Managing the backlog

In the business world, time is money.

If your company takes 20+ days to close its books each month, then that time is lost and could have been better spent elsewhere. This is also known as opportunity cost.

Your SAP team also faces a similar challenge. Most technical teams have a backlog of issues and enhancement requests.

How long would it take to work through that backlog with your current staff? A length of 2-3 years is not uncommon.

Managers often tackle this problem in a linear fashion.

If she estimates that her team of 3 resources can clear the backlog in 3 years, then augmenting her team with 6 additional resources (contractors) will reduce that time to 1 year.

That’s a fine start, but I’d like to suggest another approach.

Instead of hiring contractors to build reports or to patch programs, the manager should consider reaching out to an experienced consulting group for an assessment of the problem.

An experienced consultant can analyze a problem and devise a solution, often with tools or methods that the client is not aware of. In addition, a consultant can show a team new approaches to problem-solving.

Here’s a concrete example: a medical devices company was getting inaccurate numbers for their inventory.

To compound the problem, they required a systems outage to address the problem. This issue occurred almost every month.

I assessed the problem and suggested an alternate approach for getting accurate inventory valuations with zero-downtime (i.e. no systems outage). You can read the case study here: Case Study – St. Jude Medical

The 1-hour assessment saved the company 15 to 30 hours each month.

While the suggestions by the internal team were sound, the approach would mitigate the problem by only a few hours. I had a different approach because I had tackled similar problems for other clients.

Interested to see if your backlog can be dramatically reduced? Let us show you with a complimentary assessment: Contact Us