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Central vs. Distributed...

Former Member

‎09-30-2008 8:58 PM

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Folks,

I have following scenario to consider:

Company AB Chem (ABC) has global operations all over the world. It is headquartered in Japan.

Company GH Inc. (GHI) is a wholly owned yet independent subsidiary of company ABC, but based out of US. But whereas ABC is primarily a chemical and Sales company, GHI is an automotive manufacturer and tier-1 supplier of OEMs in the automotive sector. In short, they are in two different types of businesses with not significant apparent overlap.

Company GHI is considering implementing SAP for itself. ABC already has global SAP in place. Therefore, there is a suggestion to use ABC's global SAP for GHI too.

The question is: is it advisable to go that route or should GHI have its own SAP implementation. What do you see as significant/potential issues related to using ABC's global ERP and becoming part of that? I am more interested in factors other than cost considerations: architecture, master data, processes, change management esp. post go-live , SLAs with the support vendor, upgrade paths this might lead to etc.

I would really appreciate some expert inputs on this.

Thanks.

1 REPLY 1

Former Member

‎01-02-2009 2:54 PM

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Hi Matt,

Please find below my comments.

Master data- There might be some benefit on the master data front(specially vendor/customer master) if you go by the suggested way of using the global SAP of the implemented company. However as the 2 comapnies have entirely different business portfolio additional data will definitely be required to be created for the other company.

Processes- Had both the companies been in same business line, it would have been recommended to completely go by the global SAP already implemented for the first company because their business processes would have been same. We could have used the BBP of the first company and taken it further by the use of BC sets. Since the comapnies are in different buisness better to have independent SAP implementation for th second company.

Change management esp. post go-live- Since both the companies are in the relationship of parent-subsidiary company, few selected business process owners of the already implemented comapny can acts as a change agent for the subsidiary comapnies. They can communicate their experience, line of thoughts, benfits achieved after the implementation of SAP. This can be done during the independent implementation of second comapny.

SLAs with the support vendor- I feel that SLAs with support vendor does not have a direct linkage to the implentation strategy and that can be fixed during the contract finalization with the vendor.

upgrade paths this might lead to- This will also not have any direct linkage with the implementation strategy and will depend on the implemented version of SAP and the targeted version for upgrade.

Rgds

Manish