SAP Implementation Unleashed: A Business and Technical Roadmap to Deploying SAP - Softcover

Anderson, George; Nilson, Charles; Rhodes, Tim; Kakade, Sachin; Jenzer, Andreas; King, Bryan; Davis, Jeff; Doshi, Parag; Mehta, Veeru; Hillary, Heather

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0672330040 ISBN 13: 9780672330049

Publisher: Sams Publishing, 2009

Synopsis

SAP Implementation Unleashed

A Business and Technical Roadmap to Deploying SAP

 

George W. Anderson

Charles D. Nilson

Tim Rhodes

 

SAP can help you capture better information and deliver it more quickly, allowing you to make better decisions and maximize the business value of everything you do. However, SAP implementations require massive effort, total buy-in, and significant change throughout the organization. In SAP Implementation Unleashed, 10 expert SAP project managers, functional consultants, and technologists guide you through the entire journey, helping you avoid pain and pitfalls and gain all the benefits of SAP.

 

The authors introduce start-to-finish business, technical, and project management roadmaps for successful SAP implementation. Then, drawing on their immense experience, they walk you through the entire process of planning and deployment—addressing make-or-break issues and hidden gaps that other guidebooks ignore. You’ll discover how to employ processes, models, and toolsets that help you achieve implementation excellence while systematically reducing cost and business risk. Along the way, you’ll find actionable advice and real-world insight into innovative project management, best-suited leadership, effective load testing, contemporary infrastructure implementation, and more.

 

George W. Anderson is responsible for providing enterprise applications thought leadership for the EDS/HP office of the CTO. A long-time SAP consultant and PMI-certified project manager, George has authored several best-selling books and enjoys new challenges.

 

Charles D. Nilson is a senior program manager for EDS/HP and has led many successful SAP implementation teams over the years. He is a PMI PMP and is SAP Partner Academy certified in MM and PP.

 

Tim Rhodes is a senior SAP technical consultant for EDS/HP and a Basis/infrastructure veteran focused on implementing, migrating, and upgrading SAP Business Suite and NetWeaver solutions. Tim is also an SAP-certified technical consultant, OCP, MCSE, and HP Master ASE.

 

Detailed Information on How To...

• Define the business vision driving your implementation, and use it to design your solution
• Use TCO techniques to fully understand SAP’s financial impact in your organization
• Structure your SAP project management office, business teams, technical support organization, and overall project team
• Size, plan, and test your SAP infrastructure to deliver the best performance and availability at the best cost
• Integrate SAP into an SOA environment
• Install and configure SAP Business Suite and NetWeaver components
• Perform basic functional configuration, testing, and change management activities
• Enable a smooth transition by successfully performing the critical tasks that immediately precede
• SAP Go-Live
• Choose the right mix of tools and applications to test, manage, and monitor SAP
• Prepare your SAP Operations team for its post-implementation responsibilities

 

Category: Databases

Covers: SAP

User Level: Beginner–Intermediate–Advanced

 

About this title

About the Author:

George Anderson provides enterprise applications thought leadership and strategic direction for project teams. An avid writer, technologist, and speaker, George is a certified SAP Technical Consultant, PMI PMP, and more, and holds one of several technical editor positions for the SAP Professional Journal.
 
Charles Nilson, Jr. is a Senior Program Manager and has held various SAP project, program, and consulting roles across his career, managing multicultural teams and supporting scores of successful SAP implementations across four continents. He is a PMI PMP and SAP Partner Academy certified in MM and PP.
 
Tim Rhodes is a certified Senior Technical Consultant and SAP infrastructure veteran focused on implementing, migrating, and upgrading SAP. He is also a coauthor of Teach Yourself SAP in 24 Hours, 3rd edition.
 
Andreas Jenzer is a Principal Consultant with 11 years of SAP experience spanning the entire SAP systems lifecycle. Andreas consults to executive-level technology leaders around the world.
 
Sachin Kakade is a Senior Solution Architect and Functional Consultant specializing in enterprise applications such as SAP. He has 17 years of experience in manufacturing, specializing in SCM, BI, and ERP solutions.
 
Jeff Davis is a long-time Enterprise IT Architect and SAP Consultant with experience on large SAP implementations across the US. While SAP consulting is his career, Jeff's real passions are knowing Christ more and enjoying time with his family.
 
Parag Doshi, Heather Hillary, Veeru Mehta, and Bryan King contributed significantly to SAP Implementation Unleashed, sharing their unique expertise and experience in areas as diverse as SOA, leadership, functional configuration, operational excellence, and more. Their real-world implementation lessons learned added a valuable "in the trenches" dimension to this book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

Introduction

Implementing SAP has always been about transformation, or letting go of old ways of doing things in favor of something newer and better. Transformation goes beyond the incremental changes an organization might adopt as it seeks to change. Instead, transformational change is synonymous with revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, change. It’s about turning the corner, getting over the hump, or making the leap to a better place. Is it painful? Nearly always. Is it worth it? With a number of exceptions, the answer is nearly always yes. Implementing SAP is one of the few broad transformations that can take not only a business unit but an entire company to the next level, to a place where better information is delivered more quickly, better decisions are made, and ultimately an increased return on information (an old SAP adage that continues to be validated by thousands of SAP’s customers) is realized. The trick is doing it right.

Doing It Right

The pain associated with an SAP implementation comes from several different places. End users will be changing both their tools and the way they work. Managers and other decision makers will be changing processes with which they’ve grown comfortable over the years. Better information will drive these new processes faster, too, bringing with them a different set of issues. And behind all of this, IT organizations will find themselves deploying and managing the most critical suite of companywide business applications they’ve ever seen. All this change is akin to growth; awkward crawling and hesitant walking at first, followed by a bit of stumbling and a certain amount of falling and getting back up again. Like learning to walk, implementing SAP comes with its share of bruises. Persistent organizations will get through this and see themselves grow more resilient, more self-aware, and ultimately less like the old organization. There’s almost no way around all of this; transformational change has great upside down the road but is painful nonetheless.

What if you had a guide, though? Someone who had already navigated these waters and walked these paths? Wouldn’t such a thing be worthwhile? Wouldn’t a book authored by 10 SAP project managers, functional consultants, and technologists with more than a century of combined experience go a long way toward giving you the peace of mind you need on this journey?

That’s where we come in. Our goal is to outline the business, technical, and project management roadmaps necessary to successfully plan for and complete an SAP implementation, and then fill in all the important gaps. We want you to be able to draw upon a deep pool of experience and lessons learned, comfortable in the knowledge that you not only are in good hands, but are also obviously not the first to attempt an SAP implementation. Through this book, you will crawl, walk, and run in record time. You’ll make fewer missteps and ultimately cross the finish line closer to budget and your timelines than you ever could have solo. There will still be the underlying discomfort of change, but in retrospect you’ll find that your journey has been a whole lot less painful than it might have been. And you’ll find that you not only did more with less, but did better (than your competitors!) with less, as explained next.

Doing It Better

One of the obvious facts about implementing SAP nowadays is that you’re not alone. Upward of 95% of Fortune 500 companies have introduced SAP into their enterprises, as have more than 47,000 other businesses. SAP is everywhere, helping companies change the way they do business, essentially changing their world. Additionally, the information technology underpinning SAP has transitioned from a supporting role (1980s) to something that provides competitive advantage (in the 1990s), to something that also extends where and how business is conducted (2000s). Today, our information technologies are taking us to yet another place, a place where IT and the business are so intertwined and interconnected that IT is the business, and the business is IT.

None of this is a big secret. Truth be told, in such a me-too world, the increased innovation you might have been sold on relative to adopting SAP might turn out to be less of a competitive advantage than you thought. More likely, bringing in SAP and other enterprise applications nowadays will only bring you up to par with the bulk of your competitors. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions in particular are less often the innovative game-changers of years past but rather, for many, have become the required investment necessary to merely re-level the playing field.

So, to be most effective, and to really raise the bar compared to your competitors who have already introduced SAP into their environments, you will need to do it better than them. You’ll need to innovate beyond the business innovation that comes with implementing SAP’s business scenarios and well-integrated applications. Through the very way you deploy SAP and prepare your teams to manage, use, and maintain SAP post go-live, you must find ways to innovate. You’ll need to innovate on all fronts, from the way you conduct business, to technical and technology matters, process matters, and even project management approaches and methodologies; it’s these innovations that together will fuel your ascent a rung or two higher than your competition.

Implementing SAP is a ton of work, to be sure. We’ll help you consider and explore potential innovations at every step along the way. We’ll teach you how to boldly sidestep incremental change in favor of strategic revolution—where it makes sense. We’ll tell you what your competitors have already done and explain how you can do the same thing better, faster, and cheaper. Beyond this, we’ll show you how to gain a competitive edge in the process—how to leapfrog your competitors in ways that really make a difference. They might talk of one day achieving operational excellence, but you’ll implement processes, models, and toolsets that set the stage for not only achieving it today but reducing ongoing costs and risks in the process. They will speak of creating a custom application that somehow differentiates their business from others, but you will transform your business by adopting best and common business practices to deploy an integrated and accessible set of systems that capitalizes on your unique intellectual property.

Furthering our efforts to help you leapfrog your competitors, we will give you actionable advice and real-world insight spanning everything from project management methodologies to leadership styles, the pending impact of “mega trends” such as green IT, service-oriented architectures (SOAs), virtualization strategies, automated systems management approaches, compelling computing platform refresh strategies, social networking leverage, and more.

How will you innovate? The answer depends on the role you play in your SAP implementation. No role is without opportunity for innovation. For example:

• IT architects will be called upon to design systems and solutions that meet business and IT agility needs at a reasonable total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Business process owners need to rethink how the company does business, leveraging best and common practices, templates, and approaches in the process.
• Developers and functional experts must deliver innovative solutions and approaches, creating an agile enterprise based on a balance of both new and time-tested tool sets.
• Organization designers need to work with management and delivery teams to design a purposeful post-go-live organization enabled through automation, creating lean, dynamic, and well-communicating organizations capable of rapidly achieving incremental operational excellence.
• Infrastructure teams need to deploy SAP’s business applications and underlying NetWeaver technologies in such a way as to pull costs out of IT, thus freeing budgets enough to become nearly self-funding.
• Desktop support teams need to quickly assess their current state of affairs and innovate through streamlined SAPGUI deployment along with incorporating Citrix-based or SAP’s WebGUI-based user interfaces.
• Existing IT shops may find it necessary to innovate in terms of the very platforms deployed for mission-critical enterprise applications, leveraging platform migrations and new technologies to transition to more strategic or cost-effective platforms.
• Job scheduling teams might find it necessary to innovate how batch processing is conducted, pulling in third-party scheduling tools that represent yet another way to innovate and create a more agile business solution.
• IT operations teams must draw upon tools they have and new SAP-aware systems management applications to create an automated just-in-time monitoring system capable of truly delivering on a single-pane-of-glass, management-by-exception vision, stabilizing headcount while simultaneously freeing up employee bandwidth in the process.
• Executive leadership and first-line management must actively and broadly encourage behaviors that build a work culture that’s effective, rewarding, and “contagious.”

To this last point, contagious cultures and organizations share a number of attributes. They’re seen as outstanding places to work, and therefore draw in talent from the company’s internal employee pool. Because of this, contagious cultures and organizations suffer little from retention problems. They’re naturally innovative, spawn new opportunities for growth, lead the larger organization in terms of adopting and successfully embedding new technologies and business solutions, and act as role models for the rest of the firm. We’ll show you what it takes to create and maintain such a contagious culture, beginning with your SAP project teams and culminating in your operational post-go-live staffing models and support organizations.

Our Audience and Approach

So, you’re ready to plunge into the world of SAP! Or, maybe you’re in too deep already, perhaps even past that critical point of go-live, and need to step back and review where you are and how you got there. Perhaps you’re soon going to be involved in a new SAP implementation, or are considering a support or management role at an existing SAP site. On the other hand, you might just be curious about what an SAP implementation is all about. In any case, you have come to the right place.

Our target audience is broad and includes those new to SAP (users, managers, executives, consultants, educators) as well as those looking to simply broaden their view of the SAP solution landscape. Our intention is to provide an end-to-end look at the SAP solutions and technology. After all, there’s so much going on with SAP’s products, naming conventions, and direction that it’s hard for seasoned insiders and other experts to keep up, much less those on the outside looking in.

We suspect that many readers will use this text as a baseline of sorts, comparing their own SAP plans and implementations to what we have provided, looking for new ideas, or alternatives for approaching the problems that are common to all system implementations. Given this commonality, we believe our readers fall into a number of general categories including:

• Decision makers, including a firm’s executives, key stakeholders, project managers, and others in key leadership positions who need to understand what SAP is, how it is deployed, what an implementation entails, and what a basic roadmap with milestones/critical path items looks like (all without getting bogged down in the technical details, if they want to avoid doing so).
• Business analysts, SAP configurators, and power users who are involved with converting legacy business transactions into cross-application enterprisewide business processes connecting a myriad of business communities to one another. These are important folks, as they will essentially make SAP useful to a company’s end-user communities.
• Information technology professionals, the people who need to plan for, design, test, and deploy the technical infrastructure upon which SAP will run. This is a huge community of potential readers both familiar and unfamiliar with SAP. They’ll love the detail in this book, and appreciate how we connect the IT side of a deployment back to the business needs for implementing SAP in the first place.

More specifically, if you fall into one of the following roles, you’ll benefit from this book:

• Executive leaders tasked with implementing, transforming, or maintaining SAP environments
• Stakeholders seeking to understanding the breadth and depth of an SAP implementation
• SAP project managers and various business and IT leaders tasked with discrete subprojects related to implementing, supporting, testing, tuning, or training
• Business and application consultants, business process owners, and others tasked with supporting or transforming business processes on behalf of an organization
• SAP technology consultants, including SAP Basis, NetWeaver, and other engineers and specialists asked to architect, size, configure, and implement SAP solutions
• Database administrators (DBAs) and storage area network (SAN) consultants with a need to maintain their piece of the SAP enterprise pie, or simply expand their knowledge
• Traditional data center operations and infrastructure management specialists asked to step up and assist in developing or maintaining an SAP IT shop
• Network administrators, systems administrators, data center power/utility technicians, and others with similar roles supporting the very groundwork upon which the SAP solution depends
• Others internal to (or seeking employment with) an organization, interested in learning the process a company should follow in selecting, designing, and deploying SAP
• Technical individuals who are new to (or want to be a part of) the world of SAP—individuals who may be supporting similar enterprise applications or mission-critical environments (mainframes/midframes and more) and who want to make a career move into learning and supporting SAP
• Nontechnical business managers/supervisors who are soon to be thrust into an SAP project or environment

A key strength of this book is that it contains enough material to satisfy beginners, intermediate readers, and long-time SAP experts without “dumbing down” the content. It’s a hard balance to strike but something your authors have kept in mind throughout the writing process. Another strength is the holistic approach we have taken relative to explaining implementation projects, particularly the three-lane roadmap (business/functional, technical, and project management) that should not only broaden the appeal of this book but make it more relevant to a wider audience. To make sense of everything SAP, the book has been crafted along the lines of a project plan—our central roadmap is therefore steeped in project management. Along the way, we have generously peppered in real-world observations and practical examples to give substance to the journey. As we mentioned earlier, ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Sams Publishing
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0672330040
• ISBN 13: 9780672330049
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 888