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Discussing SAP SOLMAN Service Desk Integration Scenarios

October 27, 2011 By 3 Comments

When you purchase SAP ERP, you get SAP Solution Manager (SOLMAN) as part of the deal – ostensibly for free (although it is really included in the purchase price).  SOLMAN provides a wealth of functionality to help manage the technical environment as well as project processes like testing.

Service Desk functionality is delivered as part of SOLMAN for use as a ticketing system.  One of the features of it is that it can be used as a ticketing system for both SAP and non-SAP systems as well as in conjunction with other ticketing systems that may be in place already.  In this blog post I’ll briefly touch on some of the scenarios I have encountered and show that there are several ways to deploy Service Desk.

Using Service Desk is beneficial because it can automatically capture a wealth of information about what a user was doing when a problem occurred if the ticket is created directly from SAP.  Also, Service Desk can communicate directly with the SAP mother ship to log issues and manage OSS notes, which obviously reduces the risk of transcription errors.  And Service Desk can be extended to include functional components from non-SAP systems which in turn leads to the possibility of one-stop-shopping for ticket management. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP SolMan Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

SAP Go-Live Lessons Learned

September 27, 2011 By 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: , , , , ,

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

November 10, 2010 By 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:

  1. 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.
  2. We asked our project team, both client and consulting resources.  Again, the goal was to tell us why we couldn’t do it.
  3. 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.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: SAP Functional, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

SAP Project Management Consulting Clichés – Part 2

November 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Following my previous post I got a couple of responses from folks out on the interweb and decided I’d steal their suggestions and expand on their consulting clichés.  After all repetition and overuse are the start point for any cliché and this means I’m doing my part to sustain the cycle – reuse, recycle, renew!

Is Your Project a Hotbed of SAP Consulting Clichés?

I felt compelled to come up with a 2-by-2 matrix to help you decide whether your project is cliché generator or a cliché consumer.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: SAP Functional, SAP Project Management Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

SAP Solution Manager Service Desk Integration

August 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Nowadays when you install SAP ECC 6.0 you get SAP Solution Manager (SOLMAN) as part of the deal – ostensibly for free (although it is really included in the purchase price).  SOLMAN provides a wealth of functionality to help manage the technical environment as well as project processes like testing.

Service Desk functionality is delivered to you for use as a ticketing system.  One of the features of it is that it can be used as a ticketing system for both SAP and non-SAP systems as well as in conjunction with other ticketing systems that may be in place already.  In this blog post I’ll briefly touch on some of the scenarios I have encountered and show that there are several ways to deploy Service Desk.

Using Service Desk is beneficial because it can automatically capture a wealth of information about what a user was doing when a problem occurred if the ticket is created directly from SAP.  Also, Service Desk can communicate directly with the SAP mother ship to log issues and manage OSS notes which obviously reduces the risk of transcription errors.  And Service Desk can be extended to include functional components from non-SAP systems which in turn leads to the possibility of one-stop-shopping for ticket management. [Read more...]

Filed Under: SAP Project Management, SAP SolMan Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

SAP Project Management Consulting Clichés

July 20, 2010 By 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.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Functional, SAP Project Management, SAP SolMan Blog, SAP Strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

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.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP SolMan Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

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.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP SolMan Blog, SAP Testing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, sap upgrade, SAP Upgrade Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

SAP Upgrades & Recycling Project Artifacts

February 23, 2010 By 2 Comments

In my previous post on SAP upgrades I discussed how to get started on your project and to determine whether you are doing (ahem!) just a technical upgrade or intend to venture into deploying additional standard functionality, too.  In this post I’ll talk about how you can plan, anticipate and potentially accelerate some of the execution activities to verify the upgrade is working.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Functional, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, SAP Testing, SAP Upgrade Blog Tagged With: , , , ,
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