Insights

Paul Cooper

SAP Enterprise Support Part II: Run SAP - What's it all about?

In Part I I talked about the changes brought about by the SAP Enterprise Support contractual requirements and touched on the prerequisites SAP have put in place including the installation (and use) of Solution Manager Enterprise Support Edition. As discussed Enterprise Support puts in place contractual SLAs for the first time between SAP and their customers. This has led SAP to actively encourage their user and partner communities to look at what happens after an implementation and not just the post go live party! To this end they have introduced the Run SAP Methodology and End to End (E2E) Standards for Solution Operations, a robust set of principles and processes to manage the operation of the SAP landscape and application.

Many IT/IS departments managing SAP systems from both an infrastructure and application support perspective are under pressure from their business users to provide more and more monitoring and activities but with the added stress of ever reducing budgets for these non value adding reactive activities. The Run SAP methodology and E2E Standards recognise the desire of IT Departments to project themselves to the business as a valued partner and therefore provide a suite of operational solutions to enable managers to become more proactive and thereby reduce the cost of operating the SAP systems.

Run SAP versus ASAP - what's the difference?

The ASAP Methodology is the SAP roadmap of choice for the implementation, enhancement or upgrade of SAP solutions. While Run SAP is effectively ASAP but for Operations it provides an implementation roadmap, a set of standards to reduce operating costs, minimise risks in IT operations, and increases proactive monitoring. A Run SAP project can therefore be undertaken with an associated ASAP implementation or be independently implemented to improve the operational effectiveness and support of SAP systems that are already productive.

Key End to End Standards for Solution Operations

These standards have been written to either describe a best practice process for operations (e.g. incident management) and/or they are aligned to working with Solution Manager and the delivery of a way of working supported by functionality that enables efficient operation or proactive activities. SAP has also endeavoured to align these to the ITIL framework where practicable and the standards underpin the ITIL processes. They have been organised into the following groupings:-

• End User Support - E.g. Incident Management
• Change Management - E.g. Change Request Management - 'Charm'
• Application Management - E.g. Root Cause Analysis, Minimum Documentation
• Business Process Operations - E.g. Business Process and Interface Monitoring
• Custom Development Management
• Technical Operations - E.g. System Admin and Monitoring

Most mature SAP Support Organisations will have developed the processes and procedures to enable them to support their SAP Landscape & Operations (plus their IT estate) and unless they are going to migrate to the Incident Management capability of Solution Manager are unlikely to gain significant benefit from spending time in the End User Support area. The financial, risk management and operational benefits arise from areas such as getting greater control and visibility of the Change Management processes for transports (also known as Charm), problem management exploiting the Wily Introscope or looking at proactive system and business process monitoring.

Many organisations still have teams of people routinely spending their time trawling through the administration transactions of SAP at regular intervals looking for systems errors or failed jobs. By automating these types of tasks and looking at key business processes being monitored through Solution Manager (Enterprise Edition) there is scope to both improve the overall operation of the SAP system but also free up technical resource to work on value adding projects and tasks.

Run SAP and Solution Manager, now provides users with a whole suite of tools and standards to exploit in the support of the organisations day to day operation of SAP. Where in the past there was always a feeling I will wait for the next version or support pack to be released, there is now genuinely a reason to relook at the whole scope of your use of Sol Man system and exploit the tool kit for more than just downloading notes and patches!