SAP Challenges for Large Businesses
SAP ERP projects undertaken by large multi-national corporations with multiple business units and operations spread across the globe have a unique set of challenges. Managing, controlling and focusing any such endeavor is an enormously complex task requiring great skill and perseverance in many areas: business vision; organizational change management, and technology deployments. The challenges are enhanced because of different business practices, different lines of business, cultural barriers, local regulation, different languages, crossing time zones, and so on.
It is in this context that each part of the overall implementation becomes a separate sub-project with its own set of deliverables and critical path. Across these sub-projects a vision has to exist in terms of the end state target, the path to get there, and the technology to use.
How DataXstream Helps
DataXstream has a wealth of experience in projects with large multi-national companies. Many of our consultants have a Fortune 100 background and have lead teams in making significant contributions to the success of the client implementations.
There are many roles on an SAP ERP implementation at a large company and DataXstream has filled many of them. We can provide high level strategic and tactical guidance on how to organize, plan and deliver on a vision while ensuring that task execution is always grounded in tangible deliverables. DataXstream can take the strategy and convert it into delivery tactics and ultimately into detailed work content for individuals with specific expertise.
Here are a few examples of DataXstream capabilities:
Systems Architecture
We have architected multiple environments at several companies where disparate legacy systems needed to be tied together with various SAP releases. A controlled and coordinated use of various interfacing technologies (SAP PI/XI, SAP ALE, EDI, GENTRAN, GIS) delivered sustainable architectures that readily accommodated additional capacity as business volume increased.
Technology Assessment
DataXstream has performed technology assessments to review the state of an existing architecture and made recommendations for short, medium and long-term changes in support of business goals and projected business growth. In one case we mapped out a five-year plan for a client that included upgrading all their hardware, operating systems and moving to a virtual server environment in a high availability data center with full disaster recovery capability. This resulted in a huge leap in performance at reasonable cost with minimal disruption.
Project, Sub-Project Management & Team Leadership
We provide experienced high quality project management capabilities and delivery teams to ensure success within the overall framework of a large SAP project. Our teams take a focused and pragmatic approach to getting the job done. These are just a few of the areas where we excel:
- ABAP development
- interface architecture, design and delivery
- data extract, conversions and loads
- production support process design and delivery
- disaster recovery
- SAP infrastructure including basis administration and Solution Manager
- SAP module functional consulting
- test management, e.g. integration test, performance/stress test
DataXstream is the Right Choice
DataXstream consultants worked hand-in-hand with a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company to architect, design and deliver an integration infrastructure based on SAP’s Exchange Infrastructure Technology (XI/PI). The project implemented a new production landscape that seamlessly co-existed with the current legacy infrastructure. Specific challenges required the inclusion of features to manage extremely large files and complex content conversion. In terms of overall deployment and long term strategy the design seamlessly integrated into existing support procedures and provided a clear path to retire the legacy infrastructure.
