SAP continues to invest and grow in Sri Lanka

Announces first SAP Centre of Excellence, localised ERP solutions and ecosystem expansion

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

With the SAP Indian subcontinent emerging as the number one growth subsidiary amongst SAP’s worldwide operations in 2011 which continued in the first half of the next fiscal year, the software corporation kept to its promise of further expansion and investment in Sri Lanka.

At its annual corporate customer event held yesterday, SAP announced the launch of its first Centre of Excellence in partnership with the John Keells Group, revealed ‘PRISM-VISHMAUM,’ a localised ERP solution for discrete manufacturing industry and unveiled an education partnership forged with the Just In Time Group.

SAP Indian subcontinent Managing Director Peter Gartenberg revealed that Sri Lanka was a major contributor to the growth witnessed within the Indian subcontinent and expressed his pleasure at how business is developing in Sri Lanka.

“We are very happy with the response we have got from our Sri Lankan customers and partners. The country is growing in its prominence within the SAP world and we are very pleased with the progress made with our customer engagements here,” he stated. “Mobility and commerce is definitely the future. We were the leader in e-commerce and we are now leaders in mobile commerce which will be a point of focus at the Centre of Excellence.”

The Centre of Excellence in partnership with SAP services partner John Keells Holdings is being set up as a demo showcase zone for cross industry ERP solutions across manufacturing, service and trade. It will be further integrated with business analytics solutions covering various dashboards and reports across line-of-businesses. Going forward, SAP plans on including SAP mobility solutions that will enable customers to operate their key business functions using mobile devices.

Moving its focus towards building localised solutions for the Sri Lankan market, ‘VISHMAUM,’ a made for Sri Lankan rapid development solution was also launched, pre-engineered for the market with the ability to be deployed within weeks instead of months and furthermore, ensures a higher guarantee of success.

An ERP solution for discrete manufacturing industries that incorporates best practices from SAP’s global deployment experience was launched by SAP partner Prism Informatics who leveraged their rich local expertise in building the solution. It is localised to incorporate Sri Lanka specific national building taxation, value added taxation, withholding taxation, statutory regulations and sales commission calculation.   

“Sri Lanka’s emerging economy and the focus of companies on leveraging technology to achieve superior business results have made this a key strategic market for SAP,” emphasised Gartenberg. “With the localised solutions and an expanded ecosystem, we look forward to enabling Sri Lankan customers across the private and public sector to grow, scale and globalise.”

Enforcing its commitment on education, an education partnership with the JIT Group was also announced which will focus on developing local SAP competency in Sri Lanka. JIT’s training centres will provide SAP-certified training for students, professionals and customers.

With a plan to train and deploy over 100 SAP professionals during its first year of operation, the partnership will help build a strong local SAP resource pool to meet the growing demands for SAP skills in Sri Lanka. SAP and JIT will also be working closely with Sri Lankan universities to introduce SAP content into the syllabus.

“There is a lot of talent is Sri Lanka that needs access to world class information and practices – this partnership will be fantastic for Sri Lanka as through this we will be able to produce world class talent in the highest level of SAP skills,” Gartenberg noted. “We are seeing great potential here in terms of building up a group of SAP consultants for the region.”

Hayleys and John Keells Holdings have already come forward and announced that they will employ the trained talent which will in turn create further employment opportunities and further economic development.

“It’s not just about getting the right solutions, we have also worked strongly on acquiring the right partners – we now have a strong robust ecosystem of 10 partners in the region today,” revealed SAP Indian subcontinent Vice President – Emerging Business Priyadarshi Mohapatra.

“Partnership and customers has been a cornerstone for SAP and we will keep investing in that but we wanted to figure out how we could upscale the existing talent in the market so that they would be employable globally.”

Gartenberg also divulged some of SAP’s initiatives for the coming year which will include working heavily with the public sector to bring in their expertise with e-governance to Sri Lankan state enterprises.

The forum brought together 300 senior representatives and held industry tracks focused on BFSI, telecom, manufacturing and government sectors, where SAP showcased solutions across enterprise application, analytics, database and technology and mobile and cloud.