SAP-Centric Projects

Why is it that so many project professionals and PMOs are hesitant to embrace SAP while they often have such fierce loyalty towards Primavera? In my experience a lot of this can be attributed to issues that are straightforward to be resolved. Simply stated, the solutions these people work with typically are not comprehensive and streamlined.

Fact is that these tools are not exclusive. Both have in certain areas clear advantages for project control. Since these strong points rarely conflict, a well-functioning integrated process provides very significant advantages for everybody involved.

Recently I was part of a conversation in which the building of a nuclear reactor was described as a "capital project". I was asked how best to use SAP and Primavera to manage such a process. There is more than one way of addressing this question, and so I am going to ask a few questions myself, without addressing details of the process answer itself.

Who is the owner of SAP in the above example? Is it a general contractor (GC) who is supposed to manage this project? Or the buyer and future asset owner? The answer to these questinos determine whether we are even talking about a capital project or a "make-to-order" project.

One of the big frustrations people have when using SAP or working with it as contractors is that the same words have different meaning, or objects and functions are called something else in SAP than they are used to. Of course this is not a specific SAP problem. You always find this wherever somebody tries to create a standard, and this is exactly what SAP tries to do: Establish a standard for how mainly big companies do business. To achieve that, what could be better than defining the words your own way?

After investing millions of dollars into your core business software application SAP, the last thing you want to do is – not to use its rich and integrated functionality. Then of course managers, schedulers and contractors of mission-critical projects show up, pointing at the user-friendliness of scheduling tools like Primavera. Immediately you find yourself in a dilemma: Do you use SAP-only project management tools like PS (or PM and IM), or do you let your users (or at least your contractors) deal with supposed best-of-breed software like Primavera or MS Project? At least they get the critical job done, right? And you deal with the SAP stuff later…

At their 24th Annual User Conference in Orlando, the big news was the totally revamped Web functionality of Primavera's new flagship product P6. The attendance of users is great, rooms are filled and the overall quality of the presentations was excellent. P6 itself, particularly the Web version, is just pure pleasure and functionality.

Primavera seems to be able to stay on top of new technologies, incorporating them into their product suite the moment they are mature enough for that. Examples are the dynamic definition of dashboards, new concepts of navigation, and ability to extend comprehensive Gantt chart capabilities to the Web.