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strategy
When the support of your SAP ERP
system relies almost exclusively on one
knowledgeable person — and that person
takes another job — the challenge of
supporting the system can be nearly
insurmountable.
The State of Utah Department of Work-
force Services (DWS) found itself in that
exact predicament when its one-man
support team left the department. DWS,
the state’s primary job assistance agency,
limped along for a couple of years without
dedicated support for its implementation
of SAP ERP 4.7 and the SAP applications
on which the department runs its learning
management technologies.
“We sent some of our people to classes
but realized over time that if someone
leaves, then we essentially have to start
over to train a new person. We realized it
would be extremely costly and time-con-
suming in the long run to continue to do
this on our own,” says Chris Gordon,
project manager for DWS.
Fortunately, another department within the
state government — the state Department
of Administrative Services, Division of
Finance— was using a fully supported
implementation of SAP ERP 2004 to run
the state’s payroll and other financial
functions. Consolidating the DWS and
Finance systems would allow the state to
run many of its critical functions from a
single instance of SAP.
Mission and Cost Drive
Consolidation Plan
Put broadly, the task of DWS is to connect
job seekers and employers within the
state. The department posts job ads,
processes unemployment claims, provides
economic and wage data, and provides
public assistance services.
As a government agency, the department
is strictly regulated, which in turn puts a
premium on employee training. DWS
relies on SAP Learning Solution and SAP
NetWeaver Portal to help train more than
2,000 state employees. New employees
have anywhere between 60 and 80 train-
ing sessions to learn their specific
functions, estimates Gordon.
An example screenprint of the department’