CRM Featured Article

SAP (News - Alert) Public Services, a subsidiary of SAP AG, announced today that Miami-Dade County Public Schools has selected SAP ERP.

 

The district-wide business transformation project, called “BOSS: Business Operating Solutions for Schools,” aims “to improve administrative processes and to enable the district to reallocate resources to schools and students,” according to school officials.

 

With this selection, SAP officials say, Miami-Dade becomes the fifth school district in Florida to run SAP products. The announcement was made at the co-located events Sapphire 2008 Orlando, SAP’s international customer conference and the America’s SAP Users’ Group Annual Conference.

 

As the fourth-largest school district in the United States, M-DCPS has 342,000 students, more than 50,000 employees across 850 work locations, and maintains an annual budget of over $6 billion. The system needed “a current, integrated financial and human resource system in order to improve decision-making and provide data about student academic progress,” SAP officials say.

 

School system officials say the M-DCPS legacy systems were labor intensive, difficult to navigate, costly to maintain and risk-abundant due to their age, growing obsolescence and the diminishing knowledge-base of IT staff able to work with the old code.

 

Another concern of the school system was to eliminate isolated pockets of information, to improve collaboration among principals, teachers and administrators.

 

The SAP software will be used to integrate financial, procurement, human resource and payroll business processes, and provide greater employee access to personal information and self-service options for benefits and payroll. Processes like time and attendance recording or the management of travel expenses, formerly paper-based, will be replaced by electronic workflow and approval processes.

 

Earlier this week, the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group, a customer-run community of SAP professionals, announced the launch of a series of Benchmarking and Best Practices initiatives through its continued collaboration with SAP America.

 

The announcement comes as part of activities surrounding the 2008 ASUG Annual Conference and the Sapphire 2008 Orlando conference this week.

 

The ASUG and SAP Benchmarking and Best Practices program was developed in 2005. The program is introducing three new Benchmarking studies: Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Sales Effectiveness; Enterprise Health Check; and Retail Merchandising/Category Management.

 

One new Best Practices survey, “Running the ERP Marathon,” is being offered in conjunction with Florida State University.

 

The CRM: Sales Effectiveness Benchmarking study examines the effectiveness of a company’s sales force based on company financials, key performance metrics and sales enabling processes. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about their company’s sales efficiencies, proficiencies and deficiencies, group officials say:

 

“This will provide insights into Key Performance Indicators with comparisons to both industry and aggregate respondents. The Sales Effectiveness Benchmarking initiative covers over 25 KPIs and over 30 Best Practices.”