SAP chief says time for a break

By ADAM GIFFORD

SAP New Zealand managing director Viv Gurrey has resigned to spend more time with her young family.

"I've spent four weekends at home in the last seven months. I spend most of my time in airports, planes and hotels and I've had a gutsful of it," said Gurrey, who moved over from Geac three years ago.

Gurrey said she is going out on a high, with SAP New Zealand outperforming all other countries in the Asia Pacific region in surpassing targets during the past financial year.

Companies Office records show in 2000 SAP New Zealand lost almost $3.1 million on revenue of $17.2 million, and in 2001 lost $3.4 million on $17.3 million revenue. Results for 2002 have not yet been released.

The last year SAP New Zealand declared a profit was 1998, when it earned $6.1 million on revenues of $36.5 million, picking up blue chip customers like Enza and Air New Zealand's engineering division.

Gurrey said she was planning her departure well before her predecessor in the New Zealand role, Geraldine McBride, returned from three years in North America to head up Australia and New Zealand.

Spokeswoman Jennifer Roach said professional services director Karel Driessen is acting managing director while SAP looks for a replacement for Gurrey.

McBride told the Herald last week she is making aggressive growth targets for the region. She would not comment then on whether existing jobs were up for review.

"That may mean additional people coming into the business and maybe realigning some of the positions. I have been hiring people, not firing."

McBride says local figures matched the worldwide result for the German software manufacturer, which grew revenue in a flat market by 6 per cent to €7.4 billion.

SAP's New Zealand results were driven by its sale of a supply chain solution to dairy giant Fonterra, with the prospect of more work to come, and sales of additional licences to ENZA and Air New Zealand Engineering Services, which is buying Business Warehouse, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Enterprise Portal modules.

While SAP's existing customers at the big end of town will continue to maintain and add to their systems, future growth will require SAP to make inroads into medium sized and even small customers.

Its cost structure does not allow it to go after such customers directly, so it is going after them with new partners and new products.

One of the first results of this strategy was the sale by reseller Realtech of a mySAP All in One solution, a template-driven version of SAP R/3 designed for small and medium businesses, to Lighting Direct.

McBride said Business One, a mid-market package SAP has bought and rebadged as its own, will be introduced into the New Zealand market later this year through new channel partners.

A major priority is to grow sales of customer relationship management (CRM), a term SAP seems to apply to a wide range of customer-facing applications and not just the traditional call centre and sales force automation.