Once you’ve made the decision to use a specialist SAP support partner, either to complement your in-house team or to provide you with fully outsourced SAP support, you need to make sure that you select the right partner – after all, your SAP system needs to be in safe hands. In this blog we will outline some of the key questions to ask when choosing your partner.
Does the partner’s company culture, size and location align well with your business?
Beyond meeting your checklist of pre-requisites for type and level of support that you require, it is really important to consider if your chosen partner will be a good fit with your company’s culture, size and location/s.
You need to understand how well your support partner’s consultants will become integrated with you to develop a deep understanding of your business. After all you want to trust your partner as your independent advisor in all matters SAP.
For rapidly growing businesses with an increasing global presence it is vital that your partner is both agile enough to respond at pace and mature enough to be able to deliver consistent, scalable services required for your growing business.
Do they have the right level of SAP knowledge & experience and associated certifications?
To ensure the competence of an SAP support partner you need to check:
– Their track record of providing high quality SAP support services
– What SLAs they offer
– That their consultants are certified in their specialist SAP modules
– If they are PCOE certified
– If they are able to provide you with a migration pathway to the Cloud
How flexible is the service provided by the SAP support partner?
You need to look at the different levels of support offered by the partner, and also the skills and size of your in-house team and your immediate or longer term needs. Finding an SAP provider that offers a good level of flexibility means that you only pay for what you need and can easily flex up as your business needs grow. Do they offer a Pay-As-You-Go Model designed to help you flex your resources at times of peak demand?
Does the Support partner have a dedicated team or outsource the work?
An SAP provider with its own team will have a deeper understanding of your system and its history as well as your organisation and your industry. Close interaction between partners and customers encourages a process of continuous improvement that is essential to helping you drive better value from your investment in SAP.
Do they offer other services that you might want to take advantage of?
Whilst you want to find a partner that has specialist skills and expertise in your industry you may also enquire about some of the other services that it provides to its other customers that you may want to take advantage of. As a growing business you want to be sure your partner can scale with you and are able to offer a range of complementary services to aid your ongoing business plans.
