We`re ERPWerks

ERP Training and Risk Management

ABOUT US

Our mission is to help our clients build and accelerate their internal SAP/ERP capability.

We do this via:
1) Professional development and training programs bridging Business and Technology and focused on both Current Employees and New Hires
2) Smart Data and Predictive Analytics guidance and prototypes
3) Collaboration with Higher Education teaching and program development to help convey practical SAP and ERP knowledge to students about to enter or re-enter the workforce.

ERPWerks operates following these principles:
Risk Management Excellence
Advanced Logistics Processes Organization
Collaborative framework involving business, IT and process stakeholders
Data Integration
User Adoption
Analytics (Dashboards and Predictive) Excellence

We are an international team operating in the US, Switzerland and Germany.
Languages: English, German, Swiss German, French, Italian, Spanish.

 Realize Your Business Case!

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND TRAINING. 

Helping both new hires and current employees gain expertise in SAP.

We focus on practical, experience-based knowledge transfer within the context of your company’s priorities. We understand you need internal capability, and our mission is to help you get there.

Risk Management is central to everything we do.

We work with SAP as well as with leading international content providers to provide the right solution for you.

Click here for sample courses.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS PROTOTYPE LAB.

Helping companies move from Big Data toward Smart, Predictive Data via academic, prototype-based, affordable partnerships.

Organizations understand the value of new data modeling techniques: the challenge is matching specific needs/applications with the serious investments required.

We work with a team at the the University of St. Thomas to provide prototype-based project work solving smart data issues for you.

HANA, Hadoop, Spark, R, Mahout and other capability.

UNIVERSITY COLLABORATION.

Collaboration with Higher Education teaching and program development to help convey practical SAP and ERP knowledge to students about to enter or re-enter the workforce.

We are experienced with SAP’s University Alliance and the mechanics of effective course design for undergraduate and graduate programs.

Lead Instructor

Bill Gamble

Bill Gamble

Bill brings over two decades of international experience working with businesses, many of them family-owned, as a trusted advisor in the areas of ERP, strategic planning, project management and risk management. He has also held positions as CIO and COO. Bill has managed several large international projects involving SAP, finance/controlling and various logistics process and workflow platforms. He has an extensive international network built up over twenty years of delivery-oriented project experience. He also has designed and teaches a full-semester ERP Overview course at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He attended Dartmouth College (Magna cum Laude) and the International Institute of Studies and Training (Japan).

"We treat ERP not as software, but as a framework for your processes. As such, it can be a common improvement language for your organization."

William Gamble

Tenets

Client Self-Sufficiency in ERP

Client Self-Sufficiency in ERP

Fewer and more targeted consultants, greater internal expertise. Our mission is to help you build up SAP/ERP capability: Programmers, Basis, Module Experts, Logistics Process Experts. Let us assist.

Risk Management

Risk Management

We bring extensive international project experience to every hour of training. Project Management, Governance, Data, User Adoption, Internal Capability: we connect classroom knowledge with making your ERP the most effective possible and helping you avoid financial and business risks. We care about maximizing your ERP investment.

Best Content

Best Content

We are partners with SAP as well as leading industry and academic content providers. We have also developed private content for business and academic clients since 2004.

Best Service

Best Service

We care about delivering what we promise. Client satisfaction is the ballgame.

Customized and Relevant

Customized and Relevant

We "get" that you do not need another cookie-cutter by-rote training program. You have immediate needs and concerns and any training needs to address them. Period.

From the Blog

Connections: Finance and SAP Risk Management

March 18, 2016

Rightcoast

 

Last week I attended a talk at my old school – italicize the old – given by a hedge fund manager who among other distinguished accomplishments wrote with compelling clarity in 2006 about the impending credit crisis: the kind of person people listen to.

The talk focused on investment approaches and risk management, and from the get-go I was fascinated by the connections between that risk management and risk management for SAP implementations, which have by now become such a strategic financial component of larger international companies.

In fact, it is awfully fun these days as someone who works on the bridge between IT and business to see examples of concept convergence in areas such as:

  • Risk Management
  • Project and Change Management
  • Analytics.

Refreshingly, the once-massive moat between tech and, really, your customers, is shrinking, thanks to more open technologies and the desire and need of well-run businesses to realize the benefits of huge technology investments.

So for example, instead of needing to make a phone call and basically redirect a satellite to get a predictive report on sales areas with lots of data, managers – perhaps with a bit of assistance but so much less than previously – can access some HANA libraries along with maybe PA and Lumira and move the management of IT into business.

When I worked for UBS in Zürich I met a few financial risk managers, and some concepts they used, echoed by the speaker last week, really rang some bells (in a nice way!). Let me mention a couple, adapted for SAP.

1) The realization of your Business Case is directly tied to the management of your risks. And management = understand / embrace / minimize.

2) Let go of your thought barriers and see beyond the obvious. Assign someone with an understanding of your business processes and a great imagination (assign yourself as well!) to translate that standard list of “ERP things-that-go-wrong”, e.g.
– Data cleansing and harmonization
– User adoption
– Consultant management
– Realistic and effective process mapping
– Project management and governance
– QA
into scenarios specific to your people and processes.

It could be a fun weekly challenge, to get out and listen to someone really smart and good at what they do.

A Fictional CEO’s Road to HANA, Part II

March 10, 2016

main-east-Hana

 

Following a fitful sleep, you head into work with two things on your mind: one, the frustrating “no progress” meeting with your CIO and his Analytics Specialist, and two, the vibrant Data Sciences student team from last night at the University.

Someone told you recently, at a conference somewhere, that SAP for CEOs is like an onion: you peel away layer after layer and then you start to cry.

Beyond the software licenses, and “add-ons”, and project costs, and consultant costs – all of this you expected – your business has 7 different analytics and BI tools, and as far as you can tell none of them is nirvana. This you did not expect. Sure, there are dashboards galore at meetings, chock-full of KPI tracking and targets, and reports, but you keep waiting for the integrative and predictive elements they keep promising. Up goes your blood pressure.

On the seventh floor Ted, one of your executive assistants, is waiting with your Lavazza cappuccino, and you take it from him and say you will be in IT. He lurches to his phone to call ahead and you tell him not to, you want to surprise.

And surprise them you do. The main room has a bunch of fancy pods, and they are mainly populated, with people in t-shirts slouching over screens, and you recall what the HR consultants taught you regarding “generational value realizations”.

“Dude,” you hear a whisper,” “Bossman.”

Five minutes later, you’re sitting with the CIO, his PhD, and three other staff members, discussing analytics and your request for better data on the West and Southwest stores and warehouses. The MRP is working well, efficiency numbers are up, yet you still need more info on
– integration
– Predictive.

So you go, “What’s the deal with Hadoop, Mahour, Spark and HANA? Why aren’t we doing more?”

“Some of the group look irritated, as if it’s none of your business, but the CIO says, “We have a mandate to reduce tools.”

“Yeah, yeah,” you go: “But I was at the U last night, and…”

And you tell them the story, and the PhD says, “Actually, HANA, with some help from a few open source programs, might get us where we need to go, but we don’t know enough because you told us not to spend any more on SAP.”

This is when you mention to them that they could run it at least for a while on AWS and maybe give you Lumira so you didn’t have to call down every time you wanted to –

At this point the PhD starts to get this look of surprise on his face, and then enthusiasm, and discusses where to find some staff to work on this – at which point you tell them you have the staff, as in a research project you can fund at the University. And the meeting soon adjourns, with a near-term action plan.

Results:

  • One week later the grad students deliver sentiment analysis reports on the West and Southwest, and immediately begin using further HANA templates and Predictive Analysis on AWS
  • Your analytics team trains in on HANA Studio
  • Two months later your management team completes a waayy better budget and your dashboards are just better as well
  • One year later you are down to two licensed analytics tools and a few open source programs for loading and cleaning
  • Your company has a research collaboration with the local University and lo and behold it is also a source of great IT talent
  • You are able to return to uninterrupted morning cappuccino breaks.

 

 

A CEO’s Road to HANA: Part I

March 1, 2016

Sentiment Analysis, zum Beispiel?

Part I

Let us say you are a CEO of a business that has stores or products or brands that in some way touch the retail marketplace. Business is going well this year, but there’s pressure: international and national competition, growth management issues, and all kinds of Lean and Kaizen projects flurrying about that make sense but you still have the impression they could be coordinated better. Forget IT and ERP and all the consultants; you just want to enjoy your third cappuccino.

Then, just as you take the first sip, one of your many Executive Assistants beeps you to announce your 10 o’clock. Urgh: you forgot.

 In saunter the CIO and his analytics specialist, a PhD commanding a salary you wish you could have earned half of at his age of 33. They are here to report on a request of yours from two weeks ago, a market analysis of stores in the West and South, where sales have been waffling, though in different places for different reasons. Worse yet, you’re not sure if they’ll keep waffling. You know all about ERP and Sales Areas, and Distribution Chains, but the stew of anecdotal information from many sources, and contradictory reporting – specifically regarding how to improve forecasting – has simply become irritating.

 You never wanted to be known as the grouchy CEO, but after twenty minutes of hearing about problems with your huge West Coast database architecture, and data integration, and inventory reports from ERP, and the five different analytics tools, and predictive, and big blobs of data from different streams, and k-means algorithms, you halt the meeting.

“Hang on a sec,” you say. “I thought we agreed to reduce these tools to one or two – for the license costs alone.”

“Exactly,” they agree. “It’s just taking a while.”

You shake your head, feel a migraine careening your way. “I just,” you enunciate slowly, “want to prepare for the budget process that starts in a month.”

You end the meeting early, and immerse yourself the rest of the day in more productive meetings regarding operations and sales, until you leave early at 5 to teach your graduate class in management at the University. This is a joy for you, every other Tuesday for a semester, it’s just refreshing to work with the motivated and enthusiastic MBA candidates.

During the first break you head for the café, but on the way walk past a most interesting room with a gaggle of young people clustered around a console in the Data Sciences Center. This is Techie Shangri-La. You wander in and watch, and smile at the energy of this group, which is clearly dealing with some “Big Data” project. The far wall is filled with a high-rez projection of code and objects on the left, and cycling visualizations on the right.

“What is this?” you ask one of them, stopping her from chomping into a pizza slice.

“Oh!” she says. “We’re having a contest between a relational database, Hadoop/Mahout and HANA. 120 Million records, geospatial, it’s really cool. HANA’s totally winning. Next we’re doing sentiment analysis and predictive.”

A couple other students come over and you ask a few more questions about HANA, but have to get your coffee and back to your class. As you walk away you keep turning over in your mind a statement the students made – “It’s set up with libraries and templates so that even a businessperson can use it!” – and confusion hits. You business has HANA; you remember approving the investment. But in today’s meeting they didn’t say much about it.

You make a mental note to visit IT in the morning.

Integrating ERP at Small and Midsize Companies

January 27, 2016

So often, when considering ERP, there seems a sharp and defining line – a moat, really – between the large enterprises and, well, all the rest. This is largely understandable. ERP has been defined by the SAPs and Oracles, and even healthy midcap companies can look at the required investment in financial and human capital and decide to make do with systems that often are running things pretty well. Why change what’s not broken?

Well, clearly there are reasons:

  • Pesky competition implementing continuous improvement
  • Customers demanding more rigorous supply chain standards and efficiency
  • Profit pressures
  • The plain old drive to get better and communicate.

On the other side, however, the SAPs and Oracles are struggling to identify business models that are not only affordable for the “less large”, but flexible and informal enough. Why informal? Not all companies have the right BAs and Process Mappers on staff, or the time and energy, or the PMOs and logistics specialists, to take the next step in ERP integration, and it is further very daunting to take a decision to rely on a consulting firm, however excellent they are.

Here’s the thing, though: the moat is scalable. Really. Here are a few brief thoughts.

  • Obviously, if you are a company managing finance and inventory and sending stuff through production lines to sales and distribution, you already have ERP. It’s such an obvious thing to say, but sometimes I talk with smaller and even not-so-small firms who see ERP as this “thing” in other county or country, viewed through a nebulous and expensive lens. Not so.
  • Shifting the mindset this way helps you realize you can think of end-to-end processes in ways that support continuous improvement and also IT’s platform, accelerating progress in two key areas:
    1. Horizontally, by integrating business processes
    2. Vertically, by providing better and ever-better analytics.
  • Working on data cleansing and integration in the context of process integration is a good thing to do.
  • Working on fostering a company-wide appreciation for and understanding of cultural respect for process integration is even better!
  • These efforts can help inform a more effective approach to your ERP integration plans, whether they involve:
    1. Replacing one or two homegrown systems that require too much Excel (not that we don’t like Excel!)
    2. Working on automated interfaces between disparate systems (just remember, contrary to every marketing brochure ever written, they are rarely seamless)
    3. Considering an affordable integrated solution, perhaps from a cloud-based ERP provider.

Sage and Netsuite are two strong products, and there are others, but SAP and Oracle also offer affordable approaches, if one knows how to ask.

But even without the readiness to invest in platforms/solutions, changing to an ERP and Process Integration mindset is the right place to begin for smaller organizations.

BG

27.01.2016

S/4HANA Musings

December 9, 2015

With its November 1511 Release, SAP has moved S/4HANA from the financial space to its broader business process arena, and in fact seems to be shifting away from thinking of ERP toward offering “Enterprise Management”. In fact, it is exciting to see SAP take the leadership role in providing an integrated approach to “Vertical Business”, i.e. connecting data up through Business Process Integration and Logistics to Analytics – and, most interestingly, to the rapidly evolving world of Predictive.

And while we are starting to find a variety of clear and thoughtful product pieces describing the architecture, integration approaches and platform roadmap, we can also find companies asking themselves (and others!) a couple of pretty key questions, namely:

  1. I’ve read the marketing materials, but really, what is S/4HANA? And to be honest, more importantly:
  2. What does it mean for me?- for our organization?

For starters, things are moving quickly. HANA is proving itself as an amazingly effective data platform, providing stability, security and awesome power and speed. In fact, in and of itself it is demonstrating immediately tangible benefits not just for those “data-clump” painpoints, but in general for helping companies move from worrying about Big Data to focusing positive energy on Intelligent Data.

And now here it is as the foundation for SAP’s first new platform in… well, seems like a long long time.

In terms of addressing the two questions above, we are making progress focusing on the following.

  • S/4HANA is about bringing the transactions onto the data platform, about integrating OLAP and OLTP. This architecture helps with drastic reductions in tables and schemas, while HANA beings in speed and power.
  • S/4HANA provides a vertical solution with a data platform, a digital core (all the transactions) and a new and friendly UX called Fiori.
  • This platform blends with a very open and wide variety of Analytics tools and solutions.
  • HANA remains central to all of this, so as you think ahead to moving toward S/4HANA, get your feet wet (if you haven’t already) with HANA Studio and PAL and visualization possibilities like Lumira. Build capability!
  • There is an excellent 14-day trial for S/4HANA that for beginners gets the idea across quite nicely. You might consider the HEC/Baton simulation on S/4HANA as well.

The ERP world is going to be pretty exciting the next couple of years. Have fun!

Update 9/22

September 22, 2015

Greetings from beautiful Minnesota.

We have been very busy lately, and recently realized that we have a blog! Just kidding, but we have been a bit negligent.

Our risk management approach to SAP and ERP in general is resonating well in the marketplace, and we are also seeing exciting interest in HANA and S4/HANA. While enthusiastic about the technology and direction, companies are working on making sense of how to fit in-memory column-based computing into their organizations. Therefore we have developed an intensive one-day overview of S4/HANA.

We have also had a great time getting to know the folks in Montréal at ERPSim, and are super excited about our partnership with them. We have also begin offering a one day introductory seminar/workshop as we are finding that ERP stakeholders are very busy people!
🙂

We wish you a wonderful rest of your week,

BG

Client Surveys

June 25, 2015

It’s been a busy start to the summer, with several client survey meetings (some with my academic friends), and plenty of positive feedback! Big picture, here’s what we’re hearing from senior executive teams working with SAP.

  • “We’d love to build skills within our internal teams, whether in BA, QA, PMO, Change Management, Auditing, especially since
    1. budgets are tight
    2. and hiring skilled SAP people is highly competitive.
  • We believe in HANA but are still not entirely clear on realistic roadmaps AND where it’s going to fit with our BO (and PA) environment. Help!
  • We wish Project Teams had a broader understanding of Business Process Integration and how changes in one end of the system change other places (butterfly effect).
  • It would be great to increase integration between SAP teams and Continuous Improvement (Kaizen 6Sigma, Lean) teams.
  • We would like Project Teams (including BAs, QAs, PMs) to keep a clearer eye on Risk Management.”

 Our takeaway: the key for us is to provide VALUE, i.e., practical, experience-based courses in the “Business Process and Risk Management Zone”. We are on the case.

BG

ERPWerks: Accelerating Internal Capability


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