Project preparation
The project preparation phase, depicted below, focuses at two main
activities, i.e. to make a setup for the TSO and to define a solutionvision. These activities allow an organization to put in on the right track towards implementation.
Design and initially staff the SAP TSO
The first major step of the project preparation phase is to design
and initially staff an SAP technical support organization (TSO), which is
the organization that is
charged with addressing, designing, implementing and supporting the SAP
solution. This can be programmers, project management, database administrators,
test teams, etc. At this point, the focus should be at staffing the key
positions of the TSO, e.g. the high-level project team and SAP professionals
like the senior database administrator and
the solution architect. Next to that, this is the time to make decisions about
choosing for internal staff members or external consultants.
Craft solution vision
The second project preparation job is to define a so-called
solution vision, i.e. a vision of the future-state of the SAP solution, where
it is important to address both business and financial requirements (budgets).
The main focus within the vision should be on the company’score business and how
the SAP solution will better enable that core business to be successful. Next
to that, the shortcomings of the current systems should be described and short
but clear requirements should be provided regarding availability (uptime), security, manageability and scalability of the SAP system.
Sizing and blueprinting
The next phase is often referred to as the sizing and blueprinting
phase and forms the main chunk of the implementation process. The phase is illustrated below.
Perform cost of ownership analysis
This phase starts with performing a total cost of ownership analysis (TCO analysis) to determine
how to get the best business solution at the lowest costs. This means to
compare SAP solution stack options and alternatives and then determine what
costs each part of the stack will bring and when these costs will be incurred.
Parts of the stack are for example the hardware, operating system anddatabase, which form the acquisition costs. Next to that,
there should be taken a look at recurring costs like maintenance costs anddowntime costs. Instead of performing a complete TCO
analysis for various solution stack alternatives that would like to compare, it
can be wise just to do a so-called delta analysis, where only the differences
between solutions (stacks) are identified and analyzed.
Identify high availability and disaster recovery
requirements
The next step is identifying the high availability requirements and the more serious disaster recovery requirements. This is to plan what to
do with later downtime of the SAP system, caused by
e.g. hardware failures, application failures or power outages. It should be
noted that it is very important to calculate the cost of downtime, so that an
organization has a good idea of its actual availability requirements.
Engage SAP solution stack vendors
A true sizing process is to engage the SAP solution stack vendors, which is the next step. This
means selecting the best SAPhardware and software technology partners for all layers and
components of the solution stack, based on a side-by-side sizing comparison.
The most important factors that are of influence here are the estimated numbers
of (concurrent) users and batch sizes. A wise thing to do is to involve SAP AG
itself to let them create a sizing proposal stating the advised solution stack,
before moving to SAP’s technology partners/SAP vendors, like Accenture, HP and IBM.
Staff TSO
The TSO (Technical Support Organisation) is the most important
resource for an organization that is implementing SAP, so staffing the TSO is a
vital job which can consume a lot of time. In a previous phase, the organization should already have staffed the most vital
positions. At this point the organization should staff the bulk of the TSO,
i.e. fill the positions that directly support the near-term objectives of the implementation, which are to develop and begin the
installation/implementation of the SAP data center. Examples are: data center experts, network infrastructure experts, security specialists and database administration experts.
There are many ways to find the right people within or outside
the organization for all
of the TSO positions and it depends on the organization how much time it wants
to spend on staffing.
Training
One of the most vital stages of the implementation process
is training. Very few people within an organization are SAP
experts or even have worked with SAP software. It is therefore very important
to train the end users but especially the SAP TSO: the people who design and
implement the solution. Many people within the TSO need all kinds of training.
Some examples of these positions:
§ SAP Network Specialists
§ SAP Database Administrators
§ SAP Security specialists
§ Documentation specialists
§ Et cetera
All of these people need to acquire the required SAP knowledge and
skills or even SAP certifications through
training. Moreover, people need to learn to do business in a totally new way.
To define how much SAP training every person needs, a company can make use of a
skillset matrix. With this matrix,
a manager can identify who possesses what knowledge, to manage and plan
training, by defining the height of expertise with a number between e.g. 1 and
4 for each skill for each employee.
Setup SAP data center
The next step is to set up the SAP data center. This means either building a new data center
facility or transforming the current data center into a foundation capable of
supporting the SAP solution stack, i.e. all
of the technology layers and components (SAP software products) in a productive
SAP installation. The most important factor when designing the data center
is availability. The high availability and disaster recovery
requirements which should have been defined earlier, give a good idea of the
required data center requirements to host the SAP software. Data center
requirements can be a:
§ Physical requirement like power requirements
§ Rack requirement
§ Network infrastructure requirement or
§ Requirement to the network server.
Perform installations
The following step is to install the
required SAP software parts which are called components and technological
foundations like a web application server or enterprise portals, to a
state ready for business process configuration. The most vital sub steps are to
prepare your OS, prepare the database server and then start installing SAP
software. Here it is very important to use installation guides, which are
published for each SAP component or technology solution by SAP AG. Examples of
SAP components are:
§ R/3 Enterprise — Transaction Processing
§ mySAP BI — Business Information Warehouse
§ mySAP CRM — Customer Relationship
Management
§ mySAP KW — Knowledge Warehouse
§ mySAP PLM — Product Lifecycle
Management
§ mySAP SCM — Supply Chain Management
§ mySAP SEM — Strategic Enterprise Management
§ mySAP SRM — Supplier Relationship Management
§ mySAP HCM — Human Capital Management
Round out support for SAP
Before moving into the functional development phase, the
organization should identify and staff the remaining TSO roles, e.g. roles that
relate to helpdesk work and other such support providing work.
Functional development
The next phase is the functional development phase, where it is
all about change management and testing. This phase is depicted below.
Address change management
The next challenge for an organization is all about change management / change control, which means to
develop a planned approach to the changes the organization faces. The objective
here is to maximize the collective efforts of all people involved in the change
and to minimize the risk of failure of implementing the changes related to the
SAP implementation.
The implementation of SAP
software will most surely come with many changes and an organization can expect
many natural reactions, i.e. denial, to these changes. To fight this, it is
most important to create a solid project team dedicated to change management and to communicate the solution vision
and goals of this team. This team should be prepared to handle the many change
issues that come from various sources like:
§ End-user requests
§ Data center team
§ DBA group
SAP systems and operations management
Next thing is to create a foundation for the SAP systems
management and SAP computer operations, by creating a SAP operations manual and
by evaluating SAP management applications. The manual is a collection of
current state system documentation, day-to-day and other regularly scheduled
operations tasks, various installation and operations checklists and how-to
process documents.
Functional, integration and regression testing
Testing is very important before going live with any system.
Before going live with a SAP system, it is vital to do many different kinds of
testing, since there is often a large, complex infrastructure of hardware and
software involved. Both requirements as well as quality parameters are to be
tested. Important types of testing are:
§ Functional testing: to test using functional use
cases, i.e. a set of conditions or variables under which a tester will
determine if a certain business process works
§ Integration testing
§ Regression testing
All tests should be preceded by creating solid test plans.
Agreements will be met. This can be done with SAP’s standard
application benchmarks,
to benchmark the organization’s configurations against configurations that have
been tested by SAP’s hardware technology partners. Again, a test plan should be created at first.
Final preparation
Prepare for cutover
The final phase before going live with SAP is often referred to as
the cutover phase, which is the process of transitioning from one system to a
new one. The organization needs to
plan, prepare and execute the cutover, by creating a cutover plan that
describes all cutover tasks that have to be performed before the actual
go-live. Examples of cutover tasks are:
§ Review and update all systems-related operations
procedures like backup policies and system monitoring
§ Assign ownership of SAP’s functional processes
to individuals
§ Let SAP AG do a GoingLive check, to get their blessing to go
live with the system
§ Lock down the system, i.e. do not make any more
changes to the SAP system
Go live
All of the previously described phases all lead towards this final
moment: the go-live. Go-live means to turn on the SAP system for the end-users
and to obtain feedback on the solution and to monitor the solution. It is also
the moment where product software adoption comes into play. More information on
this topic:
§ Product Software
Adoption: Big Bang Adoption
§ Product Software
Adoption: Parallel Adoption
§ Product Software Adoption: Phased Adoption
*From the reference of wikipedia.org
Design and initially staff the SAP TSO
Address change management
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