I don’t often find myself speechless — ask anyone who knows me — but last week I found myself in a client meeting with absolutely no idea what to say.
We were describing the typical three-year timeline for an ECM roadmap, when an exec interrupted with, “Why does ECM take so long?” She went on to explain that she had rolled out SAP globally in six months at a $30 billion energy company and couldn't understand why you'd need any more time than that to roll out ECM.
I gave a few angles — SAP has a better defined set of vertical applications like AP and AR, or that six months sounded like an unusually short timeframe — but she wasn't having any of them. I finally told her that I didn't know why ECM took so long, but that it just does and offered to connect her with dozens of ECM owners at companies large and small who have been on the ECM path anywhere from five years to a decade or more. She thanked me, and we moved on.
But it got me thinking about the question. Not sure if this post provides any answers, but at least it will point to some areas for further investigation … and hopefully the collective wisdom of you all out there will shed further light in the comments.
So here goes.
SAP Has More Resources and Support
For a global SAP rollout, you typically have dozens if not hundreds of folks (many of them high paid consultants) working on the effort, putting in lots of overtime. These teams often take over entire floors or whole buildings as their war rooms. They have direct access to active and engaged sponsors in the C-Suite who get the team any resources they need to get SAP across the finish line.
Contrast this with the typical ECM effort.
Usually no new hires are brought in and the project is run as more of an edge of the desk initiative. CXOs have low visibility for ECM, which leads to it not being a priority for stakeholders vis a vis their other commitments (their day jobs, other initiatives — like SAP!). ECM efforts struggle to get even baseline training for end users.
Can you imagine saying, “we’ll just give SAP users links to video clips to train and turn them loose”?
SAP Directly Involves Core Business Processes
SAP (and enterprise resource planning in general) is all about automating core business processes like accounts payable (AP), accounts receivable (AR), order to cash, procure to pay, etc. Given this, it can’t drag on and on, because these processes are part of keeping the lights on. There are hard dollar repercussions when you compromise processes like order to cash or AR.
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Contrast this to ECM, which generally speaking has a far less direct impact on keeping the lights on, focusing instead on more general business use cases. Which is another way of saying that no one really cares if document management or collaboration is compromised.
Is it a pain? Yes.
Do we directly lose dollars? Typically, no.
SAP Has a Well-Trodden Path to Implementation
The final contributing factor is that SAP has a well trodden path to implementation: a single vendor with a limited set of well-defined use cases (AP, AR, supply chain management, etc.), and many highly experienced system integrators who have a decade or more of experience.
In contrast, ECM is made up of a range of vendors with a loosely defined set of use cases: document management, collaboration, case management, etc. ECM only recently started to deploy vertically against use cases/business applications rather than horizontally as a generic platform. Once it makes this switch, I think deployment may get faster, but for now, ECM usually means an enterprise platform deployment rather than a targeted business application.
These are my three best guesses as to why SAP might deploy faster than ECM. But part of me also feels like my executive’s experience with the six month SAP time line is far from normal. I've heard of organizations struggling with SAP (and other ERP solutions) for years … sometimes never getting it right and having to jettison the whole thing.
So I’ll close this post by asking all of you out there: do you feel like ECM is slower than SAP? If so, any ideas on why? Or do you think SAP is no faster (or maybe slower) than ECM? If so, any thoughts on my executive’s claim that SAP can be rolled out for most in six months?
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