One of the features of big IT supplier conferences such as SAP's Sapphire is that a theme always emerges that characterises the state of the vendor's customers.

Here in Berlin, the early signs are that the theme is the benefits of standardisation.

For several years, SAP and its main rival Oracle have been preaching to customers of the benefit of rolling out a single, common version of business applications across an organisation, with no – or the absolute minimum – of bespoke changes or additions to the package.

For the vendor, this has always made sense – not only does it hinder the use of other software, but it makes the system easier to support and maintain, especially when upgrading to new releases.

For users, the story has always been a good one – lower costs, easier support, less complexity, enforcement of core processes throughout the business – but the real-life evidence of this taking place has been less apparent.

But now, some of the early adopters have finally gone live, and are here at the conference to share their experiences.

Rolls-Royce chief information officer Jonathan Mitchell presented one such case study.

The aero engine manufacturer completed a global rollout of SAP in September last year, and is already seeing the benefits.

Mitchell discussed a few key lessons learned in the Rolls-Royce project that will be of use to others embarking on a similar initiative:

• Any requests for bespoke development had to be personally approved by him – thereby making only the most essential alterations to the standard product.
• He stressed the importance of testing – the company conducted three separate full dress rehearsals before going live, and one of the fundamental tenets of the project was that testing should never be reduced, only increased, regardless of the effect on delivery timescales.
• To enforce adequate and ongoing user training, Rolls only allows system access to licenced users – and to maintain their licences, users have to attend regular training sessions.
• The quality of your chosen super-users – the business representatives chosen to be the expert users of the system for their area of the organization – is critical to the overall project. Mitchell said the role of the super-user was central to the rollout.

The company is already seeing the benefits of the ruthless standardisation enforced by using a single software package worldwide.

As more organisations share the lessons they have learned, the more we will see smaller companies adopting a similar approach.

Magazine wholesaler Menzies Distribution is an example – the firm has just embarked on a £10m, five-year business transformation project, with a similarly ruthless standardisation based on SAP at its heart.

The growing use of unmodified, packaged software in companies is not necessarily great news if you are an in-house software developer - or perhaps it is if you are looking for an opportunity to develop new skills - but it is very good news for IT leaders looking to remove complexity from their operations and use IT to drive change and innovation across the business.