How Accurate Was SAP on its SPP Service Parts Application?

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Executive Summary

For years SAP has said that SPP was a highly effective service parts planning application.
In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim.

What SAP Said About SAP SPP

Our listing of SAP MDM and SAP PLM this listing is essentially the same story as SPP. So this is not an analysis of a specific comment by SAP, but an analysis of SAP’s overall proposal with MDM. One of the problems is that when a product “goes away,” the vendor’s statements and projects tend to be forgotten. You will learn how accurate SAP was about its claims on SPP.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem.
Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers.

What Actually Happened with SAP SPP?

SAP SPP is the service parts planning module within APO. We took both classes on SPP, worked with SPP, and immediately found many quality control problems with the application. From this, we predicted that SPP would run into significant implementation problems, which it did. We covered this in the 2010 article Why SAP SPP Continues to Have Implementation Problems.

Years later, SPP has failed at virtually every customer it has been implemented. SAP shows customers on its SPP slides where SPP is not used. Even the primary showcase account CAT Logistics was not able to get SPP to work as intended.

The acquiring companies are doing their best to hide the failed investments from both their internal customers and the media. These investments could have been stopped years ago or merely basic testing into the product, but this was not done.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 5% accuracy rating on SPP.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a larger research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.