How to Reduce Costs with SAP Application Management Support

As a partner to the businesses who choose IBA Group for SAP development and applications management, we take it upon ourselves to make your goals our goals. For that reason, in addition to developing SAP solutions that improve efficiencies, we also commit to helping you get the most of your SAP investment. And that includes, importantly, using applications management support to reduce costs across your enterprise.

After three decades in business and expertise in design, development, deployment, and maintenance, IBA Group is uniquely suited to provide support across all levels. For our US clients, we focus on Level 2 and Level 3 support because it allows you to get the most out of our expertise, and to save money on hiring, training, development, and consulting costs.

Technical Knowledge Meets Business Knowledge

For our clients, we bring our experience to life as a trusted partner. That means that, in addition to high level technical knowledge, we also bring our understanding of business needs and requirements, regulations and constraints.

When we develop solutions and deliver application management support, we take all these factors into account. Then, we develop solutions that are the right fit for your environment and your customers. This approach not only connects you to what you need cost effectively, it also saves you time and the consequences of failed attempts to build what you require, or use what you have productively.

How we Reduce Customer Cost on Level 2 and Level 3 SAP Support

Because we are SAP developers – elite, trusted SAP solutions and application management support providers – we save businesses money in multiple ways. Let’s start with how we help you get the most out of your internal resources.

By bringing in IBA Group as SAP developers, we save you the investment of lengthy, expensive training for your in-house IT Team. Your in-house team can comfortably provide Level 1 SAP Support for your organization, along with performing the other functions you need them to perform.

On the other hand, if you wanted to get Level 2 support in-house, you are suddenly looking at a significantly larger burden on your organizational structure, your budgets, and your timelines.

The Expense of Building In-House IT Teams for SAP Support

Simply put, most in-house IT Teams are not built to handle Level 2 and Level 3 SAP Support. So, if you were to try to assign this task to them, you would encounter any (or all) of the following scenarios. In the first scenario, you hire full-time SAP developers who bring the same level of experience and skill that we provide. That means investing in multiple high-level professionals, including their salaries, training, and benefits.

In the second scenario, you attempt to increase the skillset of your existing IT staff. In order to do that, you must make equally significant investments of both money and time in training these professionals to build the skills necessary to provide Level 2 and Level 3 SAP support. Of course, the first problem with this scenario is that even after that considerable investment in training, and the time spent waiting for your in-house team to require the baseline necessary skills, you still end up with a team that has no experience. After all that time and money, you are ultimately paying for your employees to learn on the job.

Furthermore, and we have encountered this many times in companies in the US and around the world, once you make that sizable investment in training, after you have committed time and money you cannot get back, there is no guarantee that the staff you trained will stay. In fact, turnover happens frequently, especially when your employees have been handed marketable skills that they can take somewhere else.

By partnering with us, you avoid cost and risk. And you benefit from our expertise, along with our proven efficiency and quality.

Architecture: Seeing the Whole Picture

That said, we respect in-house IT Teams. In fact, we see ourselves as partners with the developers and engineers you have on staff. The way we look at it, we each bring out the best in the other, which, ultimately, leads to the best outcomes for your organization.

Our SAP Gold Partner Certified developers work with the staff you have to create seamless delivery and seamless communication to you about what solutions we are deploying and how those solutions improve the overall ecosystem of your operation. Here, solutions architects are crucial to cost savings. In many situations, business users are unable to determine exactly what they need. You may understand the problems you face. Your IT Team may have a list of common complaints or errors. But you lack a clear path forward, or an understanding of what is possible from an SAP applications management point of view, to create improvements.

From our vantage point, we see the entire architecture, the whole picture. And we develop and deploy solutions appropriately to improve that picture.

Change Management

Part of how we improve that picture and continue to create savings and efficiencies for our clients, is through the change management process. Change management occurs when the business requires changes, following the first level of support. As developers who see the whole picture of needs and solutions, we understand where and when change needs to happen. We outline those changes in the Solutions Design Document and assign tasks appropriately for in-house and outsourced support.

Here, recommendations become key to keeping application management support consistent and reliable. Once we define the recommendations and create the Solutions Design Document, application management support is no longer dependent on your outsourcing partner or your existing internal staff.

As an organization, that gives you autonomy and reliability, in addition to your savings of cost and time.

Recommendations and Risk Reduction

So now, we are seeing the scope of savings and improvements that you get when you partner with SAP certified developers like IBA Group. In the spirit of trusted partnership, we caution all businesses, whether they choose to work with us or not, to include building recommendations into their engagements.

If there are no recommendations, you have no autonomy to choose another outsourcing partner down the line. You will find yourself needing to start all over again. You will waste time and money after making decisions to save both.

In our case, we never close out a project without providing recommendations. Since we promise to save you time and money and getting you the most out of your SAP investment, it would be out of sync with our commitments to you and our values as a business to walk away without giving you a sustainable path to follow.

We aim to reduce your risk now and in the future. With us and on your own. And to save you money and improve your operations along the way.

To learn more about SAP application management support from IBA Group and how to start getting more from your technology investments and in-house teams, contact us.

Photos by Jason Dent and Marcin Jozwiak on Unsplash