SAP IMPLEMENTATION:

SIZING AND BLUEPRINTING:

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

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.

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
• Operations
 • Data center team
• DBA group
• Systems management

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 an
SAP system, it is vital do to 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.

The last phase before going live can be referred to as the final preparation phase and is
depicted below.

Systems and stress testing

Another vital preparation activity before going live with SAP is systems and stress
testing. This means planning, scripting, executing and monitoring system and stress tests,
to see if the expectations of the end users, defined in service level 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.

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

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.