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Jon Reed Interviews Rohana Gunawardena

Podcast Interview Date: September 19, 2007
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To get a closer look at the ERP 6.0 upgrade process, Jon conducted a wide-ranging podcast interview with Rohana Gunawardena, SAP Practice Director of Exium, Inc. Rohana is an SAP Financials expert and a respected speaker on topics such as SAP Global Rollouts. During the podcast, Rohana gives us the inside take on the ERP 6.0 upgrade cycle, lessons learned from global rollouts, the new GL, and many other vital topics to SAP consultants.

Rohana has an opinionated and well-formed take on the SAP market, and his different takes on the future of SAP outsourcing and the impact of NetWeaver are worth hearing. Rohana also touches on the keys to being a successful SAP consultant, and he provides a memorable look at why cultural issues are so important to address on global SAP projects.

In this thirty minute interview, Jon and Rohana touch on many key topics, including:

- Rohana's upcoming talks on "Successful SAP Global Rollouts: Jump Start" and "Tips and Tricks for Getting the Most Out of SAPNet" that he will be presenting at the co-hosted Managing Your SAP Projects 2007 and Global SAP Environments 2007 conferences from October 22-24 at the Miami Beach convention center.

- How Rohana made his move into SAP and how his consulting role has evolved into his current position.

- Why Rohana made the unusual choice of committing himself to multi-year projects and what he sees as the advantages to working on projects over multiple years. Rohana talks about the way that he has become a more well-rounded consultant through long-term projects, and he explains one of the biggest benefits of a long-term consulting role: being nominated to handle more complex and "mission critical" projects.

- Lessons Rohana has learned from global SAP rollouts, and why the "human side of SAP implementations" is crucial to project success. Rohana shares an example of a cultural issue that flared up on his project and how his team resolved the problem and got a diverse, multi-country team on the SAP page.

- Rohana's experiences upgrading to ERP 6.0, and why he thinks that the overall upgrade process to ERP 6.0 is not as difficult as some make it out to be. Rohana compares the 6.0 upgrade to other SAP moves of the past, including from 3.x to 4.x and from 4.x to 4.7.

- The impact of SAP's New GL and why it is a significant functional enhancement.

- The significance of grasping the overall business processes that SAP addresses, and why understanding the integration points between SAP modules is so important to SAP consulting.

- How Rohana defines the ideal SAP consulting skill set, and why he thinks an 80/20 mix between technical and functional skills is more marketable than a 50/50 SAP "techno-functional" skills mix.

- Why ABAP programming know-how is important - even to SAP functional consultants.

- Jon asks Rohana why he thinks there could be an outsourcing backlash, and Rohana provides an overview of economic and labor supply issues in India that could make outsourcing more expensive and less appealing than in-house options.

- Rohana explains why he thinks NetWeaver is a bit overhyped in today's market and why many software companies, including SAP, push new functionality for marketing purposes while the real work remains focused on existing releases, and in SAP's case, in core functional processes rather than hot new eSOA technology.

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