Why are so many APO Projects unsuccessful.?

[Former Member]

Hi All,

What is the succcess rate of APO Projects .?

Why so many APO Projects are a flop show and are are reimplemented by other companies.

Regards

Harsh

[satish_waghmare3 · Accepted solution]

Hello Harsh,

I do not know success rate of APO projects. I have worked on APO re-implementation project twice in the past for different client.  I cannot deny the fact that APO project are getting re-implemented by companies. Reason could be anything from - Change in Business Requirement, Lack of understanding of SAP APO Tool by Business during the 1st attempt, Poor Change Management and Training issues etc. 

Besides, There are many problems that are created by the Consultants due to their lack of knowledge of both demand forecasting as well as an understanding of the tool. Frankly if Consultant do not understand the tool, they should not be implementing it or training the Business users.  It creates a mess that makes the software worthless and unusable.

Here are some of the common reason for failure of APO Demand Planning.

• Implement APO to be used as a data entry tool and tell the users Statistics are terrible so not worth using it.
• Disable Statistical modeling under the pretext of security(authorizations).  In reality, the consultants are worried about fielding questions from the users on statistics that they do not understand themselves.
• Enabling options and parameters in the tool with out any idea of what they do to the resulting forecasts.
• Deciding on important things such as forecast aggregations, forecasting levels and exception management without any process discovery or user input.
• Finally not project planning the budget to include training to the users particularly on the Statistics and Demand Planning. Unskilled / inexperienced forecasters cause poor forecast.
• Finally, SAP to needs to fix(or simplify) the forecast error calculations and the Alert Logic to make more user friendly.
• A software program cannot be held accountable for a user’s lack of theoretical and practical knowledge.

We “Consultant” are the ‘Trusted’ ‘Advisor’ of our Customer…APO is a great tool if configured and used properly. So sell the features / benefits of APO to companies.

Hope this will be helpful to you.

Thank you

Satish Waghmare

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Satish,

Thanks a ton for your deep end insights into the same.

Regards

Harsh