AS-IS Process Mapping

AS-IS process mapping is mapping the business processes of your organization as it really is. This is normally done at the preparation phase of the project.  Assistance of the experts from each functional department( E.g.- Manufacturing, Quality Management, Production Planning) is critically important for mapping AS-IS processes. Processes should be mapped as it really is and not in the way people think it should be. It is important to look at the processes at a higher level and map without going into deep detailed. Always note the interaction between different functional departments of the business. 

Make a common agreement on mapping before you start. Choose symbols for process,data flow, input, output, start/end , semi finished product, document etc. which can be used commonly in mapping in all departments. It is important to present the document in a common readable format to the SAP consultants. AS-IS maps will be the foundation document for the blueprint. It will ensure you have not missed anything in AS-IS business when you are forming the blueprint. SAP is not typical software engineering it is Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). SAP consultants are suggesting new business practices in the blue print stage.  By looking at AS-IS maps consultants can decide where you need customized programs and where you can use standard SAP.  

AS-IS documentation will be used to study the current processes of the business comprehensively and as a base to form the business blue print. However this does not intend SAP should be customized completely to suit your business. 

Starting the Journey

SAP implementation is a huge project. It takes a considerable amount of time depending on the size and scale of the implementation. Sometimes it takes more than 2 years to complete a SAP project. However 7-8 months time will be sufficient to fully implement SAP for a mid sized company.  There are five main phase of a SAP project. (This is the general and most common definition. This can be changed depending on the different situations of the  project and company.)

1. Project Preparation

2. Business Blueprint

3. Realization

4. Final Preparation

5. Go live and Support

Preparation phase is the initial planning of the project. You need to evaluate implementation partners and choose the right implementation partner, define the scope of the project roughly,evaluating vendors, buy SAP license, assign human and other resources etc.

Evaluating Vendors

See whether they have SAP experience in your industry. Because knowing the business is critically important than knowing SAP. You need to study their SOWs (Statement of Work) carefully to evaluate their bids specially for the SAP customization processes.Some vendors are mentioning maximum number of cutomized RICEF objects (Reports, Interfaces, Conversions, Enhancements, Forms) in their proposals. Standard SAP needs to be customized to suit your business. Customizing is costly. Also it is important to evaluate the project duration, training programs an support plans proposed by each vendor.

An internal SAP team should be appointed to get their support for the project. Team should have members  representing each different business process/department of the company. Better to choose the best person from each department for your team who can be used for change management processes.

Business Blueprint phase is the documentation of company's business processes and organizational structure in the way which we are going represent our business in SAP system. Functional specifications are generated in this stage generally. Realization is the developing the system  according to functional requirements. This is the configuration of requirements of the Blueprint. Then you can do testing and adjusting in  final preparation phase and go live with your new ERP system.

Taking the decision to SAP-Managing the change

Taking the decision to implement SAP in your company is not easy. It is a long term decision. Investing for SAP is always critical  because it is highly expensive.Appraising the investment should be carried out carefully. Its true going for SAP like ERP system is a big cost for you at the initial stage. But the payback of the investment will be higher and quick. SAP will definitely increase the efficiency of all the operations of the company.  

• Alignment of strategies with operations

        Aligning organizational objectives with the workforce will help to achieve corporate objectives. 

• Access to the business information immediately

        SAP will increase the accessibility to information which will assist the decision making anytime. It will provide new easy ways to access enterprise information.

• SAP supports dynamically changing industry requirements.

        Today's market is changing dynamically and businesses should flexible for changes for the sustainability in the long run.

• Gives higher Return On Investment (ROI) faster.

Most of the changes are intangible and difficult to measure qualitatively in short term. Having SAP is an added advantage to a company because it indicates the operational excellence of the company. This will provide more opportunities  to reach new customers and SAP will facilitate top management in decision making processes. 

There may be many obstacles. Most of the time people who works with the existing systems do not like to go for a new system suddenly. Some people are used to those legacy systems for a very long period of time then they might be thinking SAP is going to mess up all. Mainly this happens due to the unawareness of advanced enterprise applications. Therefore its duty of the company's management team to convey the message to all levels of employees who is going to use the system and educate them about the change which is going to happen. Change management approaches can be adopted to helping the employees to accept the change. 

Simply, a good implementation of an enterprise application will always increase the efficiency of business and make your job easy by integrating various business functionality  across the organization. Learning the 'thing' may be difficult but when you are used to do it is nothing. Still many people are thinking pen and paper is better than MS word  when they are opening Microsoft Word at the very first time.  

Different people are reacting differently for changes.Some people are resisting for any kind of changes at anytime by their nature. However changes must be done in a business at anytime necessarily for the continuous improvement of a business.  Change management is a basically a task of human resource management professionals. Giving real information to the people and making them aware of the change is the easiest way to manage the change.

Why SAP?

The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP. 

This is the famous slogan of SAP company.

Why people are choosing SAP and how it has become the market leader? There are some strong reasons for that. SAP was started in 1972 now it is having a history of more than 30 years. SAP was focused on enterprise applications from the beginning then it has become a symbol of ERP. When you see the letters SAP it is all about ERP but this is not the case with Oracle or Microsoft. SAP has adopted the best run business practices of the market and they have upgraded their system accordingly which is a main reason for the stability of SAP ERP system.

SAP has proposed deeply focused industry specific solutions for more than 30  industries for past 30 years of time. They are using more efficient business techniques than existing practices. Another main reason for SAP's leadership of ERP market is, its independence with the database system. SAP is working fine with SQL,Oracle, DB2 or any database system and SAP is platform independent then it can  be installed with any operating system.

SAP ERP system has a strong but flexible architecture when comparing to others. It is having a big high end customer base all over the world more than 40000 thousand installation all over the world. In addition to the basic ERP, SAP has proposed many business solutions to the market to increase their competitiveness and they are still keeping their market dominance.
Now you know why SAP is highly expensive like a luxurious super car that you are dreaming to buy. \

Hardware Sizing for SAP ERP

Hardware Sizing is done in a systematic way in SAP to decide the capacity and speed of the servers and networks. Sizing include different parameters like number of users, frequency of data entering,amount of memory consumption etc. Sizing hardware is important for budgeting hardware equipment prior to the kick off of the project. There are three methods of sizing.

• Hardware budget sizing (Smaller Companies)
• Advanced Sizing(Medium to large companies)
• Expert Sizing(Complex Projects)

Budget sizing is done using simple algorithms and assumptions. Throughput estimations and formulas are used for advanced sizing and some custom calculations are using for expert sizing.   

A count called SAPS (SAP Application Performance Standard) is used with a tool called 'Quick Sizer' to sizing the hardware of a SAP system. SAPS is a hardware independent measurement. SAPS has derived from the Sales and Distribution benchmark where 100 SAPS is defined as 2,000 fully business processed order line items per hour. Find more in the SAP official site.

Its important to discuss with the people who operates with data manually or digitally in the legacy system to get an accurate SAPS count.

After sizing hardware required for your SAP system you can choose your database system and server operating systems. SAP is platform independent then you can choose any operating system and any database system. 

SAP Journey

Implementing SAP ERP in an organization is not an easy process. However this depends on many parameters like size of the company, complexity of operations, number of users, requirements of the user,resistance from the employees etc. You should choose the right vendor by evaluating their proposals which is the most important task because he is having a very special role in the journey.

Its better to have a SAP team internally to work with the implementation team which will definitely help to reduce the gap between the implementation partner and the business. Exact requirements of the users of the system form different departments should be gathered accurately by getting help of them and each process should be studied thoroughly to identify areas which you need customization in standard SAP. This can be done by appointing a team including members from different departments (Production, Quality, Marketing etc) and SAP guys. Internal SAP team should act as the bridge between the implementation partner and the company. Its better to draw UML diagrams of the processes and study about the solution of the legacy system.

Most commonly customer is providing all the hardware and equipment to the consulting firm. This becomes critical in the context of SAP because SAP needs application servers, database servers and networks unlike other simple desktop applications.

SAP Furthermore

What is ABAP?

ABAP is the language used to enhance or customize standard SAP system. ABAP letters orginally stands for Allgemeiner Berichts-Aufbereitungs-Prozessor in German which is described as Advanced Business Application Programming in English. New version of ABAP has adopted the concept of object orientation. This language is mainly used by customers to create customized reports and screens in standard SAP system.

SAP ERP

SAP ERP is a collections of different modules crated for different business processes. Below is the complete list of SAP R/3 (SAP release 3) modules.

Financial Accounting (FI),

Sales & Distribution (SD),

Materials Management (MM),

Production Planning and Control (PP),

Controlling (CO),

Business Information Warehouse (BW),

Asset Management (AM),

Project Systems (PS),

Human Resources (HR),

Plant Maintenance (PM),

Quality Management (QM),

Warehouse Management (WM),

Supply Chain Management (SCM),

Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM),

ABAP(ABAP/4) Programming Language,

BASIS system (BC)

You may notice that SAP has defined modules for every main business process of an organization. ABAP and BASIS are also different modules. For each module SAP company have made an standard set of activities. For example PP (Production Planning) module is having screens/transactions for creating production order. For each module SAP has defined standard database tables. For example PP module is having STKO table for BOM (Bill Of Material) header and STPO table for BOM item. These tables are standard tables which are having many standard fields and you are not allowed to change them. Names of these tables have originated from the German language then many SAP users do not feel any meaning by the the name of the table they have used to memorize the names of database tables.

SAP ERP has a client-server architecture therefore it can easily overcome geographical limitations of enterprises. Users are connected to a common application server and database server. Communication between the client and server happens via the Internet.

What is SAP?

SAP is simply an off the shelf ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning) system which you can buy from the German company SAP.SAP was started by a group of five former IBM employees in 1972. SAP stands for Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte originally in German which means Systems, Applications and Products in English. SAP, which is holding nearly 30% market share has become the leader of the ERP market by defeating its strong competitors Oracle and MS Dynamics over last decades. SAP is a proprietary software system therefore you can't have SAP in your company or learn SAP, for free.

Main feature of SAP ERP is integrating many business functions of an organization through a common database. SAP has adopted best run business practices of the industry over its long history thus it has become a very strong and stable system. SAP has a wide range of industry specific solutions available. The list goes beyond 20. SAP Oil and SAP AFS (Apparel and Footwear Solutions) are two famous solutions. However if SAP does not have an industry specific solution for your industry (eg- Tyre) you can have your own solution by customizing the standard SAP system.

When you are going to implement SAP, first you should buy the (expensive) license from SAP to have SAP systems in your company then customizing can be done using your own SAP team or using another SAP consulting firm. However industry specific solutions will also have to be customized because it may not satisfy your requirements exactly as it is a tailor made system. ABAP,the language created by the company SAP can be used for enhancing standard SAP applications.