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2 years ago ::
Sep 21, 2010 - 11:59AM
#1
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Welcome to an exclusive Insider Learning Network Live Q&A with Tom Rodden, Director, Enterprise Applications, Varian Medical Systems. Tom will be available from 1:00 – 2:00 pm EST on Thursday, September 23 to answer your questions on his recent experiences transforming his SAP IT department’s role within the organization. Read the full insiderPROFILES article detailing Varian Medical’s IT transformation. To ask a question, simply login and post it below as a reply to this thread. If you are not yet a member of Insider Learning Network, register today. Don't forget to refresh this page to see the most recent posts.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 23, 2010 - 12:59PM
#2
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Thank you all for joining us today for this live Q&A with Tom Rodden from Varian Medical Systems. To post a question, please just click on Post Reply button above. To start, I have a question submitted from a member of our content team here at SAPinsider: Tom, was redefining IT’s role within your organization the catalyst for the decision to use SAP Enterprise Support, or a by-product of a larger strategy?
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2 years ago ::
Sep 23, 2010 - 1:00PM
#3
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Thank you all for joining us today for this live Q&A with Tom Rodden from Varian Medical Systems. To post a question, please just click on Post Reply button above. To start, I have a question submitted from a member of our content team here at SAPinsider:
Tom, was redefining IT’s role within your organization the catalyst for the decision to use SAP Enterprise Support, or a by-product of a larger strategy?
Signing up for SAP’s Enterprise Support was part of a general decision in Varian IT to strive for world class performance. We felt that skimping on SAP support would undermine the rest of our efforts. But that decision was only part of the strategy we had to improve IT’s delivery. In fact, while it has been very beneficial, it was not a central component of our strategy, more of a logical extension of the strategy.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 23, 2010 - 1:01PM
#4
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To elaborate a bit more--The strategy was “separate project work form support work, bring in a vendor to provide support and liberate the in-house applications team from the demands of routine support so that they can deliver new and improved functionality (through a substantial project portfolio)” The SAP Enterprise Support contract was part of the strategy because we felt the increased support would accelerate time to resolution and therefore reduce the time my team spends on support. So, to answer the question, you don’t need Enterprise Support to make the kinds of org decisions we made, to engage a 3rd party to play the support role, to get your employees excited about being the experts and leaders who implement the new functionality, or to steer the team towards more rather than less training. All of that is quite separate from a decision to use Enterprise Support.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 23, 2010 - 1:03PM
#5
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Did SAP's support team help you with GRC/security issues during the upgrade? And were business and IT on the same page about things like controls and authorizations?
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2 years ago ::
Sep 23, 2010 - 1:04PM
#6
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Hi Tom, In the article, you offered 5 lessons learned about Enterprise Support. What are some others lessons you learned during this IT transformation?
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2 years ago ::
Sep 23, 2010 - 1:05PM
#7
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SAP has been helping us with GRC/Security issues, both during the upgradea and since. It has ben extremely beneficial as we have struggled in this area, particularly with Portal security integrated to the ECC back-end and Active Directory.
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2 years ago ::
Sep 23, 2010 - 1:05PM
#8
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Hi Tom -- From your experiences, what are the pros vs. cons of a big bang implementation?
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2 years ago ::
Sep 23, 2010 - 1:06PM
#9
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Hi, Tom: You mentioned that IT is becoming more of a strategic partner to business areas such as sales, supply chain, etc. How have folks from the business side responded to this change? How has it impacted them?
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2 years ago ::
Sep 23, 2010 - 1:07PM
#10
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Hi Tom, In the article, you offered 5 lessons learned about Enterprise Support. What are some others lessons you learned during this IT transformation?
There were a LOT of other lessons! For example:
- Business Buy-In: do not assume business “reps” are enough - Hold regular meetings with business stakeholders/sponsors from the start - Conduct an end-of-Design integrated walk-through for Design sign-off - Issue Escalation: do not hesitate to escalate - Make issues reviews part of your regular business meetings—project team agreement is not enough - Document the issues! Too often VVP did—this comes back to bite you - Planning: do not short-change planning - Fight the urge to “do” at the expense of planning—you will end up “re-doing” a lot of work - Varian Out In Front: do not let the consultants become “managers” - Ensure that Varian people are in every meeting and make sure Knowledge Transfer happens - Otherwise, Production Support will suffer and costs will rise as we cannot roll off the consultants - Documentation: do not skimp - Build quality documentation into the project’s processes—support and KT will go more smoothly - Data: do not assume that unit/string/integration/stress/perf testing suffices - Take data cleansing seriously—plan for it, make it clear early on that the business needs to own this - Look for additional forms of testing to check data quality - Development: Even with a package like SAP that has so much functionality in the standard software, a strong development team remains critical
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