I have spent the past 5 months working with Paymetric’s solution for SAP credit cards and I must say I have been impressed.

I first came across Paymetric in 2002 when supporting Credit Cards from the CRM side and they have come a long way since then. I was impressed with their expertise at that stage but their solution was not as comprehensive as it is today.

They have had a long and comprehensive look at SAP’s standard solution for credit cards and developed their offering to fill the gaps and improve the functionality.

Here are a few examples:

• In standard SAP, the customer needs to decide up front in the sales order to pay by credit card. It is not possible to pay for your open A/R balance later. Paymetric’s Open A/R module allows you to select Open balances after the fact to settle with a credit card.
• In standard SAP, if you have a billing plan of say 3 bills of $5,000 each, SAP will attempt to authorize the whole $15,000 instead of only the amount with in the configured horizon. There is a way of using the Auto A/R module to cover this.

The solution comprises of a group of SAP programs (imported as a series of transports) and a separate server called XiPay (actually server is a misnomer, it is actually a piece of middleware that communicates with the payment processor). There is also an encryption/decryption server which resides on the same box.

The XiPay server is where you get a lot of value, as Paymetric has certified their interfaces with the processors (and they support quite a few). This save a bunch of development and testing time.
Even though the solution is vastly improved, it does not necessarily mean that you do not have to add code to user exits.

For example: It does not support Invoice Cancellations out of the box. You need to add some coding to cover the 2 scenarios: before settlement and after settlement. Actually, most of the coding is related to the XiPay side in this case. Another example is Billing Plans. A bit of code needs to be added to handle these.

Whatever you do, do not underestimate the effort still involved in implementing credit cards as we have discovered. Paymetric definitely does shorten the implementation time dramatically, but do not get the illusion that it is a plug and go.

I have also been very impressed with the caliber of the Paymetric consultants when we have had questions or issues.

In summary, I think it is an excellent solution and well worth the investment. It will shorten your credit card implementation time and really improve your final solution.

This morning I was musing over the fact that I had not heard a large emphasis on change management for a few years now. When I started with SAP (early 90’s), change management was the big buzz word. Every project had a dedicated raaa raaa change management team. Am we were made very conscious of the vital importance of change management for the success of a project. Because let’s face it, we were introducing huge changes to the business. And their acceptance of these changes could make or break a project. And my first 3 years of SAP experience was in South Africa. South Africa has this curious mix of first world and 3rd world. So quite a few of the rollouts I did involved actually teaching users how to use a computer and then how to use SAP.

In fact on my first project in the US, we even had a user take early retirement to avoid having to learn how to use SAP. In another case, the users refused to use MRP and it was eventually switched off.

So what is Change Management? The definition I like is: Overcoming resistance to change. So how do you do that? From my observations and experiences, it involves helping users realize several things:

1. SAP is going to help me do my job better? In my case, I tend to work on the Customer Service and outgoing logistics side, so the users I deal with want to serve the customer better. This is not always from the companies perspective. This is often just a case of, can I answer all the questions the customer puts to me (do I have easy access to the information). Let’s face it, it’s an unpleasant job if your customers scream at you all the time.
2. Is SAP going to make me more productive or is it going to make my job more difficult? In today’s information age, having the right tool for the right job makes all the difference in the world. Example: If you ask me to calculate a whole table of financial and sales figures with MS Word, I can probably do it, but it would be painful and very time consuming because MS Word is not designed for that. However, give me MS Excel and life’s a breeze
3. Is SAP going to save me time which is similar to point 2? So that I can work shorter days and spend more time at home with my family.

Keys to Change Management So how do we get users to embrace and welcome SAP? From my observations the following points are crucial:

• A colleague of mine always says:
  

  A fish always rots from the head

  Support for the project and it’s goals must come from top down. It never ceases to amaze me how a company can spend millions on an implementation and then refuse to pony up the appropriate resources and time to design and test the crucial business processes and make the crucial business decisions. Or the users they pony up end up doing 2 jobs: there normal job and the project.

• Involve the users in some of the decision making and definitely in the testing. SAP is going to directly affect their job. Yes management benefits from the increased availability of crucial business making information, but who puts that information in the system - the users.

• Allocate sufficient time for training. Users do not want to struggle or appear incompetent.

• Let users know what is changing. here are 3 strategies I have seen work well:

• A “Show & Tell” session or “Lunch and Learn”. Invite users to a demonstration of a business process. Great time to verify that you have not missed anything. You would be surprised how often this brings up something you have missed. Tip: Get a user to do the demo.

• A more formal process is a “Conference Room Pilot”. On one of my projects we had 1 scheduled every 6 weeks. It acted as a project milestone to showcase what had been accomplished. It was typically 3-4 days, also involved smaller breakout sessions to gather more specialized feedback and information and an evening social event. And people flew in from all the plants. It worked extremely well.

• Publish a regular newsletter.

• Get Regular feedback from users (maybe anonymous) to elicit rumors, concerns and fears.

The ultimate goal is to prove to the users that the new system is going to provide them huge benefits. Thus reducing their resistance to change. With the increased frequency of smaller companies implementing SAP, this becomes more and more difficult to accomplish. The reason is that these companies have excellent people but are typically lean to start with. One person often wears many hats. One of the big “criticisms” of SAP implementations in the early days was that they absorbed key personnel for extended periods of time (sometimes years). Be aware of this and plan for this and plan backfills if necessary. In a bigger implementation I did in the UK, the company identified 10 people for the project and backfilled their positions 100%. Unusual, but highly effective. In summary: SAP Change Management is answering a simple question.

How do I persuade users that SAP is going to provide them benefits over their existing system thus reducing their resistance to the change.

I recently came across an email with a Quote from a daily progress meeting (by the project manager ) which I had forgotten about:

“We are going to continue having these meetings, everyday, until I find out why no work is getting done.”

This was a project from hell. We did great work and I have good memories from it, but it landed my client colleague in hospital and caused quite a few resignations from the consulting partner (I was an independent). We were taking 3 countries live per month !!! Risky business.

End result: Project ran out of budget for the year, was scaled back from about 50 consultants to 5, project manager left or was asked to leave. The project was eventually restarted with a new budget the following year and went live later that year.

This has been a particularly crazy week with meetings galore and very little progress. It is a fine line of when are there too many meetings. On the one hand, it is very useful to sit in on meeting to find out what others are doing and dealing with. On the other hand, you need to decide when they actually add value to your part of the implementation.

As SAP is an integrated beast (which is a blessing and a curse in itself), I have often been amazed at how just picking one thing up in a seemingly unrelated meeting, can make all the difference in the world. It would be nice if you knew in advance what that thing was and arrive just in time, spend 5 minutes instead of 90 minutes .

We almost need a dedicated resource who can read the future so that you can co-ordinate you entry and exit to meetings, and spend the other 85 minutes doing some other productive work.

I wonder how we could sell getting this person on board . They would certainly be worth the money.

That’s all for now. It’s 4.00 am am I am “Sleepless in Boston”.

The SAPGuy

We all only have 168 hrs a week.
Lets say we sleep for 8 hrs a night, or 56 hrs a week
Lets say we spend an additional 12 hrs a week eating
So we now have 100 hrs remaining.
Say we sell 40 hrs to our boss and use about 8 hrs commuting.
This leaves use with about 52 hrs to distribute between our partners, kids, hobbies and relaxation.
Realistically, this is often more like 40 hours.

I am a big fan of anything that saves me time or automates something, in short, improving my productive time. And in an increasingly digital and mobile world, it is important that it is accessible from anywhere. From a "Getting Things Done" (GTD) perspective, ToDo lists are equivalent of the everyday "runway" tasks (as opposed to 10,000", 20,000".. tasks). Through the years I have tried many systems. These have ranged from complex FiloFax paper and electronic based systems to simple ToDo in my planner pad. In general what I am looking for is:

• Simple but with adequate features
• Access it from anywhere with an interned connection.
• Classify and group the Tasks
• Prompt me for tasks due and do not show me tasks that are not due
• Prioritize my tasks
• Add notes
• Free or low cost

Towards the end of 2006, I discovered a free online tool called Remember the Milk which more than met my criteria. It is one of the new breed of Web2.0 web applications (with the creation of some modern programming languages like AJAX and the new ideas of social networking, it is now possible to create complete interactive applications online that also can take advantage of networking of multiple users - known as Web2.0). Here is a screen print of the application.

And here is a second screen print of the tasks tab.

As you can see, you can create context specific lists. And not only that, but you can then tag (one or more simply free form descriptors) each individual task. And all the tags are displayed in a tag cloud (also known as word clouds).

 The relative size of the word indicates the relative importance of the word (calculated by the number of & priority of tasks tagged with this word). It is a simple visual representation of the tasks and their importance. Each task can have:

 

• Due date
• Repeat
• Time Estimate
• Location - links to Google Maps
• URL
• Number of time postponed
• Shared with
• Notes

Some other great features are the ability to share task lists or individual tasks, and get a daily notification of your tasks due today and overdue tasks. This makes it easy to allow other users to see what you are busy with and for you to manage your own task list.

All in all, it is a really impressive little tool and I have found that it helped me immensely to save time and plan my time and tasks. Be sure to read the help notes and the blog to learn more about more tricks and features.

I highly recommend that you try this application. That’s all for now.

Regards
The SAPGuy