RUN SAP methodology

You need not only to successfully implement SAP solutions but also to manage the operation of the business processes after going live with the software.

The implementation of operations is a project that runs in parallel with the functional and technical implementation projects. In some cases, the implementation of operations is conducted by an organization different from the one conducting the functional implementation project; for example, the implementation of operations may be conducted by outsourcing companies or another department of your company.

In the implementation of operations, several parties may be involved: the company, system integrators, the support
organization, outsourcing partners, and hardware partners. For this reason, you need to coordinate all the activities to implement the operations as a project or several projects.

The road map for Run SAP guides you through defining the scope of the operations to be implemented, preparing a detailed plan, doing the setup, and running your SAP solution. Moreover, it helps you find the right strategy and tools to implement your end-to-end
solution operations.

The road map provides not only what needs to be implemented but also information about how it needs to be implemented, in the form of implementation methodology documents and best-practices documents.

The implementation methodology documents describe how support is implemented across the life cycle. The best-practices documents describe in more detail how to implement the end-to-end solution operations for different SAP solutions.
The best practices described are based on the experiences of thousands of companies.

The road map is available as part of Run SAP in SAP Solution Manager as well as in the SAP Service Marketplace extranet. Run SAP provides detailed assistance through every phase, as described in the following:
• Assessment and scoping
• Design of operations
• Setup of operations
• Handover into production
• Operations and optimization

The road map of RUN SAP methodology

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1. Assessment and Scoping

This phase is preparation for the implementation of the operations. The objective is to make an assessment of the business and technical requirements for operations in order to define what aspects of the operations need to be implemented, enhanced, or adjusted. In most cases, companies already have an existing support organization and operations, but they need to integrate new parts of the solution or a new solution into the existing operations. In some other cases, companies need to start from the beginning. Since SAP provides a set of standards and tools to run operations, your organization needs to identify the gaps in the solution operations to ensure high availability of business processes and systems. The output of this phase is the definition of the kind of support processes that will be implemented and the technical infrastructure required to do this.

1.1 Operational Requirements Analysis

The first steps in this phase are to understand the business requirements for operations and to guarantee the operability of the solution. Operability is the ability to maintain IT systems in a functioning and operating condition, guaranteeing system availability and required performance levels to support the execution of the enterprise’s business operations. For example, mission-critical solutions require 24x7 availability, which has implications for the way you need to monitor and maintain the application and the systems.

1.2 Scope Definition

Once the operational requirements are clear, you need to define what part of the operations you need to implement, enhance, or optimize in order to meet the business requirements. To define the scope, you can use the SAP standards for solution operations discussed above to identify the gap. You also need to identify the following: • The skills required to manage the solution • The way in which the support organization needs to be empowered • Tools and processes required • Functions to be implemented using SAP Solution Manager During the scope definition, you also need to identify which SAP components, support for business processes, and interfaces are being implemented and need to be considered for operations. Finally, you must decide what kinds of support you will implement as part of Run SAP.

1.3 Technical Requirements and Architecture

To implement operations, you need a technical infrastructure. This technical infrastructure includes tools to support the different support and operations processes, such as end-user support, monitoring, change management, and so on. In this phase, you need to determine how the technical infrastructure needs to be implemented (for example, global versus local infrastructure). SAP Solution Manager serves as the application management infrastructure for operations. On the basis of the defined scope, you need to determine the architecture, the structure, and the sizing required for SAP Solution Manager, considering which kinds of support will be implemented or enhanced.

1.4 Project Setup

Normally, the implementation of the operations occurs in parallel with an implementation, upgrade, or enhancement project. As a result of the scoping and assessment sessions, you define which parts of the operations need to be implemented and which projects need to be set up. During the project setup, you plan the projects and the next steps following the Run SAP methodology. You need to consider implementing end-to-end solution operations as an implementation project.

1.5 Governance Model for Operations

The governance model describes the mission of the IT operation. You describe the mission by defining the organization, the standards, and the processes (that is, the who, what, and how) on the basis of the fundamentals of the corporate strategy and policies (that is, the why). The first step to efficient operations of end-to-end solutions is to ensure the specialization of organizations. Dedicated stakeholders are responsible for different objectives. You can arrange the stakeholders into different organizations that can be grouped largely into two key organizational areas: business unit and IT. While the names of the organizations may differ from company to company, their function is roughly the same. They run their activities in accordance with the corporate strategy, the corporate policies (for example, corporate governance, compliance, and security), and the goals of their organizations.

1.6 Solution Transition to Enterprise Service-oriented Architecture

A clear IT strategy is a key success factor for effective operation of business processes and systems. For the support organization, it is important to understand the IT strategy to determine the impact on the operations and how the operations need to be adjusted or enhanced to be able to support the strategy. The solution transition to enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) includes topics such as readiness for enterprise SOA, upgrade strategy and planning, capacity management, and so on. Supporting and operating enterprise SOA means higher responsibilities. This is especially true for the IT departments that must ensure that the underlying technology guarantees the reliability, availability, data consistency, and agreed performance of services that are part of the business processes. The goal of the solution transition to enterprise SOA is to support your IT organization on its way to enterprise SOA and in running an existing enterprise SOA. This includes not only the technical but also the organizational readiness.

2. Design of Operations

The purpose of this phase is to design the operations on the basis of the results of the assessment and scoping phase. Basically, you need to create a business blueprint of your operations processes or define what you need to do to enhance or modify existing procedures. In this phase, you define the operations. This includes the following information: •How the processes are going to work •Which tools are required to implement the support for the processes • How to train your support organization • Which services are required from SAP

2.1 End-User Support Concept

The support for end users after the golive stage is a critical success factor for the acceptance of the solution as well as for the normal flow of the business processes. One of the most critical operations processes is incident management. Incidents in operations of mission-critical applications can cause severe business loss if they are not properly managed, their root cause identified, and corrective action taken. The incident management standard defines the process and tools required to manage the collaboration between the involved parties to resolve incidents in time. Normally, companies already have an existing incident management process and the corresponding tools. However, when a new solution goes live, you need to ensure that the existing procedures can handle the new solution and can meet the service-level agreement with the users of the solution. The support desk functionality in SAP Solution Manager enables your organization to implement incident management. Change Management Concept Change management enables the planning and management of changes, minimizing the risk through the use of standard processes for each of the changes. A proven change management concept is a key success factor for ensuring the stability of business processes and systems. Change management includes:

• 2.1.1 Change request management

The goal of the change request management standard is to efficiently and punctually implement changes to SAP applications with minimal risks, using standardized methods and procedures to ensure the stability of the systems and processes.

•2.1.2 Change control management

Change control management is the process to enable the deployment and the analysis of changes that need to be addressed in order to ensure that changes are executed without disruption of the ongoing business. The standard covers two major areas of change control: change deployment and change diagnostics.

•2.1.3 Test management

The goal of testing is to ensure the normal flow of the processes. The test anagement standard includes not only functional testing but also integration and volume testing. SAP Solution Manager provides tools to support change management.

2.2 Application Management Concept

The goal of this concept is to provide the assistance required to analyze and solve incidents and problems. Application management includes several tasks, from solution landscape planning, to implementation, to handling and execution of changes coming from business units, to documentation of standards, to assurance of remote supportability. The key interface between business and IT is the application management organization. The application management concept defines how the support organization will handle the following topics:

•2.2.1 Minimum documentation

This includes the documentation of the system landscape, business processes, and interfaces. This is a key success factor for problem resolution since this information needs to be accurate to speed the problem resolution process and ensure change management and know-how transfer to the organization.

•2.2.2 Root cause analysis

Clear procedures and relevant tools are key success factors for enabling you to analyze the cause of problems. SAP Solution Manager provides the required tools to conduct root cause analysis for code from both the ABAP™ programming language and Java.

•2.2.3 Remote supportability

To be able to receive fast, safe, and remote support to analyze problems, companies need to have SAP Solution Manager to connect to the SAP network and get remote support.

2.3 Business Process Operations

Concept To ensure availability of business processes, you need a comprehensive concept to manage business processes end-to-end. The business process operations concept includes the topics covered in the following sections.

2.3.1 Business Process and Interface Monitoring and Exception Handling

To increase availability of business processes, you need to define a concept to monitor the core business processes and define error-handling procedures to be able to react to critical situations. In the design of operations phase, you need to identify the critical business processes and exception situations and the ways to handle those exceptions. This includes identifying the corresponding tools for the processes. For example, SAP Solution Manager offers the functionality to monitor your business processes. The standard of business process and interface monitoring and that of exception handling describe a model for the management of mission-critical business processes. Business process and interface monitoring describes best practices for monitoring and supervision of the mission-critical business processes, including critical interfaces. Exception handling explains how to define processes and procedures to manage exceptions and error situations during daily business operations. Possible results are smoother business execution and an optimized total cost of operations.

2.3.2 Data Volume Management

Because of the tendency to run highly interconnected systems (internal and external) and the business needs to have data instantly accessible, data volumes are growing and growing. This has an impact not only on performance but also on your overall operations. Therefore, you need to define a concept of how to manage data growth by avoiding data creation, archiving data, and deleting data. The data volume management standard helps increase the availability of your solution because administration tasks such as software upgrades, database reorganization, data backups, or data recovery can be done in less time. In addition, you can reduce the time needed for managing disk space and benefit from more efficient use of resources such as hard drives, memory, and CPU.

2.3.3 Job Scheduling Management

Job scheduling management determines in what sequence you have to execute different activities (online and background), while considering existing limitations and avoiding bottlenecks, to meet given processing deadlines. There are two main reasons for scheduling restrictions: time and hardware resources (CPU, main memory, network capacity, and so on). Additional restrictions may exist as a result of dependencies between different activities within the same system or even across system borders. Job scheduling management includes the definition of roles and responsibilities as well as procedures for planning, controlling or scheduling, and monitoring of all system-related and business process–related operational activities for a system landscape. All these activities should be performed centrally and are defined as follows:

Ø • Planning is the process of collecting information on which background jobs have to be run and then deciding which job should be run at what time.

Ø • During scheduling, you enter the job data into the system landscape.

Ø • Monitoring ensures that the background jobs are running correctly – for example, at the dedicated time – and do not cancel or produce errors.

Job scheduling addresses issues of time constraints and resource limitations. In a productive solution landscape, you need to execute online and background activities as well as maintenance and administration tasks. Job scheduling leads to reduced costs, less people resources, better resource usage, and better timing through automation. With load balancing, the resource usage can be optimized.

2.3.4 Transactional Consistency and Data Integrity Management

Data inconsistencies can lead to immense costs. In addition, business processes that are supported by inconsistent data can lead to downtime of your solution until the root cause is identified and data is corrected. By preventing and detecting data inconsistencies as early as possible and utilizing defined error-handling procedures, your daily business operations can be protected. In the design of operations phase, you need to identify the areas for potential inconsistencies, define monitoring procedures, and eventually create corrective tools to solve inconsistencies. This requires profound knowledge of the application as well as the involved interfaces.

2.4 Custom Development Management Concept

Custom code comprises the components that have been developed to complement the standard application portfolio in order to achieve a particular functionality not delivered within the application standard. Custom code can be an application developed on top of SAP software or an application developed next to the software and interfacing with the rest of the application landscape. It is not enough to develop the custom code; you need to have a concept of how to maintain new code, how to deploy the code, how to monitor the processes, and how to manage exception situations. These concepts need to be part of the code design in the design of operations phase, with the standards defined in this phase and then implemented and optimized during the operations and optimization phase.

2.5 Technical Operations Concept

To run your SAP software, you need to define a concept for technical operations that includes system administration and system monitoring. Your concept depends on the SAP components being implemented. In the design of operations phase, you need to define the underlying technology to monitor your landscape and SAP software and learn how to operate the solution. SAP Solution Manager serves as a central application management solution. With SAP Solution Manager, you can combine technical information – such as key performance indicators and performance information – with business process–related information. It supports the whole solution life cycle, from the implementation to the operation of SAP and non-SAP software.

2.6 IT Infrastructure Management Concept

Run SAP focuses on managing the business processes and the SAP software components. In addition, your company needs to manage the underlying infrastructure to run SAP applications. This includes the following areas:

Ø • Access management

Ø • Mainframe management

Ø • Server management and support

Ø • Network management

Ø • Storage and archiving

Ø • Directory services management

Ø • IT operations • Desktop support

Ø • Middleware management

Ø • Internet and Web management

To manage this infrastructure, SAP partners support the best practices and standards needed. Most support organizations use the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) methodology to do this.

3. Setup of Operations

The purpose of this phase is to implement end-to-end solution operations on the basis of the plan made during the previous phase. To help you do so, the road map for Run SAP provides more detailed information, including accelerators and best-practices documents for ways to do the implementation. The setup of operations follows the same structure as that in the design of operations phase:

Ø • End-user support implementation • Change management implementation

Ø • Application management implementation

Ø • Business process operations implementation

Ø • Custom development management implementation

Ø • Technical operations implementation

Ø • IT infrastructure management implementation

In this phase, you can use the implementation methodology documents as well as the best-practices documents, which describe how to do the setup. As a result of this phase, you will have an implemented and tested operations concept and will be ready to start operations.

4. Handover into Production

This phase describes the activities required to start the operations of the SAP solution. The objective is to ensure that the support organization can manage the SAP solution and that all the processes and tools required are in place and have been tested. This is a “phase gate” to ensure that the operations of the solution have been implemented and tested. In this phase, you also check if and prove that the requirements to run the application are met. These include service-level agreements, performance of the business processes and software, integration, and so on. This phase includes the following topics in general:

Ø • Knowledge transfer training and certification – end-to-end solution operations trainings and certifications

Ø • Final testing and sign-off

Ø • Transition into production

Ø • Handover

5. Operations and Optimization

The primary goal of this phase is to ensure the normal operations of the business processes and the solution landscape in order to meet the business requirements. To do this, you need to establish procedures in advance to monitor the solution (business processes and systems) and put in place a support organization with the right skills and knowledge. The secondary goal of this phase is to optimize and improve the solution and its operation in order to reduce TCO or avoid additional cost. In general, this phase consists of reactive and proactive activities. These activities include the daily operations of the solution after implementing the solution.

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