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SAP managed to change the market's perception of its products in the past year. "Today our products are viewed as premium but not expensive," said Lee Boon Lee, president & CEO, SAP Greater China.
As a result, SAP has reached more SME customers in Hong Kong. According to Lee, 80% of SAP's revenues in the SAR are from SMEs and the number of SAP Business One customers doubles or trebles annually. SAP Business One is designed to help SMEs automate critical business operations, such as sales, finance, purchasing, inventory, and manufacturing.
"To expand the SME market in Hong Kong, we put a lot of resources into educating our partners," said Lee. For instance, SAP has a program-Channel Enabler-for partner training, and an open academy to allow outside parties like consultants to learn about SAP applications.
The firm also saw existing customers buying more mid-market or enterprise applications in the last 12 months. For example, Towngas built a new billing system on top of their SAP platform while Pizza Hut-a SAP Business One customer-began to use SAP's mid-market solutions. |
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Incorporating SOA into NetWeaver
Technology-wise, SAP's major move in the past 12 months was the incorporation of SOA into its NetWeaver platform. According to Lee, SOA is a blueprint for creating a flexible IT landscape based on the SAP NetWeaver platform.
"The incorporation of SOA is a response to changing user requirements," said Lee. "Users want faster ROI and easy-to-use products-SOA allows us to meet such needs."
With SAP NetWeaver as a technical foundation, SOA moves IT architectures to higher levels of adaptability and moves companies closer to the vision of real-time enterprises by elevating Web services to an enterprise level, said Lee.
An enterprise service is usually a series of Web services combined with business logic that can be accessed and used repeatedly to support a particular business process. Aggregating Web services into business-level enterprise services provides a meaningful foundation for the task of automating enterprise-scale business scenarios, he added.
Lee pointed out that major advantages of SOA to the IT shops include less time spent on programming tasks and ease in the building of a library of processes, leading to improved efficiency and flexibility across an enterprise.
Products and people
Lee is also proud of SAP's focus on R&D investment. "Unlike our rivals who spend so much on acquiring companies, we grow organically and inject money into making our products better," said Lee.
SAP's organic growth approach also enables easy product upgrades for customers. "Companies don't compete on technologies," said Lee. "We top our rivals by having more talented people who are willing to stay with us for a longer term."
To stay competitive in the market, Lee said SAP also nurtures its employees. "Brain power is our differentiation," said Lee. "We attract the right talent by establishing promotion processes."
"SAP employees usually stay with the company for a long time," he added. "I have been here for 17 years. Most of our top management people have been in the firm for over 10 years."
He noted that stable talent is important to customers too. "Our rivals bear much uncertainty. When employees feel no security, they seek new jobs," said Lee. "This makes customers worry because they want to deal with people they are familiar with."
Roadmap for SAP ERP
With a focus on protecting customer investments, SAP makes sure that users of its latest SAP ERP 2005 won't have to do a major upgrade before the end of 2010. Available since May 2006, SAP ERP 2005 marks the fastest adoption rate of an ERP release in company history.
In January this year, SAP announced that over 1,000 customers were live on SAP ERP 2005.Organizations in different industries and different regions-such as Higher Education Press in China-use the application. Offered as part of customers' license and maintenance agreements, SAP enhancement packages for SAP ERP make it simpler and faster for customers to adopt new product functionality and industry-specific features without the risk of business disruption.
According to Lee, customers embrace SAP ERP 2005 for new user experience options and simpler, more intuitive user interfaces, including pre-configured role-based work centers, self-service capabilities and key functional enhancements.
Some of the major enhancements include:
• integrated talent management functionality that helps organizations to increase workforce value and productivity;
• new capabilities that simplify establishing HR shared service centers to automate and standardize HR core processes, improve the quality of services from HR departments, and provide global access to HR services;
• the new General Ledger that automates the reconciliation processes, streamlines manual processes and minimizes user errors, enables organizations to reduce the cost of finance and close their books faster and with greater accuracy;
• streamlined invoicing and collection processes that help customers enhance cash flow and improve working capital management; and
• integrated real estate and travel management capabilities to help companies contain costs and effectively manage corporate real estate.
Looking forward, Lee is positive about growth in the Hong Kong market. As a result, SAP's primary challenge is to train more people to support customers as fast as it can. "Companies don't compete on technologies. We top our rivals by having more talented people who are willing to stay with us for a longer term," said Lee.
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SAP sees success in mid-market
SAP announced at its mid-May customer conference Sapphire '07 that nearly 10,000 companies in over 50 countries have selected SAP All-in-One solutions for mid-sized firms.
The number of SAP All-in-One customers grows at a rate of 23 percent year-on-year, according to SAP. The solution is developed and delivered by a network of approximately 1,000 SAP channel partners, the company said in a statement.
"With the SAP All-in-One solutions, we saw a tremendous improvement in the visibility of information across our company that allows us to retrieve information rapidly," said Raymond Tan, managing director, Swiss Precision Industries.
Swiss Precision Industries of Singapore engineers and manufactures precision tools, dies and components that drive a diverse range of industries. It also works closely with its customers to design and develop new products, offering a one-stop shop for manufacturing solutions. Swiss Precision chose the HighTech-One solution from SAP partner Ledge Consulting.
"We are able to identify opportunities for improvement resulting in enhanced management efficiencies through the deployment of the solution's integrated and streamlined business processes," Tan added. "The implementation has already resulted in a quick return on investment and enhanced operational performance."
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