Global Roadmap for SAP implementation

The predefined Global ASAP Roadmap with its four phases offers you the following implementation benefits: 

• Proven strategic decisions used as the basis for effectively implementing R/3 and its installation tools 
• The development of groupwide implementation standards 
• The rapid creation of a group reference system and a central productive system for setting up master records, for example. 
• Long-term and cost-effective support and maintenance concepts

Phase 1: Global Program Setup

In the first phase, the global implementation program is set up. The workpackages Program Management Preparation (see below) and Global Template Project Setup contain administrative and project planning steps. The workpackage Define Global Strategy is structured to facilitate the holding of senior management workshops and follow-up studies on global implementation strategies.

The basis of global SAP strategy decisions is formed by carrying out a strategy determination study. This analysis includes modeling the organizational structure, defining the functional scope and key business processes, reporting requirements and the corresponding documentation. After this, the following elements of a global R/3 strategy need to be worked out: 

• System Architecture Strategy-Describes the IT standards and requirements based on the global system topology of the corporate group. 
• Distribution Strategy-Describes the distribution of system functionality in a system topology defined for this purpose. 
• Global Design/Configuration Strategy-Specifies the type and number of reference template systems to be developed. 
• Change Management Strategy-Describes the type and scope of new implementations and the way change procedures are carried out for users and hardware. 
• Gap Resolution Policy-Describes the solutions needed to bridge identified gaps in the functionality. 
• Implementation Strategy-Describes the number, type and way that global templates are rolled out and local systems implemented. 
• Center of Excellence Strategy-Describes the organization required for training, maintenance and support functions. 
• Customer Implementation Release Strategy-Examines and describes the procedure for upgrading the R/3 System specific to country and industry solutions. 
• Global Program Structure and Resource Strategy-Specifies the sequence of the implementation program, its organization and the corresponding allocation of resources. 

The global R/3 strategy determination process is concluded with a Risk Analysis and a presentation to the enterprise's management, which then leads to the appropriate implementation strategy decisions being made.

Phase 2: Global Business Blueprint

The second phase of the Roadmap is characterized by the creation of the development systems and template contents. This includes the reviewing of the scope defined in the setup phase, the training of the template team, and the designing of the template itself.

The analysis of local and global requirements leads to a detailed model of the business processes necessary at the global level. The standardization of business processes and functions, as well as of best-practice cases is one of the main tasks of a global template. In this connection, the special requirements for business processes and functions running on distributed systems are an important consideration. 

Phase 3: Global Realization

The work packages in this phase deal primarily with the creation of the global template together with the local units. This phase also describes the way to deal with group-specific customer developments at the global level.

In order for the concept of a global template to be successful beyond the rollout phase, it is necessary to ensure smooth maintenance handling. The step of Global System Management is therefore particularly important, since it contains the description of the system architecture to be implemented and the management of the systems involved.

A further important step is the creation of a Customer Competence Center. This organization should be able to carry out first-level support and coordinate all future developments. Global ASAP provides guidelines for the establishment of a Customer Competence Center.

Phase 4: Global Maintenance and Support

Besides administrative activities, the phases after the rollout emphasize the support of the local units. Phase 4 contains information on how to tune the local system and optimize business processes. Experiences gained during the rollout should now be incorporated back into the global template and be made available for later installations of R/3. A suitable rollback procedure is also included.

Global ASAP contains procedures for dealing with ongoing systems operations and the template upgrade procedure relevant to the customer's implementation release strategy.

Rollout Roadmap

The Rollout Roadmap has as its goal the creation of a local productive reference system and, in the case of distributed systems, the provision of a link to a central productive system in order to, for example, set up and maintain R/3 master records.

The Rollout Roadmap speeds up the implementation process in the local units, so that – depending on the enterprise's requirements – entire implementation series can be carried out. Redundant project activities can thus be pinpointed and avoided. The advantages of this roadmap are:

The realization of groupwide implementation standards, through an efficient rollout in the local units 

A rollback procedure for the exchange of general experiences, which can then be incorporated into the template. In this way the changes are passed on to the local units quickly and comprehensively.

Phase 5: Go Live and Support

Now you are ready to go live with your productive system! Afterwards, the project team focuses on supporting the end users, for which training may not be completed. It is also necessary to establish procedures and measurements to review the benefits of your investment in R/3 on an ongoing basis. 

Key SAP Services to support you in this phase include 

• The Online Service System (OSS) 
• Remote Consulting 
• EarlyWatch® Services

These services encompass a series of remote analyses of specific R/3 System settings, with recommendations for improving system performance.

Post go-live activities during productive operation

The last phase of the implementation project is concerned with supporting and optimizing the operative R/3 System, both the technical infrastructure and load distribution as well as the business processes. Activities such as the following are carried out: 

Production support facilities are defined, for example, checking system performance on a daily basis 

Validation of business processes and their configuration Follow-up training for users Signoffs, etc. 

This phase can also include a series of follow-up projects for adding new application components or automating and improving business processes, such as with SAP Business Workflow. The project manager monitors the fulfillment of the enterprise goals and the return on investment.

During Phase 5, the first EarlyWatch® session should be held, where experts from SAP analyze the system’s technical infrastructure. The aim is to ensure that the system functions as smoothly as possible. The purpose of SAP's EarlyWatch® Service is to improve the performance of your live R/3 System by preventing system bottlenecks. The underlying concept of SAP EarlyWatch® Service is prevention: taking appropriate action before a problem situation develops.

Regular analysis of live R/3 Systems by teams of experts ensures that potential problems can be recognized and remedied at an early stage. This maintains system availability and performance at a high level. SAP EarlyWatch® measures the server, database, applications, configuration and system load. The results are recorded in a status report with recommendations for system tuning.

From early productive operation onwards, SAP EarlyWatch® provides regular performance and error analyses by evaluating statistical data on the various system components.

System and Release Upgrade

As part of R/3 system maintenance, new releases of the software, including new and enhanced application components and corrections, are shipped at regular intervals. You will normally need to verify or reconfigure some of the settings in order to use them.

AcceleratedSAP offers two kinds of roadmaps for moving the software forward to new releases or versions. One is the Continuous Change Roadmap, which provides ongoing support and assistance for the post go-live phase, and is described below. The second is the Upgrade Roadmap, which you can use to plan and carry out an upgrade to your R/3 System.

Special Release IMGs specific to your system configuration are available. You can read the online documentation for a new release directly from the IMG.

Generating a Release IMG-Upgrade and Release Changes

When you implement a new release, you can decide whether you want to keep working with the same functions within the selected components (Upgrade Customizing) or whether you want to implement the new functionality supplied for the existing release (Delta Customizing). 

For legal changes affecting some country versions, in particular for the HR component, you can now see which legal changes have taken effect in your country and carry out the corresponding Customizing activities to have your system include these changes.

One of the strengths of the R/3 System is its ability to grow with the enterprise. Imagine you have to set up a new organizational unit, or a new plant, for example. The IMG can help, using preconfigured or existing organizational units as a basis. All you need to do is adjust the configuration until it matches your exact requirements, verifying the mandatory activities – to get a new, fully functional organizational unit, ready for accounting, purchasing, sales or warehousing, for example.

ASAP for Upgrades

AcceleratedSAP provides an Upgrade Roadmap and upgrade manuals to facilitate release changes and upgrade projects. The Upgrade Roadmap enables you to take a systematic approach to release changes and complements the available technical documentation.

Although implementing new versions of R/3 is carried out in the form of a new project, the project team will profit from their experiences during initial implementation. Many documents already exist and only need to be verified or extended. 

Phases in an upgrade project

In order to systematically carry out an upgrade project, the ASAP Upgrade Roadmap will generate a project plan with only the activities required. All other activities have either already been carried out or they are not relevant. As with the Roadmap for the initial implementation, there are descriptions of the individual tasks, and wherever possible, additional accelerators in the form of checklists, templates or examples. The technical documentation of the upgrades is extended via ASAP to include release-specific project management.

Release 4.0 of AcceleratedSAP contains the Continuous Change Roadmap, with standard activities necessary after the initial implementation. In this way, SAP provides ongoing support and assistance for post go-live activities. The tasks in that structure provide solutions for all known types of continuous change: Business changes, technology changes or changes in the user community.

Phase 4: Final Preparation

The purpose of this phase is to complete the final preparation of the R/3 System for going live. This includes testing, user training, system management and cutover activities, to finalize your readiness to go live. This Final Preparation phase also serves to resolve all crucial open issues. On successful completion of this phase, you are ready to run your business in your productive R/3 System.

In Phase 4, your end users go through comprehensive training. The last step will be to migrate data to your new system. In particular a going-live check is carried out and an R/3 Help Desk set up.

 Main work packages of Phase 4

This phase builds on the work done in the previous two phases so that R/3 can be handed over to the individual departments for productive operation. This includes creating the user documentation and training the end users. The technical environment is installed for the productive system and the project managers make plans for going live, including the transfer of data from legacy systems and user support in the startup phase.

End-user training can be the area an organization spends the most time and money to complete, since proper training is critical if the project is to be successful. A high-level training plan should have been developed within the Project Preparation phase, but now more detail is added. The training program is set up according to the number of users, their location and their tasks. Once the site of the courses and the trainers have been chosen, the courses can be held.

To accelerate your training activities, you can purchase the R/3 Info Database (InfoDB), a blend of R/3, multimedia content, and tools. The R/3 InfoDB contains over 250 standard courses that we use in our SAP training facilities worldwide. These courses are available for multiple R/3 releases in up to 14 languages.

Computing Center Management System

As part of setting up the Computing Center Management System (CCMS), the system administrators are trained and the network administration, backup, archiving, and capacity monitoring systems are prepared and tested. Some of the tasks involved here are configuring the printing facilities, conducting system volume and stress tests and conducting a going-live check.

Furthermore, R/3 logon groups are now set up, enabling you to provide application servers with improved response time for particularly important work groups using time-sensitive transactions. 

Operation modes (resource configurations for each instance of the R/3 System) now need to be defined, with the times that the services are available. Alert monitors and backup schedules are set up. Productive system printing procedures and spool administration procedures are defined according to the Systems Operations Manual set up in the Blueprint Phase. Finally, the R/3 job scheduling system needs to be configured, as well as alert monitors and backup schedules defined.

Also in Phase 4, the system administration staff needs to be trained in a workshop session. Topics include troubleshooting, tape management, and user management, as well as escalation procedures.

R/3 technical implementation cycle

In Phase 4 you simulate the productive operation of your R/3 System, a step of great importance. The test plan contains all the most important situations that arise in the normal course of business: 

• Testing conversion procedures and programs 
• Testing interface programs 
• Conducting volume and stress testing 
• Conducting final user acceptance testing 
• Developing a final go-live strategy

The test situations are selected on the basis of importance and frequency of expected use. Printers and other output devices are also included in the tests, in order to, for example, check print volumes or print layouts in printed invoices or purchase orders. End users are included in the planning and execution of the tests.

Volume testing also involves checking the critical parameters for specific business procedures, for example, adhering to a two-second average processing time to create a sales order.

CATT Test System

The Computer Aided Test Tool (CATT) can be used to automate test sequences for key business processes. The results are logged in detail and then reviewed. CATT is also used for quality tests during release changeovers and for simulating complete business processes.

System administration testing involves testing the activities of a System Administrator, such as managing job scheduling, administering corrections and transports, reacting to R/3 System alerts and logs.

Phase 4 also provides for the testing of the disaster recovery plan and of the procedures defined for the productive environment. If a third-party provider has been engaged for these services, their services and responsiveness can also be tested. Disaster downtimes are verified and details on de-escalation procedures are documented.

Now that the technical configuration for the productive system is finalized, plans are drawn up for transferring legacy data. At this point, the system settings (Customizing) and R/3 Repository objects are transferred from the quality assurance system, and automatic and manual data transfers to the productive system are carried out and tested.

Going LiveTM Check

The GoingLiveTM Check involves an analysis of the major system components of the R/3 installation with regard to system consistency and reliability. For this, SAP experts log on your R/3 System via a remote connection, inspect the configuration of individual system components, and provide valuable recommendations for system optimization. By analyzing the individual system components before production startup, SAP can considerably improve the availability and performance of the customer's live system. In addition, the technical application analysis provides information on how to speed up the core processes within R/3.

In the second step of optimization the transactions with high resource consumption are searched for and necessary adjustments made. In the third step of verification, the changes from the two prior sessions are validated. This check is performed in the productive operation system.

After a system goes live, some fine tuning and eliminating of potential bottlenecks is still necessary. This is carried out four weeks after going live with the R/3 System.

Refining the Cutover

At the end of Phase 4, it is necessary to refine and validate the cutover plans generated in the Realization phase. Among other things, this includes tasks such as the reviewing of the runtime of test runs to estimate runtime for the complete data size. A conversion checklist for transporting all changes into the productive system is provided for all the configuration settings to be imported.

At this stage, it is important to verify that required tasks have been successfully completed, for example, that the technical environment is in place, the cutover programs are ready and the application data is verified. Approval is now sought from project management and company senior management to start the cutover process.

Here you can also refer to the Data Transfer Made Easy Guidebook created especially for this purpose. It is located in the Knowledge Corner of the ASAP CD.

The help desk is particularly important in the first weeks after going live, but you will require help desk support throughout the productive life of your R/3 System. An internal help desk should be staffed and supported mainly by employees of the enterprise. Setting up a help desk involves, among other things, installing office and technical equipment and defining OSS users. Problems which cannot be solved by this internal help desk are forwarded to SAP via the OSS system.

As soon as you know when you will go live with the R/3 System or with new R/3 applications you should inform SAP. Thus you can ensure that SAP can provide optimal support throughout your going-live phase. For the last weeks before and first weeks after the go-live date, SAP offers the R/3 GoingLive Customer Care Service, accessible via SAPNet and OSS.