Published on the 13/11/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
NSW Trade & Investment claims its SAP ByDesign rollout is the largest of its type in the world, servicing 8500 users, and also that it remains on track despite some confusion over SAP’s plans…
When SAP recently announced that it was slowing down development of the SAP ByDesign system to focus on its HANA cloud platform many users were left wondering what that meant for their deployments. The confusion was compounded by rival cloud ERP vendors including NetSuite, which attempted to woo SAP customers with free offers to transition SAP users onto alternate cloud platforms.
But the NSW Government is continuing unruffled and a spokesman told iStart that SAP had pledged to maintain support levels for the government’s system.
NSW Trade & Investment turned to the software-as-a-service ByDesign platform in order to consolidate six different finance systems, six different payroll systems and six different human resources systems that did not communicate with each other and had no common platform.
The first stage of the project, which consolidated all core agencies and staff onto the new system, has been completed and the finance, procurement, projects and assets components went live last December followed by the integrated HR, payroll and time-sheeting elements in March.
According to a spokesman for the department the second stage of the project went live last month – four months later than the original schedule suggested and only after dipping into pre-approved contingency funding. This phase involved bringing the NSW State Library, NSW Art Gallery, Powerhouse Museum and Australian Museum as well as the Mine Subsidence Board on to the new system.
According to SAP it is now working to transition all its cloud offerings on the SAP HANA Platform. “SAP Business ByDesign continues to be part of the SAP cloud portfolio and continues to be supported and actively promoted in its current scope through our extensive partner ecosystem. Optimising SAP’s cloud portfolio on our HANA platform means a dramatic price-performance improvement with all the benefits of simplicity in the cloud for all our customers,” according to the company’s official statement.
According to the NSW Government spokesman; “SAP will roll out technological changes by re-platforming the product which is expected to deliver positive benefits for the department including improved usability and response times.”
