Academy of Better Business

Elite Cafe: SAP administration in outsourcing

Advantages of IT outsourcing in a middle-size business

Are five IT specialists enough for a three-hundred-person, steadily growing company? Yes, provided that they can ‘borrow’ some qualifications from others.

The first

Elite Cafe is one of the most innovative companies in its area that was the first in Poland to implement SAP with a preconfigured SPRINT system. What has it gained?

A broad functionality of SAP(finance and controlling, supply and sales, HR) was started quickly and relatively cheaply; the methodology of SPRINT, together with ready-made documentation and project tools did not demand high involvement of Elite employees during implementation.

The IT system that supports strategic areas of a company’s operations requires constant monitoring of the availability and data security in order to function well. Appropriate qualifications and knowledge are vital to meet this requirement.

Even the most skilled company’s administrator, responsible for running the system, must constantly improve his skills at various training courses on maintenance and development of an ERP system and other elements of IT infrastructure that influence its functioning.

More difficult when you are alone

During last three years Elite Cafe has had its own administration of SAP system. BCC provided support for the company: a few times a month it executed a remote check of the system or the monitoring of functioning of the infrastructure on the application level, data bases and operational system. Moreover, the client was provided with current phone support of BCC consultants during solving current problems. It was limited to a certain amount of hours per month.

The threat of losing a well-trained employee to another company was also quite real. Moreover, the number of IT specialists in Elite was in this way diminished, as being an independent system administrator required focusing only on that task.
 
The solution was outsourcing, a form of cooperation at a lower or comparable cost to the original model of independent administrator of  SAP. How is it possible?

Hired qualifications

After three years of an independent system administrating Elite decided to entrust BCC with the remote administration of SAP through outsourcing. What will the company gain? The invaluable: a constant access to steadily increasing qualifications of BCC technical consultants, who supported SAP implementation and maintenance for more than 20 clients. The implementation projects covered various versions of the system and SAP installation on various hardware and software platforms.

It’s worth noticing that their qualifications are constantly improved through training courses, new implementations or  internal projects, related to gaining knowledge about new technologies and solutions launched onto the market.

All this minimizes or almost cancels unpleasant surprises or the possibility that an employee will lack in qualifications to solve unusual problems that may occur during administering the system.

It should be also noted that the contract obliges BCC to make available for the client not only a single person’s services, but the whole team of IT consultants, which is especially valuable in terms of risk connected with absence of the employee responsible for system supervision.

The price of the service is also important. It turned out to be comparable to the cost of the previous model that required spending money on employee training and other costs.

The qualitative changes were quickly felt by Elite IT team and particularly IT management. Thanks to BCC, instead of spending long time on current administrative works related to SAP, they can focus on working on developing IT solutions in order to meet the business requirements better.

Under a specified timetable of days and hours of duties a consultant becomes a remote administrator for the client’s system and sends reports about the state of the infrastructure twice a day .

In case of a  breakdown a client must be visited by a consultant ready to solve problems and within the maximum term specified in the contract.

The consultants also define potential areas for improvement or development of the system that can improve the efficiency of the hardware or security if the whole infrastructure. Any suggestions and remarks are passed to the clients in a form of daily updated administrator’s day book and reports on works in progress.