This discussion give you an opportunity to apply the knowledge you have gained in prior weeks and this week. You will also have an opportunity to use what you have learned in prior courses and in prior work experience. Use your creativity this week. Concentrate on explaining the reasons for the answers you select. As in many business situations, there is not enough information here for there to be a "right" answer. Hopefully, this will generate an interesting discussion when you comment on other people's answers.
To allow you to post your work as you do it, I will place questions 1-3 in the first discussion thread (W5D1) and questions 4-5 in the second discussion thread (W5D2) This has the side effect of requiring you to make a minimum of two initial postings (one in each thread) and four follow-up comments (two in each thread).
You are going to start an information technology consulting firm that will specialize in installing SAP software. Your headquarters are going to be in Chicago where 50 consultants will be located. You have a brother in San Jose who will hire another 40 experienced consultants within 6 months. You plan to hire the consultants as you sell work but once consultants are hired you do not plan to lay them off. You expect to grow very rapidly and your business plan shows that in two years you will have 300 consultants including 50 in a development center in India where you plan to be building custom web services for your client jobs. Since you will be an SAP consultant, you want to use SAP for your internal systems. This is important to your marketing plan.
1. What SAP components would you plan to use?
2. Why did you select these components?
3. You know over the long term that you want to run the traditional SAP Business Suite (not one of the SME options). However, you have only sold one job so far and you will be doing that in Chicago starting in July with 8 consultants that you will hire by then. That is why you are concerned about the cost of the SAP Business Suite. What will you do to fulfill your systems needs in the first 6 months you are in business?
4. Will you have your computers in-house or will you use cloud computing? Why or why not?
5. You also know that over the long term, you need to specialize and this will help demonstrate expertise and sell future work. (Remember the consultant presentation you listened to earlier in the course.) How will you specialize? Will your specialization be by industry (oil drilling companies, hospitals, large retailers,,,?) by technology (SAP Netweaver and Business Intelligence?) or by something else (companies with fewer than 300 employees?) Consider factors such as your personal preference, which industries that you think will grow and be able to afford your services, your business knowledge from prior courses you have taken, and/or something interesting you find on the internet.