During the SAP North Star & Go to Market meeting in Brussels in October 2023, SAP took the opportunity to interview Richard Taylor, partner at the Birchman Group.
In this interview, Richard dives into the importance of preparation, Birchman’s consultative approach, and how adopting best practices helps organisations to deliver business benefits.
How do you speed up SAP cloud go-lives?
The key to speeding up cloud go-lives lies in the initial preparation phase.
Birchman spends time with organisations at the early stage of their cloud journey, examining all the types of questions, preparing for those answers, and putting into place their business transformation approach, stakeholder engagement and communication plans. As you go into the explore phase, you’re then much better prepared.
Hopefully at this point anyone involved in the project has already done their self-enablement and are part of the programme, allowing them to answer those initial questions, look at the way the solution works, and how to adopt the best practices right from the beginning.
By doing these two phases more thoroughly, you then reach the point of being able to speed up the whole implementation approach. If you skip these areas or rush, you run the risk of having to re-do the work, causing the program to take longer.
How has Birchman adapted their business model to reflect this?
Birchman works on a peer-to-peer level to help our customers understand what they would need to do as an organisation to adopt best practices, and the changes and value that it’s going to drive.
This also plays to our overall business change and transformation strength , taking a more consultative approach to implementations. Birchman works with customers on their target operating model, helping them to recognise what business change, strategy, and organisational change they need to look at.
There will always be some critical implementation elements, such as data. By looking at data closely throughout the prepare phase, you can address the challenges and gaps in your organisation, helping you reach user acceptance testing faster.
Is it more challenging to win new customers in cloud?
We think it’s much easier; our offering is received well by both new SAP customers, and those already in the SAP ecosystem, through system demonstrations, talking about core principles, and how it differentiates against the competitors.
We find a lot of customers don’t necessarily ask about cloud verses on-premises, as they are looking more at the business value that they’re going to get out of it.
How has Birchman changed the way they market their business?
Our approach is now more focussed on moving to best practices and adopting business change, as apposed to developing a solution that’s very specific to an organisation as it stands today.
It feeds into the overall consultative approach, answering questions such as ‘how do you go from A to B as an organisation?’ and ‘how does that then ultimately enable you to drive value?’
Birchman’s approach resonates well with both CFO’s and the COO community, therefore that’s where we focus our effort and energy in the sales approach.
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If you’re looking for an expert to help you drive new value to your organisation through an SAP solution, look no further than Birchman. Contact our team today to start your SAP journey.
