NewswireTODAY - /newswire/ - London, United Kingdom, 2011/06/08 - The UK & Ireland SAP User Group is participating in SAP’s Customer Connection program for Continuous Improvement, aimed at giving SAP users more say in the company’s product development. It is one of four global user groups currently taking part.

The UK & Ireland SAP User Group has announced that it is participating in SAP’s Customer Connection program for Continuous Improvement, aimed at giving SAP users more say in the company’s product development. The UK & Ireland User Group is one of four global user groups currently taking part in the initiative, designed to create a more structured and unified process for product development requests for products and solutions available today.

“Greater input into SAP’s product development remains an ongoing request from users so being part of the Continuous Improvement initiative stands to be of great benefit to our members,” said Craig Dale, chief executive of the UK & Ireland SAP User Group. “User groups and SAP both recognised that the previous process wasn’t effective and didn’t meet either party’s needs. For users development requests could disappear down a ‘black hole’, while it is also fair to say that SAP needed a better way to prioritise development requests as it only has finite resources.”

Through greater collaboration between SAP and its customer communities, both will now agree focus topics (e.g. CRM, SRM and Healthcare) that are updated quarterly and under which they will collect improvement requests. Customers will post these improvement requests; however, there will now be clear selection criteria in order to help SAP and its user groups prioritise requests and allocate the necessary development capacity

Through its SIGs the UK and Ireland User Group will be asking members to identify potential improvement requests and nominate ‘subscribing customers’ for execution and productive use. Improvement requests will be managed through a central portal (Idea Place), providing a common private space for all participating user groups where members can post requests as owners. It is hoped that the new process from improvement request collection through to execution will take approximately 9 months, which is considerably quicker than before.

“Through having more defined selection criteria we hope to provide members with greater transparency of the process, provide them with more timely communication and add value. For instance, even if a request doesn’t meet the criteria we may see that 2 or 3 companies have the same requirement. Therefore we could suggest they work with a partner and split the costs between them, providing them with a much more cost-effective solution than going solo,” added Craig Dale.

About UK & Ireland SAP User Group
The UK & Ireland SAP User Group’s membership is open to users of SAP products in the UK and Ireland. Membership consists of organisations of all sizes and includes some of the largest private companies and significant public sector organisations in the UK and Ireland.

If you would like further information regarding the UK & Ireland SAP User Group, please visit sapusers.org/.

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