As an IT pro supporting SAP, or tackling an SAP implementation, simplicity is certainly not the first attribute that comes to mind. In fact, as an enterprise suite of ERP, CRM, PLM, SCM and SRM applications, SAP links and integrates every business process across your organization. While 253,500 customers in 188 countries successfully rely on SAP to accelerate their business operations, inadequate planning, lack of testing during each implementation phase, improper SAP monitoring, or even poorly managed user training can all result in costly pitfalls and mistakes for you and your organization.
For example, a recent $50 million SAP implementation by San Diego — the biggest IT project ever undertaken by the city, designed to provide a core IT architecture for 15 years — ended up tripling employees’ workloads for certain types of tasks! Pair this up with other highly visible SAP implementation failures at Marin County, or at Hershey’s where order fulfillment time doubled to 12 days and you will get the point. Testing and validating SAP functionality and workflows during each implementation phase, and proactively monitoring availability and response time of SAP in production systems, as perceived by your end-users, are critical to your success. Here are some tips to help you get started.
PRE-IMPLEMENTATION GUIDELINES.
• DO #1. Document existing business processes: Since SAP touches so many business functions, take the time to understand and document how each business user (project managers, HR, sales, financial teams, etc.) completes existing processes and common workflows.
• DO #2. Redesign business processes. Many of the SAP implementation pitfalls we just mentioned were primarily due to simply replicating existing processes instead of redesigning them with SAP for more efficiency. Therefore, don’t skip this crucial, yet time-consuming step, and map and optimize all user requirements, for each group of users, into new workflow models. This information will also help you guide your monitoring efforts later on
• DO #3: Reduce the number of customized functions. Try to use as many objects and functions as you can from the off-the-shelf version of SAP instead of writing your own custom code. You might run into quality issues with custom objects later on, plus they might not work as expected if/when you roll-out a new version of SAP.
• DO #4: Test and validate each SAP implementation phase – from an end-user perspective. Begin manual testing as early as possible, so users can provide feedback on SAP business processes and validate reporting structures. Later on, automate your testing processes to save time, increase efficiency and thoroughly test and re-test as needed to ensure quality and top-notch SAP performance. Look for a testing tool where you can easily replicate and automate end-to-end user interactions with SAP in the form of testing scripts (e.g. enter an order, generate a shipping receipt, create an invoice) , which can be later on re-used for SAP production monitoring as well.
• DO #5: Train your users. Tailor your training accordingly, and plan for role-based training customized to each set of users’ unique requirements
SAP PRODUCTION MONITORING GUIDELINES.
Did you know that the #1 customer complaint faced by organizations that use SAP is “SAP is too slow”? Therefore, instead of infrastructure-centric SAP monitoring, look for synthetic monitoring capabilities to automate the driving of your SAP applications — just like a real user would do — visually examining the desktop and responding to changes, driving the keyboard and mouse and continuously taking response time measurements along the way, on a 24x7x365 basis, so you get alerted at the first sign of trouble, before your real user are impacted. Here are some additional tips for you
• DO #6. Build a comprehensive Monitoring Plan. Just like you documented your business processes and workflow for each set of business users, take the time to plan and document your SAP monitoring strategy, including key areas like: Monitoring scripts (so you can proactively measure complete end-to-end user interactions with SAP), Alerting Policies, Notification Groups, Reporting Distribution, Monitoring Locations, Service Level Agreements and so on
• DO #7. Focus on Essentials workflows first. Tackle the basics, including key financials, HR/payroll, supply chain processes and workflows, and add more monitoring scripts later. In addition, consider using a dedicated “SAP user” monitoring account to keep your SAP data secure.
• DO #8. Look for non-invasive agentless SAP monitoring that will not change your application code. That way you can ensure no impact on your SAP production system, and complete monitoring accuracy
• DO #9. Be aggressive in your SAP monitoring thresholds (availability and response time). Since proactive SAP monitoring helps you identify problematic trends early on, before your end-users are impacted, you should baseline and setup both warning and critical thresholds for all monitored SAP transactions. Consider as well monitoring SAP transactions across multiple locations so you can easily identify response time discrepancies across users and locations.
• DO #10. Don’t monitor SAP in isolation. Integrate SAP monitoring, alerting and performance dashboard views within your existing IT management tools and frameworks tools to increase IT efficiency and streamline your response procedures
Are you ready to avoid SAP problems and ensure success?
Check out CitraTest (SAP test automation) and CitraTest APM (proactive SAP response time monitoring from a user perspective).
Good luck with your SAP efforts!