Real Value Lies Beyond Numbers

One of SAP’s best kept secrets is its Value Engineering team, a group of specialists who work with customers to build business cases for investments in technology and software. Ultimately this hidden jewel seeks to demonstrate the value of an investment through the use of an extensive library of benchmark data and their experience of working with other SAP customers in similar verticals.

The fact that a group like this exists underlines the importance that prospective customers place on the business case for their project and ultimately their ability to demonstrate long term value and return on investment (ROI). In highly competitive and rapidly maturing solution areas, like the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) market, this becomes even more important as customers seek not only to build a business case but lower perceived risk by understanding the value of a given solution by learning from peers who have already deployed the same solution.

Gartner highlighted this when in May of 2009 it published a report titled “Finding the Fast Path to Corporate Performance Management Value” which examined the sort of ROI and payback customers could expect from an investment in EPM solutions. While the report provides some very valuable data it struggles to provide real specific examples citing for example ROI in a range of 50-200% for one particular EPM domain. This highlights that there is no better alternative than talking to one’s peers and hearing about their experiences.

If there was ever an event which provided a forum for this then it’s SAPPHIRENOW which takes place this week in Orlando and Frankfurt. This event is the perfect venue for customers and prospective customers to come together and learn about SAP solutions, the value they create and how best to leverage them. By way of a few examples then SAP EPM team will be hosting approximately 100 customers for a special interest group breakfast on Enterprise Performance Management and organizations like the Campbell’s Soup Company will present on how they achieved better planning and budgeting processes using SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation version for SAP NetWeaver.

This is great if you’re one of the lucky people that were able to be in Orlando and Frankfurt but what if you’re not? Well to start with, SAP is making the event accessible online but it’s also committed to sharing customer experiences through as many channels as possible and making this accessible all year round with case studies, webcasts and customer videos. For example you can learn about customers like DWP, Tesoro, Swiss Post and Desjardin’s and how they use SAP’s EPM solutions directly on the SAP website.

It’s through customers stories like this and a forum like SAPPHIRENOW that real leadership is demonstrated. It’s not about broad sweeping statements about vague numbers of customers which are almost impossible to prove or and even harder to disprove but about providing real tangible stories of how customer use a given solution, their experiences and the value they were able to realize.