
BRF+ at the centre of your excellence
It has been a trend in the past decades to outsource your IT department to external suppliers. This has as a consequence that the employees working at the company running SAP are lacking even basic SAP configuration and development skills. This lack of experience makes the company too dependent on IT service suppliers, not being able to assess whether the solutions proposed are the best solution for the company.
Wikipedia describes the Centre of Excellence as “a team, a shared facility or an entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support and/or training for a focus area”. I would imagine your company has such a team as well. The question is whether they are mostly consisting of outsourced resources. If so, are you sure this is the most cost-effective approach?
I have seen extreme cases where even the simplest of decisions, like flagging obsolete customers in SAP for deletion, takes several months to get the management approval.
In another example, an external IT supplier is more focused on selling as much billable hours as possible. The company running SAP is then flooded with expensive managers who are competing against each other to show they add value to their client.
The original idea to outsource your knowledge is to save money. The IT service suppliers are very persuasive with making promises where in reality they will underdeliver. But after the company running SAP goes down the outsourcing path, then it takes a lot of conviction to regain control in-house. The Business Rule Framework can be the tool to start the journey back into building your Centre of Excellence.
As from this week, the Michael Management training course “IC 1142: Business Rule Framework (BRF+) Introduction” will guide you in understanding the enormous cost-saving potential BRF+ can bring to companies running SAP ECC or S/4 HANA. There is a secret you need to unlock and some training for your analysts and developers. But that journey will be reaping the benefits very quickly.
The Business Rule Framework is a secret for two important reasons:
- BRF+ is hidden within the DSM tool (Decision Service Management), which requires a licence. SAP would, therefore, prefer you to buy DSM when the engine of this tool is BRF+. However, BRF+ itself is free and only needs activation in your system.
- BRF+ replaces the need for coding power, supplied by the IT service suppliers, reducing the number of billable hours.
So, do not expect SAP or your IT service provider to promote BRF+, as it is not financially beneficial to both of them.
Instead, listen to the advice provided in the Michael Management course, supplied by an independent consultant who wants your company to save several $100,000 annually on your IT budget.
You can approach this training course as a summary of all the blog posts on this website that is aimed at business leaders and management. They are the key people to realise that you can regain control and become less dependent on outsourced resources.
It takes only one hour to get the message and then you can plan how to implement what you have learnt. Obviously, keep an eye on future blog posts on this website. Also, a hands-on training course will be published on the Michael Management website. This is aimed at analysts responsibly to deign the complex decision making for custom-built solutions in your SAP system. More about that course in a future blog post.