McLaren's Tracker!

Has Kimi been driving faster now a days in the circuits? I don't see any difference! Are the McLaren engines in great shape? Can't comment especially after the Monaco Grand Prix. But their F1 car building team is happy about one aspect - They are able to track information down to every component level.

So, what is bringing this change? Let's just open the back door. What we may be looking at is like a new car every year - Design & manufacturing in like 4 months, taking care of around like 10,000 components, incorporating design changes inbetween the production lines, an engine for one race or at the max 2 and with a head count of say 500 - Just look at it like a lap in the whole circuit of product cycle and at that lap speed. One thing is for sure in this section - Things are always tough to track and people always have the responsibility to report progress and to answer management's queries! As reported by BusinessWeek last week, this 'sure thing' has been eased out lately. And the company that has made this happen is SAP - Much to my surprise!

There has always been this story about these big giant ERP solution providers like SAP, Oracle...

It's a period of heavy rain in this dense forest and everything around is getting bad. A turkey in this forest wants to cross over the flooded river to go for safety. Comes a Fox (you know who) around. He offers to help. Turkey sure is scared and doesn't want to risk. But, Fox is quite promising that Turkey yields.

Turkey climbs on the back of Fox and stays farther away from Fox's mouth. As Fox starts walking, the water level increases and slowly the Turkey realizes its sinking. Without much of choice and realizing Fox is the only "friend" now, it slowly starts moving towards the neck...on top of neck... near the forehead... on the forehead... That's it. Next moment, without Turkey's realization Fox has its mouth around Turkey's neck!!

SAP was never for small companies with like less than 1000 employees. It's like filing bankruptcy eventually if such a small company is signing up for SAP. But, look at SAP's goals -

...SAP has for years been trying to push further down into what it calls the Fortune One Million -- companies with as few as 100 employees. SAP's goal is to have 100,000 customers in that segment by 2010, a more than fivefold increase from the current level....
-- BusinessWeek

Well, if SAP is looking at very small businesses, it has lots of ground work to do. Especially make its products so lean that they just meet what the small firm (or the industry marget segment in broader perspective) wants and ofcourse, without much of maintenance to do for the whole year long.

Partnership with McLaren would sure give visibility for SAP (like I thought of blogging:)) and probably bring more businesses to SAP. But do every small firm has a funds bank in their back like DaimlerChrysler for McLaren's F1s?