327Business Excellence at SAP
use of its resources and competencies. It continued to search for the right structure for servicing
the growing range of its products and the increasing breadth of the companies (in terms of size,
industry, and global location) it was now serving. Recall that in the mid-1990s, SAP had begun to
centralize authority and control to standardize its own business processes and manage knowledge
effectively across organizational subunits. While this reorganization resulted in some benets, it
had the unfortunate result of lengthening the time it took SAP to respond to the fast-changing web
software ERP environment.
To respond to changing customer needs and the needs for product customization, SAP now
moved to decentra