The integration was to take place for the supply chain operations of the firm which included functions like front-of-house order-to-cash, plan-to-manufacture, procure-to-pay, and finance-control. The need for the new integrated SAP system was to position the company with globally scalable processes and systems, enable an efficient, effective and nimble operating model and to address visibility gaps and collaboration issues.
Some of the Project Challenges faced here included:
- Master Data Challenges: Hundreds of new products every week. These needed to be added to the master database.
- Product Lifecycle: Customer specific products have less than 4 weeks lifecycle
- Volume of SKU’s (Stock-Keeping Units)
- Specific Field values: Hundreds of additional non-standard fields
- Number of orders: Thousands of orders are received daily
- Outsourced Manufacturing: Production and Distribution is handled by vendors
- Accounts receivables: Millions of claims have to be handled every year for thousands of customers
- System Integration: Move from many customized and highly specialized systems to an integrated system
- A very aggressive timeline: Blueprinting and Realization to be completed within a time period of 10 months.
The project followed the Global delivery model which had an onsite team working closely with the client and multiple offshore team locations consisting of ABAP Developers (Application programming), Functional Consultants ( Certified consultants on SAP Modules like Material Management, Sales and Distribution, Finance and Controlling, Production Planning, Human Resources, etc.) and BASIS consultants (Administrative access to the SAP system).
The core SAP financial system is guarded by authentication and access controls. The SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI) enables you to implement cross-system processes. It enables you to connect systems from different vendors (non-SAP and SAP) in different versions and implemented in different programming languages (Java, ABAP, and so on) to each other. The activities involved during the design and execution of this project are as under:
- Blueprinting: Hierarchy Workshops, Process Decomposition, Functional Validation ; Duration: 5 months
- Realization: Configuration, RICEF Mapping, Development, Unit Testing, Test Preparation; Duration : 5 months
- Final Preparation: Conversion cycles, Integration test, Training Preparation; Duration : 3 months
- Go-live and Support: After the user training, the system went live in the production system and support was offered by the offshore teams ; Duration: 1 month
References:
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/14/80243b4a66ae0ce10000000a11402f/frameset.htm Inputs incorporated from the material that was circulated by the client.
5 comments:
Interesting project! I'm curious to know a little more. How was it ensured that everything would talk to each other properly and in a live, production environment? Was there time involved in the "unit testing" phase for making sure that all of the development work really operated as intended?
Also, being that a large part of my work experience has been in training, who were your trainers? The developers or another group of people who understood the technology and who could effectively convey that information to others?
Thanks for the post!
Thank you for your interest Ronni. Your questions are addressed below:
SAP Implementation - Testing Process:
Yes, there was additional work involved during the unit testing phase. In fact, work was assigned to the ABAP development team in the form of objects, functional specification for which were prepared by the functional consultants. After each object was unit tested and ready to be delivered, an offshore peer review was put in place. Defects if any would be recorded for internal project records. Once these defects were fixed by the owner of the object, the entire functionality of the deliverable is unit tested again. If it works as per the specifications, the object is sent for a second round of review to the client facing execution team (onsite) team. Defects reported at this stage are recorded on a defect management portal like the Mercury Quality Center. Towards the end of the project cycle, all these deliverables / objects are integrated and dependencies are tested by the techno-functional team. This is an important stage and bugs reported at this stage require immediate attention. For this reason it is always the best practice to thoroughly unit test and tweak the individual entity.
Training – Role-based / Project-specific:
Training would take place in-house by the organization itself and it differs on the roles that one would play for the project.
ABAP Developer: Trained on how to make their code efficient, what are the project-specific quality standards that need to be maintained during the implementation, etc.
Trainer: In-house senior IT consultant
Functional Consultant: Trained on SAP configurations, customizing the business area, preparation of functional specification design, system testing, flow diagrams and DFD, preparing test scripts, etc.
Trainer: In-house Functional team lead
Basis Consultant: Trained on SAP software installation, database administration, etc.
Trainer: In-house Senior Basis Consultant
Apart from these role-specific trainings, additionally the team is required to understand the business goals and system requirement put forth by the client. A knowledge transfer session is held for this purpose as part of the project on-boarding session.
I hope this clears your doubts. In my future posts, I would take up the individual SAP implementation processes in more detail.
Really great experience. I wonder if all systems are integrated using a star scheme. That is, the SAP system sits in the center, and all other systems need to somehow work with the SAP system? I believe SAP should provide all means (APIs) for customers to do that. Is this the way how your system works?
Yes, SAP does provide a single interface to the customer to access information that is migrated from different applications. For example, information from legacy system is converted and migrated to the SAP systems and is available for further use in this integrated system. It’s a way in which multiple systems are bridged and a standardised reusable application is created where the business partners, suppliers, customers and employees obtain real-time business information quickly and accurately.
Here any one can understand this process,,.. really great.
Post a Comment