Getting the best out of ERP, an SAP journey in Cape Town
- Summary:
- What does it take to drive value from ERP in a large city? In this piece we briefly outline the steps the City of Cape Town took to drive value as measured by cash flow out of its journey with SAP.
I am currently in Johannesburg at one of Eventful's Mastering SAP Technologies conferences. I love these events because you always get to hear real stories from real people doing real things. What's more you get the warts and all picture, not the PR sanitized 'stuff' that clutter our case study inboxes.
Earlier today I listened to André Stelzner, CIO the City of Cape Town. It is a city I thoroughly recommend anyone to visit. While many outside of Africa might think of it as an emerging state, I was amazed at the technology I saw last December when in the town.
Stelzner talked extensively about his town's 10 year journey with SAP. It provides a fascinating insight into what it takes to drive success. More to the point, it talks about real ROI, that which is measured by cash generated as a result of implementing an end to end solution which ties key assets, like property to financial and customer systems.
What's really interesting for me is that while SAP is clearly a key component, it is not the be all and end all. Stelzner talks about cultural engagement and 'ERP thinking' as elements that he believes are essential to driving value.
That's the topic of the first video above. It runs longer than we usually like but I did not want to stop Stelzner from providing as much information as we could cram in. The video also gives a flavor of what organizations need to think about when they are considering this kind of implementation.
In part 2 coming soon, we discuss the future of SAP investments, and how Cape Town is using past investments to further leverage value. We also broach the topic of shared services.
A big thanks to the Eventful team for providing facilities that allowed for pain free recording.