SSA’s MANMAN support team won’t make a Michigan move

A special conference call on Dec. 2 revealed that the application support experts for the MANMAN ERP suite didn’t accept the company’s offer to relocate to a new consolidated Grand Rapids, Michigan center with the rest of the SSA Global Technology support teams. SSA is in the midst of consolidating its US application support operations in a single center by the middle of this month. Corporate vice president Mark Rosenberg reported on the changes in a conference call to CAMUS user group members early in December, a call that only CAMUS members were allowed to attend.

CAMUS member Terry Floyd of the Support Group inc. said the call delivered the troubling news that SSA’s MANMAN experts who are already serving the MANMAN community won’t become part of the consolidated, 80-person staff in Grand Rapids. Instead, support techs from other parts of SSA’s operations have taken the first level of training courses on MANMAN to fill in for the support engineers who will not make the move.

SSA has taken an approach of letting its 3000 customers stay on the application “until the nuts and bolts fall out,” a strategy that calls for fewer changes to IT operations. Continued OnGoing Support (OGS) contracts stand at the heart of SSA’s retain strategy, but now the consolidation appears to put the support team’s experience at risk. SSA has already consolidated support operations for its many applications, across IBM, Unix and Windows platforms, in its Europe, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Africa and Japan operations.