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Australia Post happy with hosted service, for now

Australia Post has declared itself happy with its leading-edge implementation of hosted CRM from SAP, but is still considering moving the software back into an in-house environment in the future.Australia Post was one of the first global customers for SAP's hosted CRM, which is run from the software company's German headquarters.
Written by Angus Kidman, Contributor

Australia Post has declared itself happy with its leading-edge implementation of hosted CRM from SAP, but is still considering moving the software back into an in-house environment in the future.

Australia Post was one of the first global customers for SAP's hosted CRM, which is run from the software company's German headquarters. Australia Post rolled out the system in October last year, as part of a broader strategy to track sales opportunities in its larger corporate customers.

"The broad view was we needed nationally consistent reporting and core processes," corporate sales manager Dennis Atacador explained during a presentation at the recent SAP User Group meeting in Melbourne.

Australia Post was already an SAP customer, but still weighed up a number of options for building its sales-tracking system besides the hosted application, including building its own software for the purpose.

"Internal development wasn't an option for us," Atacador said. "It was too costly, and it wasn't our core business."

The hosted application ultimately proved the least painful option. "What it came down to was we wanted a step change. It gave us an option to dip our toes in the water without going through something quite complex, and in a short period of time."

A question of performance
On the whole, SAP's hosted system offered around 70 percent of Australia Post's requirements, Atacador said. "There are core parts of what we wanted that absolutely hit the mark."

The relative newness of the software inevitably meant a few glitches during the rollout. "Something's always going to go wrong during an implementation," he said.

However, the cultural challenges of moving different state-based operations onto one platform dwarfed those technical concerns. "The more difficult challenge was change management," Atacador said.

"A sales team will have a different challenge to a marketing team or a logistics team or a local courier operation. We needed to align to one common purpose. To get one view of the customer is a really important part of our strategy."

Working with a hosted application from overseas has also caused some concern. "We've had some issues with performance," Atacador said. "When you're externally hosted, you're victim to the pipeline between Australia and Germany a little bit."

That lag is one reason that Australia Post may eventually shift back to an in-house system. "The in-house scenario is something we eventually want to move towards, but the time frame wasn't quite right," Atacador said.

Despite already having SAP systems in place, integrating those will be a challenge, he predicted. "There are some interfaces [to R3], but we've intentionally kept them to a large degree separate in the initial stages. When we move to that it will be hard yards."

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