Application Maintenance and Support (AMS). Why is this phase of a project so important, given that it comes after the actual “go-live”?

Pierre: After an implementation project, the support is essential to maintain the solution in operational conditions. If sometimes customers can internalize some administration activities, they usually use the service of external partners to secure the production of data.

This service ensures customers the efficiency, the performance, and the stability of the existing application to produce reporting on time according to a strict calendar.

AMS is the opportunity to externalize the support to real experts of the solution, using best practices and working in a close collaboration with the editor.

Since we are in the Corporate Performance Management field, how would you explain the type of maintenance and support services you deliver to clients? What are the advantages of having an external partner to cover the post-implementation?

Pierre: At Satriun, we are covering both functional and technical maintenance activities. The following services can be offered: Support & administration, Corrective maintenance, Evolutive maintenance, Preventive maintenance, Documentation update and Governance.

In the CPM context, preventive maintenance is strategic and allows the customer to be regularly informed of the new functionalities and strengths of the tool.

In a “fast close” process, our customers have strict closing calendars and must have the guarantee of punctual deliveries regarding corrections or evolutions to bring to their system. That is why external partners such as Satriun ensure a continuity of resources and services all along the year with the capacity to deliver with SLAs and a dedicated team with backup.

The main challenge in a post implementation phase will be the ability for the AMS provider to support customers and give answers within the right SLAs times.

Application maintenance and support comes in after the implementation is done. Can you share with us any challenges you managed to overcome, recently?

Pierre: We recently had a case where a customer faced a big restructuring with many changes in the consolidation scope (acquisitions, mergers & dissolutions) and our support team guided them step by step in the tool to secure the annual closing of the financial statements.

Following a recent upgrade of the solution, a customer detected a regression bug on one important functionality. Satriun was requested to resolve the issue by contacting the editor and installing a corrective Patch on the version.

Otherwise, customers usually request our support for database back-ups, data model / reports / user rights or calculations modifications.

What is your general advice to clients who are preparing to finalize projects and embark on the maintenance and support journey?

Pierre: Do not underestimate this post-implementation phase which is strategic to secure the ongoing success of the project efforts up and until the “go live”.

The decision how to setup the AMS needs to be made already during the project. The customer needs to clearly define the scope of the support required by listing all the activities that cannot be internalized.

At Satriun we pay special attention to being part of a real initialization phase during which the team that delivered the project transfer all the knowledge and documentation to the AMS team to be fully operational when the first maintenance ticket occurs.

Data Integration in 2022. What makes it so important and what do clients get out of it?

Mihai: We are living in a world where all industries have digitalized, everything resumes to businesses and processes. Taking this into account and having more and more functions to manage inside your business, all the stakeholders need to have all this data as aggregated as they can in order to take the right decision and steer the business on the right path of development and success.

Having these challenges, the concept of data integration comes in, trying to tackle all of these by bringing all the data together in one environment/tool/database ready to be read, transformed, and delivered to stakeholders for supporting them in their decision-making process.

When you think about data integration, how would you explain the kind of consulting services you deliver to clients?

Mihai: The subject “Data integration” is part of any implementation we are doing, whatever the scope of the project is. Starting from the design of the project we need to answer the question “What data we need to bring into the tool?” like for instance financial data and master data. Having an answer to this question our consulting services consist of analyzing any gaps we have between applications, the type of transformation that needs to be applied to the data, what the best approach for transforming the data is (at source or in the target application) and finding the best solution in creating an automatic process that keeps the data aligned between all databases part of the process.

What is the typical use case of data integration software at your clients?

Mihai: Depending on each project there are two main topics for data integration. We have the operational/financial data integration which I would call it first wave of integration and later during the development, we have wave two, which consists of integrating the master data.

In most of cases there is a data integration software that transfers the data required between two or more environments. Often the biggest part of the transformation that is covering the gaps between the two systems is performed during the transfer. We recommend this approach to our clients to try to make the file as clean as we can when arriving in the target system. We can still have transformation performed in the target system, but majority of these are process related such as rules and logics for the process, different table structure of the system and so forth.

Zooming in on a client case, what anecdotes can you share? What kind of challenges does Data Integration imply?

Mihai: In general, each project comes with different challenges but the characteristics of them are similar so in these cases you are delivering based on experience and the path to a successful result has not so many bumps.

In the past instead, we had one client for which the context of the project was a bit different, in the lifecycle of the project was included also a change in data taxonomy, meaning, the new tool was evolving very fast to this new architecture while at the same time we were trying to keep the old systems integrated in the process until the end of the digital transformation.

All this context translated in a cyclical data flow, we were transferring data from System A (old tool) to System B (new tool) and back to System A. In this flow the data needed to be transformed twice: from old to new, and back to old again The challenge we were trying to overcome was to not overload the new tool with all the obsolete master data that was not going to be used, so we were looking to keep it as clean as we could. In this particular case we needed to think outside the box and we achieved a good data flow by keeping relevant data (needed for reverting to the old data model) stored in the new system but to not interfere with the process (in order to be able to drop it anytime we were finished with it without affecting system tables and processes).

By using this approach, we were able to achieve a successful integration on both data flows (financial and master data) having all systems aligned between them by creating scheduled activities.

What is your general advice to clients who want to implement a data integration software?

Mihai: For a successful implementation of a data integration software the most important are people. You need that person that understands how to read the data and designs the outcome, so this person knows what the relevant data for a successful project is. At the same time, you always need to be part of the development someone from the Data Governance team who can support in understanding all the relationships and all relevant data model topics. In the end this person is in touch with most of the business functions and has a big picture of what is happening from a data model perspective. These people in my opinion are essential to achieve your goals.

From a technical perspective, there will always be challenges in aligning databases and tables from system to system. Having all these people working together we can always find a solution to make our client’s life easier.

Why is SAP Analytics Cloud important? What do clients get out of it?

Deborah: On a quest to achieve expected planning results, financial or commercial teams are not always able to translate their needs into a methodic workflow and find it difficult to translate all of this into an IT request, because most often they miss a part of the IT complexity.

Also, when talking about international companies acting in several countries, some teams are not aware of the methods used by others, that could ease their work, or that should be taken in consideration when building a common work. Therefore, creating standardization of the processes is extremely important and can happen only when they share the same tool, and when someone learns all the differences between the teams involved in the planning process. Connecting several data sources into a unique flow is super important, it facilitates access & data processing.

Not only do we, as consultants, understand their requests, but we are also able to advise about other point of views or lacks in their requests – based on our experience with similar processes done in other companies – and only after retracing the strategy needed, creating standardization and methodology, we will coordinate the needs into a solid infrastructure.

The fact that everything is hosted on cloud is an advantage as well, as it allows continuous updates and improvements.

Thinking about SAC, how would you explain the kind of consulting services you deliver to clients?

Deborah: Above all our main consulting service is the business understanding & advisory. We understand the business and financial needs, analyze their workflow along the full supply chain, identify improvement areas, apply our identified best practices, and translate their requirement into an appropriate architecture supporting the process flow. Moreover, we add new connections and new processes that weren’t applied in the company. Only after this base is achieved, we translate into technical solution design. We are very aware of the importance of company branding guidelines book (logo, color scheme, pictures language). And the interface (stories) is user friendly oriented (cloud).

What is the typical use case of SAC at your clients?

Deborah: SAC is tailor made, although our knowledge is the base, we don’t use templates. Most of our clients use analytics and planning tools, for Commercial, Financial, HR, Capex, Production plan, Procurement, Cash flow, OPEX, Balance Sheet and much more.

But we have also implemented less usual process, such as planning agricultural plantation, and expected harvest, as a base for the production plan and sales plan – a formula based on land squares, land quality, growth rate of each plantation, geography, and much more.

Zooming in on a client case (without naming the client), what anecdotes can you share? Any cool or complex challenges you overcame?

Deborah: We have faced many challenges, and that’s our motivation, each client brings its own complexity and requires more and more creativity.

One of the biggest challenge we recently had, was for an insurance company, that wanted to replicate the allocations done on actual data on their SAP COPA system into the planning workflow. The challenge was that we had to learn and understand their very complex allocations rules, based on thousands of key allocation, between CC, internal orders, accounts, expenses type, sectors and more. We have built a flow through 10 steps of allocation, and we kept all the movements from one step to the other for more transparency. We have also created many layers of data that allow them to see the monetary movements through the different stages, making it possible for them to see the “before allocation” & “process allocations” and the “after allocation” even more clearly than in a dedicated COPA system. I think that such a complex process was never implemented on SAC.

From the user point of view, it’s just “pushing a button”, but the results are clear, user friendly and extremely accurate.

What is your general advice to clients who want to implement SAC?

Deborah: The most important milestone is to plan the appropriate architecture, plan various models and dimensions and then plan how to connect these. All of this is needed to foster a collaborative approach and make sure to create a relevant meta data and build stories that are convenient for the end user.