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Lessons Learned for Decision Makers and Leads from a Successful SAP Retail Project

January 5, 2012 By Tim Yates 4 Comments

I have spent the last 2 years working on an SAP Retail implementation. An SAP Retail project is the last place I could have ever imagined myself working. I have always been drawn more to SAP manufacturing, distribution, and A&D projects. Being a manufacturing engineer by trade, I am always a little more comfortable with a manufacturing line or warehouse near by. Even the facility that we ran the SAP project out of had a manufacturing line in it and a warehouse, so it helped to ease my inner engineer. It also broke my 12 year streak of not having a project in the state I live in.

I have been working with SAP for over 15 years. This was my first SAP Retail project and once again SAP has proved to me that it can be successfully leveraged and become a competitive advantage for those companies that implement it. Each time I start a new project in a new industry I think about the vast differences in how the new company will need to leverage SAP and the challenges that unique business will create for the SAP application. Time and time again a reasonable solution path is achieved and SAP becomes a solid foundation from which the business operates. The diversity of my own personal experience working with successful SAP customers demonstrates this point. There are not a lot of similarities in how A Flooring Retailer, Rocket Manufacturer, Pharmaceutical Manufacturer operate, yet they are all very successful at leveraging SAP.

It’s SAP Upgrade Time! Do You Know Where Your Customizations Are? Part 3.

November 3, 2011 By Mike Salvo Leave a Comment

In my final post on this topic, I will discuss some of the techniques that I use to “discover” information about customizations in an SAP system, even in the absence of any documentation. The information available to be discovered may include such details as the object name, object type, user name of the person who made the last modification, date and time of the last modification, usage statistics, where-used, and for code-based objects, even the versions and their code differences.

SAP Go-Live Lessons Learned

September 27, 2011 By Tim Cooper Leave a Comment

In real estate the key factors in making the sale are location, location and location. In an SAP project I’m coming round to believing that success requires testing, testing and testing.

A Short Selective Retrospective on Key Constituencies

All project events and project success stem from testing and testing well. I’ve written about various types of testing before and how that can lead to some confusion because of issues with definitions. Here I want to discuss some areas where testing really can make or break a project and ideas for how to minimize the chances of things turning out badly. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, SAP Testing, SAP Testing Tagged With: DataXstream, SAP, SAP ECC 6.0, SAP Integration, SAP testing, Tim Cooper

Lumber Liquidators’ SAP VMware Virtualization Case Study

April 5, 2011 By Dataxstream

Going Virtual: How Lumber Liquidators Optimized Its IT Investments and Lightened the Demand on Its IT Organization

The April 2011 issue of SAP insiderPROFILES magazine will feature an editorial on the virtualization of Lumber Liquidators’ SAP implementation. The piece takes you inside the thought process of Lumber Liquidators’ IT team as they recount the factors that led them towards virtualization, the selection of DataXstream as their implementation partner, and how they feel today about about the decisions they made a year ago during the virtualization process.

Read the Case Study:

SAP insiderPROFILES – Lumber Liquidators SAP Virtualization

Filed Under: Blog, News, Press Releases, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, SAP Technical, Uncategorized Tagged With: Case Study, Dell, lumber liquidators, SAP, virtualization, VMware

SAP Mid-Month Go-Live: Got the T-shirt

November 10, 2010 By Tim Cooper 2 Comments

Conventional wisdom says you don’t go-live with SAP financials in the middle of the month (strictly speaking I should say the middle of the accounting period, but I’ll say month as a generic term for the posting period). I recently went through a mid-month SAP financials and logistics go-live and so far it has been a success.

Initially the project team had the expected you-can’t-do-that reaction when the idea of a mid-month go-live was suggested. We took three main steps to determine whether or not we were crazy or had a viable go-live option:

We asked SAP. As one of the main participants on the project we got them to do an internal review with some platinum consultants with the objective of telling us why we could not go-live mid-month.
We asked our project team, both client and consulting resources. Again, the goal was to tell us why we couldn’t do it.
We Googled like maniacs to find something to support and justify the conventional wisdom. We failed to find anything substantial that would deter us.

Armed with the conviction that there was no reason we couldn’t go-live mid-month we set about defining the details of how we would pull it off.

Virtualization, Sustainability discussions at SAP TechEd 2010

October 20, 2010 By Cailin Yates Leave a Comment

Sustainability is one of many topics being discussed at SAPTechEd 2010 in Las Vegas. In addition green being ‘the right thing to do’ it also makes good business sense, so much so that Timo Stezler, VP Green-IT SAP, frequently said, “We have found carbon is an indicator of inefficiency.”

One area in which businesses can make improvements to reduce waste is in Virtualization. Eddie White, Sr. VP with Sentilla, noted that data centers account for 2% of the power usage in the United States. In addition to actual hardware costs, the cost of power to the data center, power drawn by the servers and power used in cooling, can be reduced by 25% through efficient use of hardware and through virtualization.

In addition, virtualization allows a business to “sweat the assets it already has instead of adding new ones.” Through smart virtualization a CIO can delay the need for a new data center, which can cost in the area of 10 million dollars. White noted that IBM’s data center accounts for 6% of the company but utilizes 30% of the company’s power usage.

Stezler stated it simply. “Virtualization has a huge impact.” SAP was 60% virtualized servers in 2009 and the goal for 2010 is 80% virtualization. In more detail Stezler notes that Energy Management is a new challenge for IT. In recent studies 50% of clients and investors state energy efficiency and carbon footprint are among deciding factors when making consumer or investor decisions. The data center is typically 30% to 40% of energy cost associated with any business.

With this in mind DataXstream offers virtualization services as part of our SAP integration focus. DataXstream is a certified partner with Dell and has also partnered with VMware the global leader in Business Infrastructure Virtualization. These partnerships allow DataXstream to streamline the virtualization process as well as allow excellent pricing options.

In each session Timo Stezler advocated, “Become a strategic Sustainability advisor to your business.” Work to streamline efforts within your business.

For more information on Virtualization:

SAP Virtualization Solutions: http://www.dataxstream.com/products-services/sap-virtualization-solutions/

SAP AIO Virtual Infrastructure: http://www.dataxstream.com/sap-aio-virtual-infrastructure/

For more information on Green IT within SAP:

Green IT blogs on SDN https://go.sap.corp?Green-IT-blogs

SAP Green IT Community: https://go.sap.corp/GIC

SAP Sustainability Report: http://www.sapsustainabilityreport.com

Filed Under: SAP Strategy, Uncategorized Tagged With: data center, energy management, Green IT, Project Management, SAP TechEd 2010, sustainability, Timo Stezler, upgrades, virtualization

SAP Data Migration – The Data Migration Plan (Part 2)

August 4, 2010 By Mike Salvo 1 Comment

If you are responsible for the success of data migration, you will want to build a detailed plan that will walk you through all of the three phases of data migration: pre-data migration preparation, the data migration itself, and post-data migration cleanup. I like my data migration plan to contain detailed steps that ensure that I don’t forget anything. Each step lists a specific named responsible person along with their area of responsibility and contact information. Unless I am responsible for executing the task myself, I prefer the named person to be a client employee (i.e. the business owner of the process) rather than a project consultant. This is where the responsibility should be, and it requires that the business process owners actually participate in the activity rather than sit on the sidelines and watch.

SAP Project Management Consulting Clichés

July 20, 2010 By Tim Cooper 4 Comments

There’s an old saying (aren’t they all old?) that instructs you to avoid clichés like the plague. SAP has generated its own set of overworked buzzword terminology and has an eco-viral-collective that churns out more and more each day. I can hardly keep up with the acronyms.
Over the years I’ve accumulated three favorites of my own that I’d like to share. The aim here is not to kill off the clichés, instead it is to suggest ways to head them off before you use one and have clients rolling their eyes at you–Or at least have a quick follow up so that the cliché actually has some value.

SAP Data Migration – Answering the Important Questions (Part 1)

July 13, 2010 By Mike Salvo 2 Comments

It is data migration time on your SAP business project. Whether your project is implementation, acquisition, or merger, the goal is pretty much the same: the seamless inbound acquisition of master and transactional data from one or more external data sources while ensuring that this activity has minimal impact on the rest of the business. This is where we attempt to move years of neglected master and transactional data from a loosely structured, anything-goes legacy system into a very tightly integrated and highly structured SAP system. You must consider the likelihood that the concept of master data management had not been invented yet when the legacy or source system providing your data was implemented.

How much data to move? How much data to leave behind? What to automate, and what to execute manually? How to gracefully orchestrate and execute a data migration cutover from one system to another? Where and how to fit the data migration plan into the overall business implementation plan? How to continue to run the business during the data migration phase of the business project implementation? These questions are all part of the planning fun!

SAP Upgrades & Offshore Resources

March 23, 2010 By Tim Cooper 2 Comments

It looks like it is official: 2010 is the year of the upgrade. A little validation is good for my self-esteem. Now that’s out of the way and I’m polishing my attaboy trophy let’s get on with it.

In this post I’ll do a combined discussion about the use of offshore resources in an upgrade project as well as share some experiences working with remote resources. My colleague, Mike Salvo, has already discussed ABAP customizations in an upgrade in this post. Now that you’ve found these customizations, what do you do next? Actually Mike provides loads of good advice about what to do next in terms of sorting out what is in the overall pile of objects that need to be examined.

What I hope is that you have documentation related to these objects: information that tells you why they were created, what they do, where SAP functionality is deficient in the current release and how you worked around the shortcoming. This should be helpful in making the evaluation about whether you can remove a particular object or if you need to make sure it works in the new release in a way that satisfies your business and/or technical need.

I going to assume that you have been through the “bag of rocks” analysis described in Mike Salvo’s posts and now have a collection of pebbles, stones and boulders to work through. This is where you can make good use of offshore resources to help out: there’s a lot of discussion about the use of offshore resources and you can use them really well or really badly. Let me digress.