VMS Carries Out Its Thousandth SAP Benchmark

Heidelberg, 2007/02/21 – Since 2002 SAP optimizer VMS has diagnosed potential savings of 219 million euros at Germany companies

SAP optimizer VMS is currently carrying out its thousandth Benchmark in its history at Bayer MaterialScience (BMS). VMS has already started recording the data on BMS' SAP systems and benchmarking these systems. The Benchmark report will be completed this month.

Bayer Business Services provides IT-based services and joint accounting and human resources services to all divisions of Bayer AG (MaterialScience, CropScience and HealthCare). To date Bayer Business Services operates eight regional SAP systems for BMS there. VMS will now help plan the consolidation of the eight regional systems into a global SAP system by developing suitable measures. So at the moment VMS is also measuring the systems landscape in order to get a planning basis for an effective and efficient consolidation process. As a side effect, BMS also hopes to be able to optimize the operating costs for the existing SAP landscape by the time implementation is completed.

Benchmarks now enjoy a high level of importance in the business world. For Ralph Treitz, managing director of VMS, this is a logical consequence of the heightened commecial orientation of those in charge of company IT managers. "Over the last few years we've been seeing a clear trend to the industrialization of company IT operations", the former SAP manager sums up. "Whereas CIOs used to be particularly interested in the smooth operation of their business and less interested in the costs, today they have taken the optimization of costs to heart." So he is seeing "clear progress in productivity" in company IT departments, regardless of whether these are in-house or outsourced.

In the four years it has been in business, VMS has made a name for itself with its new "DNA level Benchmarking" method. With a total identified savings volume of 219 million euros, VMS can demonstrate that all its clients have benefited considerably from its SAP optimization services. The fact that clients are satisfied with VMS is also demonstrated by the Bayer example. While Heidelberg-based VMS are measuring BMS' SAP system for the first time, they were working with Bayer Business Services as early as 2003 and 2005 and measuring the performance of Bayer CropScience SAP systems.

VMS is going down new roads in the SAP Benchmark field. It is foregoing the usual procedures which are based in particular on key performance indicator comparisons (KPI) and peer group audits. With a calculation model developed by Professor Andreas Mielke, CTO at VMS and professor at the University of Heidelberg, VMS can measure systems-utilization, infrastructure and procedures more accurately than before and can compare them on an inter-sectoral basis on the VMS database. Ten of VMS' clients are DAX-30 companies.

As a knowledge-based service provider, VMS has been optimizing SAP landscapes since 2002. VMS audits SAP installations from the business process level to the transaction level and, as a partner of the CIOs, identifies strengths and weaknesses. In the process, VMS works with an integrated concept that covers the IT infrastructure as well as the IT and business processes. VMS' methods are "minimally invasive", where even detailed audits put scarcely any demands on the clients' resources. VMS offers the experience and data from some 1,000 measured SAP systems and, on this basis, can provide action-oriented advice on optimization and cost management. The structure and dynamics of the IT environment are then reproduced in the VMS Report, which is the navigation system of the SAP landscape.

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