At the 2020 SAP Glob­al Part­ner Sum­mit, the soft­ware com­pa­ny unveiled its new mul­ti­fac­eted Part­ner Deliv­ery Qual­i­ty Frame­work. The ini­tia­tive is aimed at increas­ing the qual­i­ty of part­ner imple­men­ta­tions and help­ing dri­ve results for cus­tomers — out­comes that both SAP and its cus­tomers are vest­ed in. 

ASUG had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to speak with Cathy Daum, senior vice pres­i­dent of SAP’s glob­al part­ner orga­ni­za­tion, go-to-mar­ket, and scale part­ner­ships, and Hans Uebe, glob­al head of ecosys­tem deliv­ery suc­cess at SAP, about this new frame­work. The two dis­cussed how the frame­work came to be, how it helps part­ners, and how SAP plans to devel­op it in the future.

Jim: What’s the ben­e­fit of SAP’s new Part­ner Deliv­ery Qual­i­ty Framework?

Hans: We’ve estab­lished the Part­ner Deliv­ery Qual­i­ty Frame­work because we real­ize it is very impor­tant to work close­ly with our part­ners on how they run projects. We need to ensure the con­sul­tants who work for our part­ners have the lat­est skill and knowl­edge of our cloud offer­ings and are capa­ble of deliv­er­ing val­ue to our cus­tomers in run­ning world-class projects. One side of the frame­work is we want to make sure all stake­hold­ers know the great inno­va­tions avail­able in SAP prod­ucts, and that they are capa­ble of bring­ing those inno­va­tions to cus­tomers. The oth­er side is look­ing at how to stay on the same page once a cus­tomer choos­es a part­ner for their project. We believe a project in the cloud is ongo­ing because you are in this per­ma­nent mode of launch­ing, adopt­ing, and going into the next phase of inno­va­tion. It’s a con­tin­u­ous engage­ment, and we’re look­ing at how to make sure this engage­ment always brings val­ue to the cus­tomer, whilst also ensur­ing our part­ners can deliv­er best-in-class projects and a prof­itable business. 

Jim: Can you explain the three pil­lars of the frame­work and how they all tie together? 

Hans: With the Part­ner Deliv­ery Qual­i­ty Frame­work, the cus­tomer has decid­ed to use SAP and is going into the project with one of our part­ners. About 90% of imple­men­ta­tion projects are run by part­ners in our ecosys­tem. They are not run by the cus­tomer them­selves or by SAP ser­vices. Our part­ners are crit­i­cal play­ers in the mar­ket, help­ing our cus­tomers get the best val­ue out of their investment. 

The first pil­lar is project deliv­ery qual­i­ty. We estab­lished process­es to make sure we avoid issues ear­ly. Part of this is ensur­ing we con­nect the right part­ner with the right cus­tomer. The sec­ond pil­lar focus­es on part­ner ser­vice qual­i­ty. We look at how to build a close rela­tion­ship with part­ners and make sure that the peo­ple work­ing for our part­ners are best in class. We have invest­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly in enable­ment pro­grams that help our part­ners keep their con­sul­tants cur­rent, and encour­age them to lever­age the SAP Learn­ing Hub that deliv­ers con­tin­u­ous knowl­edge to con­sul­tants, as well as the under­ly­ing pro­grams for the con­sul­tants to get cer­ti­fied and then stay cur­rent in their cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. We also look at how to offer com­ple­men­tary ser­vices to our part­ners that help them fur­ther devel­op their prac­tice and move to new ser­vice deliv­ery mod­els. The third pil­lar is a new­ly cre­at­ed role with­in SAP, the part­ner deliv­ery man­ag­er, who works with our part­ners and over­sees the projects that are deliv­ered to the cus­tomers. This cre­ates a lev­el of account­abil­i­ty and dri­ves execution. 

Jim: Can you tell me more about the part­ner deliv­ery manager? 

Hans: We talk a lot with our part­ners about work­ing togeth­er to win new busi­ness. In the cloud space, we must stay very close to all part­ners. When it comes to the deliv­ery of a project, we want to ensure that the project is stable. 

Our part­ner deliv­ery man­agers are ded­i­cat­ed SAP employ­ees assigned to a num­ber of part­ners. They engage with the head of the deliv­ery prac­tice to dri­ve the two pil­lars of part­ner ser­vice qual­i­ty. They also estab­lish a reg­u­lar cadence and look at all the projects that the part­ner is cur­rent­ly run­ning to make sure that we under­stand why a project is running. 

Cathy: While we’ve announced the Part­ner Deliv­ery Qual­i­ty Frame­work only recent­ly, some of our lines of busi­ness — notably SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, SAP Ari­ba, and SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence—already have this part­ner deliv­ery man­ag­er. What we’ve done is brought those togeth­er under a sin­gle frame­work, so that they all oper­ate in the same way. The idea is to extend them across our oth­er cloud solu­tions. We’re also adding some automa­tion into many of the process­es that Hans talked about so that we can inter­act with our part­ners and doc­u­ment where they are in a sys­tem­at­ic way. 

Jim: Can you tell me about the Dri­ve to Deliv­er pro­gram and how it is address­ing the short­age in IT talent? 

Cathy: We pulled togeth­er a team of peo­ple inter­nal­ly and some MBA stu­dents from the Mannheim Busi­ness School. That team worked togeth­er with our part­ners to under­stand their biggest needs as the mar­ket tran­si­tions into a more cloud-ori­ent­ed mar­ket. What were the key require­ments that our part­ners had? We heard that they want­ed help in the hir­ing of new tal­ent­ed indi­vid­u­als — whether they are grad­u­ates from high­er edu­ca­tion or more expe­ri­enced con­sul­tants. Our inter­est was to aug­ment the pool of resources and not to have part­ners hir­ing from each oth­er. We want to increase the num­ber of skilled resources for SAP in the ecosys­tem. Our part­ners also want to under­stand how their con­sul­tants could con­sis­tent­ly stay up to date, how to upskill the team, and how to build an entire­ly new practice. 

So, we built spe­cif­ic pro­grams around those areas of inter­est. These pro­grams essen­tial­ly help our part­ners finan­cial­ly, prac­ti­cal­ly, and logis­ti­cal­ly to bring new resources on board. We’ve also put in place sev­er­al ini­tia­tives that sub­si­dize our part­ners’ par­tic­i­pa­tion in the SAP Learn­ing Hub. 

Jim: Can you walk me through how Dri­ve to Deliv­er ties into the Part­ner Deliv­ery Qual­i­ty Framework? 

Hans: If you want to dri­ve deliv­ery qual­i­ty, you need to have the best peo­ple. One key thing that we are expe­ri­enc­ing as an ecosys­tem — and SAP as a com­pa­ny — is a trans­for­ma­tion from being an on-premise-cen­tric com­pa­ny to becom­ing a cloud com­pa­ny. The same is true for many of our part­ners. That dri­ves the need to bring in new think­ing and ideas to your work­force. As I men­tioned ear­li­er, qual­i­ty is one of our key pil­lars. We want our part­ners to be at the high­est lev­el and dri­ving innovation. 

Jim: Where did the Part­ner Deliv­ery Qual­i­ty Frame­work come from? Was this some­thing that part­ners or cus­tomers were ask­ing for? 

Cathy: It was a com­bi­na­tion of both. We’ve heard from cus­tomers that they want to ensure that SAP is sup­port­ing part­ners in an imple­men­ta­tion, whether it’s through safe­guard­ing ser­vices or pro­vid­ing a good esca­la­tion path into the orga­ni­za­tion. Cus­tomers like the secu­ri­ty of know­ing that the ven­dor is absolute­ly behind the part­ner, not only as it relates to soft­ware, but also as it relates to the actu­al project. Part­ners also have told us that they would appre­ci­ate our sup­port through­out the project. We’ve had a tremen­dous­ly pos­i­tive reac­tion from our part­ners since we announced the framework. 

Jim: How does SAP part­ner suc­cess trans­late to SAP cus­tomer success? 

Cathy: For a part­ner to be suc­cess­ful, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the cloud, they have to have cus­tomer suc­cess. There is a con­tin­u­ous momen­tum in a cloud project where projects typ­i­cal­ly start small and then over time, the cus­tomer expands that par­tic­u­lar solu­tion foot­print and maybe moves into oth­er solu­tions. The part­ner has to accom­pa­ny the cus­tomer along the jour­ney. It’s not a sin­gle point of go-live with the cloud. There tend to be mul­ti­ple go-lives. If the cus­tomer is going to keep mov­ing for­ward, the part­ner has to be suc­cess­ful. It’s a vir­tu­ous circle. 

Hans: We know that the val­ue in the cloud is all about adop­tion and con­sump­tion. A cus­tomer will only stay a loy­al cus­tomer if they get the val­ue out of the invest­ment. That means we will only see suc­cess in the cloud if we have an ecosys­tem that dri­ves suc­cess­ful projects for cus­tomers. The part­ners that will be suc­cess­ful in the future are the ones that know how to run suc­cess­ful cloud projects for cus­tomers. It’s a win-win-win sce­nario where the cus­tomer sees the ulti­mate outcome. 

Jim: What is the main ben­e­fit of this frame­work for partners? 

Hans: At their core, the major­i­ty of our part­ners are ser­vice part­ners. We talk to them about their core busi­ness and what mat­ters for them. We also try to dri­ve more busi­ness togeth­er. At the end of the day, the biggest ben­e­fit that you can get as a com­pa­ny is broad­en­ing your busi­ness and grow­ing your mar­ket foot­print. SAP does that with this frame­work. With the Part­ner Deliv­ery Qual­i­ty Frame­work, we look at who our best part­ners are from a ser­vice deliv­ery point of view and pro­mote those part­ners to the market. 

Jim: Obvi­ous­ly, this frame­work was just announced. How will it con­tin­ue to adapt and change? And what are your plans for it? 

Cathy: I’m sure it will con­tin­ue to adapt and change. I think mar­ket dri­vers will change, and the pro­gram itself will mature. We’re start­ing with a cer­tain num­ber of solu­tions. The intent is to take it across all of our cloud solu­tions, maybe even across our on-premise solu­tions as well. But over time, I think we’ll see things like how part­ners get trained, how they recruit in the mar­ket­place, and how we ensure cus­tomer suc­cess adapt over time. In the cur­rent COVID-19 cri­sis, we’ve seen a lot of part­ners move to a 100% remote deliv­ery. We will adapt this frame­work as the mar­ket demands. We know we are going to need to change in the future. But we’ll do it in a dynam­ic way. 

Reg­is­ter for ASUG Express Events hap­pen­ing next week includ­ing SAP & Microsoft Azure Essen­tials and SAP Inte­gra­tion Essen­tials.