Archive for the ‘SAP’ Category

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SAP HCM Consulting companies

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

I’ve had numerous requests from business partners for a comprehensive list of SAP HCM consulting companies in the USA. My aim in this post is to give you a comprehensive list — let me know if I missed one.

Pure-play SAP HCM companies:

  • EPI-USE: EPI-USE America, based in Atlanta, GA, is my former employer and one of the best SAP HCM consulting companies in the world (ok, my bias). Magnisol represents EPI-USE in Europe. EPI-USE has offices in South Africa (the parent company), Mexico, the UK, and Australia. EPI-USE has some world class complimentary SAP HCM products.
  • Symphony Consulting: Symphony is based in Charlotte, NC and partners with Ariston Consulting to implement full SAP ERP projects. They recently became an SAP Public Services partner.
  • AspireHR: Formerly ERP Solutions is based in Dallas, TX. They provide SAP HCM services and they’ve developed a number of interesting products. I assume AspireHR of the UK is not a related entity. They seem to have a strong relationship with SAP’s development group in Palo Alto.
  • Exaserv: A number of former Arinso employees started Exaserv a couple of years ago. They are based in Atlanta, GA with offices in Luwembourg, Dallas, and Walldorf Germany. They have unique products for HIPPA and Pension plans.
  • Insight Consulting: Insight is based Cincinnati, OH and Insight’s managing partner is on the HR Expert advisory board.
  • Emeritis: Emeritis has operations in the US, Belguim, Thailand, and Brazil. They claim over 200 SAP HR implementations. I don’t think that they have a strong presence in the US anymore.
  • Arinso: Arinso is one of the first and the largest SAP HCM consulting company in the world. Last year Arinso was acquired by UK-based Northgate. Arinso US is based in Atlanta, GA and has 25 offices around the world. In 2006 Arinso acquired OpenHR.
  • Worklogix: Worklogix is a niche SAP HCM consultancy. They are based in Texas, New York and Canada. Their strength is SAP Performance Management. They wrote the book!

Some full service SAP ERP consulting companies have a significant SAP HCM practice. These include:

And then the big boys:

Did I miss one or more? — let me know…

Update July 1, 2008: Yes, I did… ROC.

Update August 25, 2008: Axon will soon be part of HCL.

Update May 1, 2009: ROC Acquires Towers Perrin SAP HCM Practice in North America.

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Posted in HCM, SAP | 9 Comments »

Just-in-time (JIT) training for entrepreneurs

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

I think that the exponential increase of on-demand video (youtube.com, Yahoo! video) will allow entrepreneurs to learn on-the-fly from some incredible sources. The problem with Youtube is that it takes time to find quality videos, like this Sellingpower interview of SAP Americas CEO, Bill McDermont.The Stanford’s Educations Corner is an entrepreneur’s best friend. It contains wisdom, knowledge, tried-and-tested experience from very well-known and experienced business people like John Doerr (Kerner Perkins), Carly Fiorina (former HP CEO), and Guy Kawasaki (Garage Ventures). This month’s Futurist click-of-the-month is SciVee.tv. This is a great example of a site aggregating some quality videos.

We expect to disseminate science to the widest possible audience, thereby bringing the YouTube generation–who are the next generation of leading scientists–the best science using a medium they have adopted and use on a daily basis,” says University of California, San Diego, pharmacy professor Phillip E. Bourne, one of the directors of the SciVee project.

Apple’s iTunes now contains a section called uTunes. uTunes contains audio lectures from prominent universities like MIT, Stanford, Duke and Berkley.Another interesting site is slideshare.net. On this site you’ll find lots of very well articulated business presentations. Again, you’ll have to search a little to get gems like this one:

View on SlideShare

Which sites do you use for your JIT training?

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Posted in Apple, Business, Entrepreneurship, SAP, Technology | 1 Comment »

Blogs on SAP’s Business ByDesign

Monday, September 24th, 2007

My plan was to report in depth on SAP’s Business ByDesign product, however I decided to rather point you to a number of well crafted blogs summarizing the launch.

  • My friend Tom Otter provides an insider’s view.
  • Bob Warfield writes a great blogs on all things SaaS, and Web 2.0. His BbD summary is very good.
  • Jeff Nolan over at Venture Chronicles is always insightful. Another good summary.
  • Joshua Greenbaum is another good read.

and for fun check out these:

SAP’s official magazine SAP INFO is also interesting reading. SDN may have some interesting information soon. Not too much at the moment. I still have many open questions:

  1. How (if at all) will SAP partner regarding BBD? ADP is listed as the only partner.
  2. Will SAP release an SDK for BBD?
  3. Will BBD be the end of SAP’s All-in-one and Business One?

Update – Sept 26, 2007: Interesting read on Infoworld.

Update – Nov 7, 2007: Kagermann says SAP BBD is not for enterprise customers.

Do you have answers?

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Posted in Business, SAP, Saas, Technology | No Comments »

SAP’s A1S launced today and is called: SAP Business ByDesign

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

SAP Business ByDesignSAP officially launched A1S today and it’s called: SAP Business ByDesign. It will cost $149 per user per month. A quick initial review of SAP BBD looks a lot like current self service scenarios and webdynpro transactions. I will do a more detailed review soon.

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Posted in Business, SAP, Saas, Technology | 1 Comment »

SAP, Oracle and Workday HCM product strategy updates

Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

Bill Kutik’s recent HRMS Happenings article is a very good overview of what’s coming from the prominent HCM vendors. The following highlights caught my attention:

  • Oracle will continue to develop Peoplesoft, Oracle HCM and Fusion HCM as separate product lines.
  • Workday is busy developing a payroll engine.
  • All the vendors have interesting Web 2.0 plans.
  • SAP is partnering with companies like Aspire HR for functionality.
  • HR Tech 2007 in October is going to be an interesting event.

What are your thoughts regarding the new functionality coming from these vendors?

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Posted in HCM, SAP, Technology | 1 Comment »

SAP’s on demand/SaaS ERP solution, codenamed A1S

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

My aim with this post is to summarize the information currently available on A1S. A1S has been in the works for at least 3 years and is SAP’s on demand or SaaS (Software as a service) ERP solution. According to ZDNet A1S is targeted to launch in 2008 and is part of SAP’s strategy to grow its customer base from 39,000 to 100,000 customers by 2010. SAP is planning to unveil A1S at an event in New York on Sept 19. A1S is designed for the mid-market and initially it will be hosted by SAP as an on demand solution. Later it will be available as an appliance that can be plugged in behind the firewall.

Henning Kagermann’s (CEO of SAP AG) recent presentations provide more A1S hints. Here is SAP’s 2007 Q2 analyst presentation and also the May 2007 Sanford Bernstein presentation. On page 26 Kagermann summarizes the salient features of A1S:

  • A New Product: Broad cross-industry coverage, enterprise SOA by design, model-based design, configuration via business questions, and self-service & embedded training.
  • A New Business Model: Try-Run-Adapt, on demand, embedded services & remote management, order of magnitude lower TCO, and quality/robustness is key.

In this blog post searchSAP talks about SAP’s mid-market push including A1S. Here Venderprisey summarizes some SaaS blog postings including an interesting reference to A1S. The Register and others suggest that SAP picked the Sept date to overlap with the Salesforce Dreamforce conference.

Hasso Plattner’s “new idea” presentation is basically the technical underpinnings of A1S. You can see the keynote here, however you’ll have to register first. SAP calls A1S, Enterprise SOA by Design vs SAP ERP it calls Enterprise SOA by Evolution. Here is a list of the new idea aspects of Plattner’s “New Idea”: in-memory databases, real-time analytics, harmonized UI, cloud computing, on-demand, events & triggers, modular deployment, model-based configuration, no code exposed, new markets, community, standards and finally SOA.

Competitors include: Salesforce.com and its AppExchange marketplace for on demand applications, Oracle on demand, Netsuite.com and Successfactors.com. Workday, co-founded by Mr. Peoplesoft himself, Dave Duffield, is also an interesting play. They market Workday as: On-Demand Enterprise Business Services.

Also see my post regarding integration between SaaS solutions and SAP.

I’m sure we’ll know more after September 19.

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Posted in SAP, Saas, Technology | No Comments »

Integration with SAP

Friday, July 6th, 2007

Well, even with NetWeaver and XI it seems that it is still not easy to integrate 3rd party systems with SAP. I did some research and found the following interesting products. The first one that seems very interesting (based on their website, I’m signed up for a demo next week) is the an Integration Appliance for SAP by Cast Iron. A friend of mine indicated that his company is considering Cast Iron as a way to integrate their Salesforce.com system with SAP. Here is an interesting blog entry on Cast Iron and the following wikipedia entry lists more integration appliances. This is an example of Cast Iron’s mapping editor.

Cast Iron Editor

The appliance allows full environment management, i.e., you can set up a dev, test and production environment. Cast Iron has three appliances for SAP, an entry level model for one application integration, a flag ship model for enterprise level application integration and also a high availability (HA) appliance.

WinShuttle is another popular way to upload and download information from SAP. This product seems less flashy than Cast Iron’s appliance, however it seems to deliver the goods for many customers.

Gregor Hohpe wrote a book on patterns and best practices for enterprise integration, called, Enterprise Integration Patterns. Gregor’s web site also contains a lot of useful information regarding enterprise integration.

I look forward to hearing back from my SAP friends regarding their integration experiences.

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Posted in SAP, Technology | No Comments »

Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (ESOA) for the rest of us

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

Venderprisey linked to an excellent presentation on ESOA. I post it here for your convenience. It’s also an example of an excellent presentation.

Do you agree?

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Posted in Business, SAP | No Comments »

Shai Agassi – Post-SAP

Sunday, April 29th, 2007

Shai Agassi recently left SAP AG to pursue other interests including alternative energy. Here is the press release. He is still a technology consultant to SAP with an office in Palo Alto.

His post-SAP blog is called the Long Tailpipe. You can also find a great podcast here that he recently delivered at Stanford.

What is your view of Shai leaving SAP?

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Posted in Blogging, Green Energy, Leadership, SAP | No Comments »

SAPPHIRE 2007 in Atlanta

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

SAP Logo

SAP is definitely faced with some interesting challenges at the moment. The Oracle lawsuit and now with Shai Agassi leaving. I live in Atlanta and look forward to attending SAPPHIRE. I’m sure it’s going to be an interesting event. It is now a joint event with ASUG and it is from April 22-25, 2007 at the Georgia World Congress Center.

Let me know if you are going. I look forward to seeing you there.

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Posted in SAP | No Comments »

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