companies, global SAP implementation is to provide an ERP solution in support of production start-up in Asia. Most of users are new hires and they do not understand the ERP concept or the Global Template; they do not understand their roles and the associated business processes.
Recommendation is to conduct a Global Template Familiarization session to introduce the Global End-to-End Processes to the users. Afterwards, change work with the local business to determine which processes are applicable to the site, and which due to legal and language requirements. A process mapping exercise is highly recommended as well, where (Visio diagram with swim-lanes) are finalized and presented to the local management team. Upon their agreement,