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 Project Management Consulting Clichés
July 20, 2010 By 4 Comments
SAP Data Migration – Answering the Important Questions (Part 1)
July 13, 2010 By 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!
Presentation on SAP Virtualization from ASUG SAPPHIRENOW
May 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment
DataXstream was at the SAPPHIRENOW ASUG Annual Conference this year to give a presentation on SAP Virtualization. The presentation, titled “Ensuring Business Continuity By Embracing Virtualization For Your SAP Environment”, is an insightful look by industry leading experts on the fundamental concepts of virtualization and the value it brings to an SAP infrastructure. The presentation slides are now available to download below. This information, coupled with our SAP Virtualization Webinar, provides invaluable knowledge to businesses who are considering virtualizing their SAP infrastructure.
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ASUG SAPPHIRENOW Virtualization Presentation |
SAP Solution Manager (SOLMAN) Template Projects
May 20, 2010 By 4 Comments
In my previous post I discussed some of the functionality available in Solution Manager (SOLMAN) to capture and build business process scenarios, processes and steps. Once you captured this information it could be readily transformed into a test plan and SOLMAN functionality used to execute, manage and monitor testing.
This is good functionality and once your business scenarios, processes and steps are in SOLMAN you can use them as a baseline for additional projects.
Consider the “global template” scenario that crops up in companies today: a core set of business processes are designed and rolled out on a global basis – the only deviations allowed are those mandated by local legal requirements (a.k.a. localization). On top of this there are the business scenarios that fall outside of the business template. You don’t want to build a standard implementation project from scratch each time for the core business processes. This is where template projects save you time and effort.
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SAP Upgrades, Solution Manager, Test Plans, and Testing
May 11, 2010 By 2 Comments
In this entry I’ll pull together a few threads from previous posts (testing, documentation, upgrades and offshore development) and throw in some Solution Manager (SOLMAN) functionality. These pieces can be fitted together to help accelerate a project and testing preparation via use of the SAP Test Workbench.
Nowadays SAP wants you to use SOLMAN to manage your landscape and use it as the main conduit to interact with the mother ship in Walldorf. Lots of SAP installations use SOLMAN as a way to generate developer keys and as a document repository: valid uses, but only a small fraction of the available functionality. Let’s explore some more of that SOLMAN magic.
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SAP Cutover Practice for Risk Reduction
May 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment
SAP system upgrades, support packs, or data conversions into production can be a very stressful and time-consuming activity. A good way to remove some of the negativity and gain confidence is for a ‘SAP Cutover Practice’ activity. Although this does require additional hardware (at least temporarily), the benefits from this activity are well worth the cost.
The Art of Writing an SAP Functional Specification
April 20, 2010 By 5 Comments
Overview
I am currently working on an SAP implementation project that is just starting its realization phase. One of my first tasks, as a member of the technical implementation team, is to review completed functional specification documents for RICEF objects. These documents, written by functional subject matter experts, are supposed to detail business requirements that address gaps, and which need to be incorporated into the system being implemented. The purpose of the review is to make sure that the functional specification documents are complete, accurate, and contain the approval signatures required to move on to the technical design phase.
SAP Virtualization Webinar – April 28, 12-1 PM EST
April 9, 2010 By
Live. Online. Free.Join us Wednesday, April 28th from 12 to 1 PM EST for the launch of our live online webinar series. The first webinar we are presenting will be a case study on SAP virtualization. Get in depth detail and a first hand look at a full virtualization implementation, see the visuals, and have all your questions answered live by our technical experts. Yo u also have the opportunity to schedule one-on-one post-webinar meeting with our technical team to talk more in depth about SAP virtualization. User space is limited so RSVP below today! |
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Too Many Developers Spoil The Code
March 31, 2010 By 1 Comment
You may have heard the following idiom before:
Too many cooks spoil the broth
The common meaning extracted from this saying is that too many people working on a single task tend to make a mess of it. But, what happens when you have too many developers working in a single piece of ABAP code? That’s right, you get a big mess. This issue is especially difficult to deal with when there are multiple functional requirements leveraging the same custom code object, form-based user-exit, or function-based user-exit.
While current releases of SAP (those built on SAP NetWeaver 2004s and later) have good built-in handling of enhancements and customizations via implicit and explicit enhancement points and BADIs, there still exists many old-school user-exits.
Multiple Developers; One Code Object
I recently worked on a project where three separate developers were creating three separate interfaces based on the outbound delivery IDOC. While the development for all three interfaces was occurring at the same time, the go-live date for each of the interfaces were different (we’ll discuss that project management glitch at another time). Each interface required a separate set of custom fields and, therefore, it’s own IDOC extension. The problem is there is only one appropriate user-exit in IDOC_OUTPUT_DELVRY and three developers needed to be developing in it at the same time!
How did we solve this problem?
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SAP Upgrades & Offshore Resources
March 23, 2010 By 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.
