How To Control ERP, CRM Support Costs

Target Technique Owners:

If you or your company is struggling to control the support costs related to maintaining & properly managing your selected ERP, CRM technique, then this article may be of interest to you.

Oracle Applications (EBusiness Suite), Oracle Fusion, Siebel, PeopleSoft, SAP, Business, MySAP, On Demand, JD Edwards World / Enterprise, etc.

Generate Baseline:

It may appear like a minor point but you'll be surprised to find how plenty of IT shops run without these basic hygiene parts covered. Generate a baseline of all items, the who, the how plenty of, the window, the fail-safe, the what, the how long, the how frequent.

Analyze:

Synergize:

Now that you have created a baseline of all the moving parts, it is time to take a long, hard look at all those numbers. All of us know the emotions; all of us know that you cannot do without even the smallest bit less. BUT are you able to take the emotional part out of the equation for a day. Lovely, now think that your only job is to cut, what will you cut first & by how much? Lovely, you are getting the idea... what next? & the next after that, that can be reduced based on either lesser demand or better utilization.

Re-allocate:

Keep in mind the mantra is to do "More with less". of the quickest ways to get there is to synergize. Try to group human & nonhuman parts in to groups of similar collections. Generate common goals & score-cards that link success of to the other. These synergy strategies have been proved to increase efficiency in a giant way. Enterprise resource planning Now that you have been able to save "x" number of man-hours & "y" number of hardware items & program licenses, you can reallocate all these to where they can actually help your companies core business & generate more revenue for your company, in turn getting more IT budget for you J

Other Strategies:

As has been shown by giant & mid-size companies like General Electric (GE), Citibank, MetLife, Nike & others, this technique of outsourced (not necessarily offshored) strategies do work, but you need an specialist at your side who can help you navigate the complex maze from choice of a seller, to choice of the first technique to be supported, on through to maturity where all you need to do is monitor service levels.

IT program & hardware landscape keeps changing, Moore's law predicts that the change will continue at an exponential pace. With all this change, do you need to continue to train & manage an IT workforce that keeps becoming obsolete every to years? Would it make sense to entrust the IT work to a company which is it is core competency?

Subhasish Moitra is a seasoned professional with over 15 years experience of working on & managingIT projects & programs of varied types & sizes. He's historically successfully partnered with companies like GE, MetLife, McGraw Hill, Nike & others help properly execute their ERP, CRM implementations & support, rationalize their outsourcing strategies, control costs, among other things.