Certainty over Baan’s future may continue to be fogged by thick, dark clouds but at least one of its friends is sticking by it. Brian Johnson, commercial director with Deloitte Consulting/ICS says the ERP professional services firm is still winning contracts with its Baan division. Accepting that 1999 is going to be a tough year for Baan, Johnson insists Deloitte Consulting/ICS has no plans to proactively scale down the size of its operations. The ERP vendor is guilty of having taken on too many acquisitions in short order and this diverted its attentions away from its clients, he concedes, but Baan has a strong product set with the Aurum product configurator being the jewel in the crown.
Globally, Baan implementations account for 10%-12% of Deloitte Consulting/ICS revenues. The spread of these implementations is uneven, though with the bulk of orders deriving from the North American market. Johnson reports that Deloitte is working to address this and has met with some recent success in the UK and French markets. Generally Deloitte Consulting/ICS is strongest in the northern regions of Europe, UK, Germany, France and the Benelux nations, with an increasing number of clients in Scandinavia and central Europe.
Deloitte Consulting’s ERP division took off with the acquisition of ICS back in 1995. ICS then was a three-year-old consulting organization founded by five former SAP executives. The acquisition delivered 1,000-experienced, mainly SAP, ERP consulting staff. Deloitte Consulting /ICS has since ramped its numbers up to 3,600 consultants, and around 1,100 of these are based in Europe. Clients tend to come from airline, telcommunications, financial and industry sectors. The ICS division works almost exclusively on SAP and Baan implementations augmented by business process re-engineering assignments. Revenue for its ICS Euro division accounts for approximately 35%-40% of global Deloitte Consulting/ICS numbers.
Johnson believes that the ERP market is maturing. Large companies by and large have completed any Y2K compliance work, he reports, with these companies we are finding that there is a second wave of activity. Where ERP systems have been slam dunked in these companies are now looking at how they can better utilize the systems to achieve additional business benefits.
In recent years Deloitte Consulting/ICS claims to have become better at attracting staff with experience, according to Johnson. We’re finding that contractors are increasingly willing to come on staff. They are being attracted not just by higher salaries but by opportunities to develop expertise in specific areas or particular functions. Many are trained in the use of specialized ERP software tools.
Deloitte Consulting/ICS has three main tools that are said to increase the return on ERP by speeding the process of implementation. Dubbed ‘accelerators’, these are IndustryPrint, SkillPrint and ValuePrint. IndustryPrint accelerates the implementation process by identifying industry-specific ‘best practices’ up-front and maps these directly to R/3 or Baan functionality. SkillPrint is a competency repository that identifies specific roles and responsibilities and links them with specific ERP suite activities to jumpstart training, change leadership and various process and systems integrity strategies. ValuePrint is a business case development tool that identifies the costs and benefits expected from implementing R/3 (or Baan), and helps clients justify multi-million ERP investments. The software includes a repository of business procedures, financial impact templates and value formulas, examples, metrics and supposed ‘best practices’ to highlight all the relevant costs and benefits, risks and business ramifications of an ERP implementation.
In February 1999 Deloitte Consulting/ICS announced it would be setting aside its FastTrack ERP method in favor of AcceleratedSAP as its preferred approach to SAP rollouts. Deloitte Consulting/ICS is already TeamSAP and AcceleratedSAP certified. The firm’s eXpress delivery initiative, aimed at mid size organizations, has used the AcceleratedSAP methodology almost exlusively to deliver rapid ERP implementations. AcceleratedSAP will now be tightly integrated with the firm’s range of services, from business process reengineering, change management and education to supply chain, electronic commerce and sales chain expertise.
Some aspects of Deloitte Consulting/ICS tools are pretty much unique in the field but if the decision to adopt AcceleratedSAP as its core method sets a precedent, then it is to be expected that Deloitte’s unique tool set will be set aside in favor of any forthcoming SAP alternative. (SAP is already working on a ValuePrint look-alike.) Current approaches would still be available for any future Baan implementations undertaken.
