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Change Management
Change Management
- A guided tour of Java software development lifecycle management with SAP NetWeaver Development Infrastructure (NWDI):
Part 1 — Fundamental concepts
by Wolf Hengevoss, Product Management, SAP NetWeaver Development Infrastructure, SAP AG
Java developers have long enjoyed the freedom of developing and managing Java applications locally on their PCs, relying solely on centralized source code control systems for change management. In an enterprise environment, however, with developers in distributed locations sometimes working on the same code at the same time, this model quickly becomes a nightmare to manage. SAP NetWeaver Development Infrastructure (NWDI) offers a solution and brings many of the proven, world-class change management capabilities of ABAP to the Java world. This article, the first in a two-part series, teaches you the fundamental concepts you need to know to begin building, deploying, and managing changes to your Java applications with NWDI.
- A Three-Step Process for Averting Downtime When Modifying Your R/3 System
by Kurt Bishop
Whether your SAP system is still in its settling-in phase, or is one that has been firmly entrenched for years, ushering in new changes is a nontrivial challenge. Even small, seemingly innocuous changes, like rearranging a screen, introducing new headings on a report, or revising your backup practices can introduce downtime. Large or small, IT teams obviously need to avoid downtime and make sure that a change does not have an adverse effect on users, partners, or customers.
Kurt Bishop prescribes a three-step process for averting downtime: document the risk/reward and cost associated with each R/3 change request; categorize change requests according to their risk/reward profile; and safeguard, schedule, and implement the change in a manner that is consistent with its risk/reward profile. This article provides details on all three steps.
- An Insider's Guide to SAP Change and Transport System (CTS)
by Sue McFarland
Customizing activities and development are a way of life in every R/3 implementation. To support customizing and development changes and to ensure application consistency among different systems, changes are recorded to change requests and distributed through transporting. SAP supports change management with the tools that comprise the Change and Transport System: the Change and Transport Organizers, the Transport Management System, and the operating system transport tools tp and R3trans.
The purpose of this article is to discuss the critical concepts surrounding change management: how a change request is created, what happens during the release and export process, how change requests are imported. In examining these activities, you will gain a better understanding of how R/3 CTS tools are designed, how the tools should be used, and key SAP recommendations for all R/3 implementations.
- Are You Certain You've Got Consistent Customizing Settings Across Your SAP
Landscape?
by Dr. Matthias Melich, Technical Product Manager, Solution Life-Cycle Management,
SAP AG
Customizing consistency is important in a single-system R/3 landscape, and it's just as important in a multi-system mySAP.com landscape, where system interaction becomes even more complex. When customizing settings become inconsistent, processes stop working as they should, and that can cause all kinds of problems for your business. This article explains how customizing discrepancies can creep into even the best-managed SAP landscapes, and then introduces you to two tools - the Customizing Cross-System Viewer (CCSV) and the Customizing Scout - that help identify where customizing settings have gone astray so that you can reconcile inconsistencies.
- Better Management of Change Requests with Extended Transport Control
by Sue McFarland Metzger
Every implementation and development team instinctively knows that the transporting of change requests is vital to the success of an R/3 implementation. Recognizing that this process can become overwhelming, SAP introduced extended transport control with Release 4.5, so once you define client-specific transport routes, you don't have to worry about managing into which clients a change request must be imported, or whether older versions of client-independent changes will be overwritten.
This article will show you, step by step, how this can be accomplished as it covers how to activate extended transport control; define client-specific transport routes; import with extended transport control; and create and use "target groups" to facilitate the distribution of change requests to multiple clients.
- Business Configuration (BC) Sets in Global Rollout Projects - Lessons Learned
by Matthias Melich, Technical Product Manager, Solution Life-Cycle Management, SAP
AG
Starting with R/3 Release 4.6C, Business Configuration (BC) Set technology offers new functionality for customizing settings in global rollout projects. This article shares the experiences of two early adopters, so you can benefit from the lessons they learned. You will learn how to include this new functionality in your own global rollout project, how to deal with the technical issues that can cause the most headaches, and the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about BC Sets.
- Centralize and simplify SAP solution maintenance across your system landscape with the
Maintenance Optimizer — an
administrator’s guide
by Martin Rink and Stefan Raffel, SAP AG
Keeping your SAP solutions up-to-date across development, test, and production landscapes is a daunting task, and the growing number of applications, functionalities, and integrated technologies only adds to the challenge. SAP Solution Manager 4.0 introduces the Maintenance Optimizer, a tool that centralizes and simplifies solution maintenance across your entire landscape — it detects and downloads relevant support packages and patches, it guides you through the maintenance process, and, as of April 2007, it is required for maintaining SAP Business Suite 2005 and higher. This article gets you up and running quickly with the Maintenance Optimizer and shows you how to get the most out of it.
- Customizing in Release 4.6 — It Gets a Whole Lot Easier!
by Dr. Matthias Melich
By SAP's own admission, the current one-size-fits-all customizing transaction (SPRO) is not optimized for the unique requirements of either of the constituencies it is designed to serve — customizers and project managers. Navigation across customizing activities can be cumbersome, integration with external PC editors is less than optimal, and there is a weak linkage between customizing and the Change and Transport System. Project managers can't very well have their customizing be transported at specific milestones without the transport administration people knowing exactly which transport belongs to which project.
This article discusses the existing inefficiencies, suggests some workarounds for your current environment, and outlines what you can look forward to when you upgrade to Release 4.6, which offers a dramatically improved customizing environment.
- Document, Access, and Understand the Customizing Information You Need, When You
Need It, with BC Sets
by Marc Oliver Schaefer, Customizing Tools Development Group, SAP AG
Documenting customizing settings helps in understanding how a system is customized and why it was customized in a certain way, which can be invaluable information when problems arise during upgrades or system maintenance. This article introduces an efficient, new approach to such documentation - Business Configuration (BC) Sets. It shows you what BC Sets can reveal about customizing settings and how to use BC Sets to document those settings, and touches upon best practices for ensuring effective documentation and audit trails. And, using an example, you will learn a particular way of setting up BC Sets to meet stringent documentation requirements.
- Enhance Your Warehouse Processes with WM User Exits: Tackling Common
Customization Requirements
by Kim Obermair, President and CEO, Aware Interweave Inc.
SAP Warehouse Management (WM) provides highly flexible, highly automated solutions for tracking stocks in warehouses, managing and prioritizing warehouse activity, and processing goods movements. However, companies frequently have custom business process and technical integration requirements that cannot be realized through configuration alone. This article explores how to address unique requirements using standard user exits within the WM module. It explains how specific user exits can address unique business needs and includes sample code for a few practical examples that demonstrate the possibilities available for your own particular environment.
- Enhancements in Customizing: Business Configuration Sets, the Customizing Cross-System Viewer,
and the Activity Log
by Dr. Matthias Melich
Documenting customizing settings has traditionally been a difficult task. Release 4.5 introduces Business Configuration (BC) Sets, an enhanced Customizing Cross-System Viewer (CCSV), and the Activity Log (AL), which all work together to expedite things. BC Sets provide an easy and efficient way to document settings, right down to the field level.
Using the CCSV, which allows you to compare the settings in the first module of a phased implementation with those in the second module, you can identify configuration overlaps and avoid changing any settings that would negatively affect previously configured modules. With the CCSV, you can also compare settings in your Development and Production systems, and you can compare the settings of a BC Set that acts as a headquarters “template” with those at a subsidiary.
Inconsistencies between settings can be investigated using the AL, which gives you the means to track and identify what specific changes were made, when they were made, and by whom. This article explains the operation of these new features, and shows you how to use them to more effectively implement your system, and then better control your change management processes.
- Ensure Customizing Data Consistency and Smooth-Running Business Processes
Across Your SAP System Landscape with Customizing Synchronization
by Doreen Baseler, Technical Product Manager, SAP AG
If your organization is like most, you no longer rely solely on SAP R/3 to support your business activities. To remain competitive, you need adaptive business solutions that provide best-of-breed functionality, scalability, and integration, so most SAP customers are now tapping into mySAP Business Suite solutions, such as mySAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and mySAP Supply Chain Management (SCM) to better manage customer relations and coordinate supply chain networks. With system complexity increasing as a result, it’s essential that you maintain centralized control over your IT landscape, from the implementation of your solutions to their operation, especially when it comes to your SAP customizing settings, which need to be synchronized across all of your components. Otherwise, your business processes might falter, a risk you cannot afford in a highly collaborative business environment.
- Ensure effective system management by configuring the right infrastructure for
SAP Solution Manager using central system landscape maintenance
by Doreen Baseler, Technical Product Manager, SAP AG
Managing a globally distributed, heterogeneous system landscape is one of the biggest challenges project teams face. Fortunately, SAP Solution Manager provides a set of sophisticated tools that enable centralized administration of the systems throughout your landscape. For these tools to run smoothly, however, you need to properly configure the infrastructure upon which they rely. This article introduces you to how the infrastructure works and how it is configured using an SAP Solution Manager component called Solution Manager System Landscape (transaction SMSY), which houses the settings and system connections that enable SAP Solution Manager to access and manage satellite systems.
- Evaluating, Incorporating, Altering, and Testing Headquarters-Defined Customizing: Lessons for
Subsidiaries
by Dr. Matthias Melich, Technical Product Manager, Solution Life-Cycle Management, SAP AG
Once a company's headquarters has established an SAP system landscape based upon a common standardized core, and developed a global template that defines which customizing values are to be standardized across its systems, it rolls out the global template to its subsidiaries. So what happens next? This article answers that question — it shows you how subsidiaries can evaluate the customizing content of the BC Sets sent in the template from headquarters, apply it in the local system, and conduct testing. It also shows you how the subsidiaries can deviate from the template in situations where they cannot work with headquarters' definitions.
- Extending and Modifying SAP Standard with Business Add-Ins and the New Modification Assistant
by Karl Kessler
Up until now, Customer Exits and Modifications were the only development techniques available for extending and modifying standard SAP applications. Release 4 introduces two new techniques - Business Add-Ins and the Modification Assistant. Business Add-Ins are predefined exit points in a source that allow developers to either insert their own logic during implementation or simply adopt one of the standard supplemental solutions provided by SAP.Since Business Add-Ins can be defined according to filter values, you can control Add-In implementation and make it dependent on specific criteria, such as Country value.
The Modification Assistant works behind the scenes to register all the modifications you make to objects in the standard system in a separate layer in the ABAP Workbench. The Modification Assistant makes it easier than ever before to modify the standard. Moreover, modifications made using the Modification Assistant can generally be reimported during a release upgrade without manual intervention.
This article introduces you to these powerful new modification techniques, with descriptions of how they will impact your current R/3 environment and helpful hints for using them.
- Increase productivity with a proven methodology for change request management
by Anton Karnaukhov, Business Process Technologies Manager, Pacific Coast Companies, Inc.
Change request management isn’t the same as change management. It’s a means of keeping track of the various change requests that come in from around the company after a major system implementation. You need a way to track these requests, regardless of what they are. For large issues, you may want to open a new project, but for small ones you just need a way to track the fix. That’s why it’s important to have a reliable, scalable methodology to manage the change requests. This article gives you a guideline for such a change request management process, and it includes several KPIs
to ensure that the process remains transparent to both business and IT.
- Introducing SLO - A Service, Methodology, and Set of Prewritten Programs for
Changing 'Unchangeable' R/3 Data
by Ali Sarraf, Managing Director, ICM America LLC
Business leaders make all kinds of decisions that have an impact on IT systems - like merging two independent R/3 systems, which inevitably results in data overlaps and conflicts and thus the need for data changes. While SAP R/3 provides standard options for making some data changes, there are no standard options for others. This article shows you how to change such "unchangeable" data with the help of SAP's SLO (System Landscape Optimization) Services Group.
- Introducing the Enhancement Framework — a new way to enhance SAP programs without having to
modify them
by Thomas Weiss, Product Manager, NetWeaver Product Management Application Server
Michael Acker, Development Architect, NetWeaver Foundation ABAP Workbench, SAP AG
The Enhancement Framework as of SAP NetWeaver 7.0 is the new and state-of-the-art way for customers to adapt SAP development objects to their needs. Enhancements as objects in the customer namespace cause far less work during an upgrade than the classic modifications, which are overwritten in every upgrade and must be reapplied. This article elaborates the basic idea of the enhancement technology by comparing it to modifications, gives an overview of the whole framework, and explains how to best use it.
- Introducing the switch and enhancement framework — consolidating industry
solutions with the mySAP ERP core
by Karl Kessler
Industry solutions have long provided some of the most appealing features of SAP, but have also prevented some customers from fully benefiting from SAP technological innovations. Due to separate maintenance, industry solutions lagged a full release cycle behind the SAP core, and each industry solution required its own instance. With mySAP ERP 2005, all industry solutions are integrated into the core, so upgrades occur simultaneously, and through the new switch and enhancement framework, functions from multiple solutions are available in a single instance. This article introduces you to this new framework and demonstrates how it can be used to add industry solution functionality to a standard mySAP ERP 2005 screen.
- Need to Get Your Customizing and Testing Ready for a Global Rollout? Use BC Sets and the Test
Organizer to Smooth the Way!
by Dr. Matthias Melich, Product Manager, Advanced Implementation Solutions
Companies with numerous subsidiaries and installations often want to establish an SAP system landscape based upon a common standardized core, otherwise known as a global template, which embodies the R/3 settings and data that headquarters wants rolled out to the subsidiaries.
This article shows you how BC Set technology can be used to capture the customizing settings that determine your company's standard business processes, and how to use the Test Organizer, a powerful, built-in testing facility, to identify which processes to test and monitor their progress. Even if you are not undertaking a global rollout, you will find valuable information that can be applied in other customizing contexts, including reuse, preconfiguration, variants, documentation, and testing.
- Performing change management tasks during each phase of an SAP project to achieve the greatest ROI and ensure
successful implementations
by Gerhard Friedrich, Consultant, RWD Technologies
Change management isn’t just about communication and training — at
its core, it is the strategy and tactics involved in convincing end users that
an SAP implementation is an extension of their ability to do their jobs more
easily and effectively. This is the second of two articles on how to perform
successful change management. The first article defines the change management
concept and the seven change management precepts that can help ensure the success
of SAP implementation projects. This second article describes how to apply
change management tasks to the phases of a project that follows the AcceleratedSAP
(ASAP) implementation methodology.
- Real-Time, Outbound Interfaces to Non-R/3 Systems Made Simple with Change Pointers, Message
Control, and Workflow
by Amy Stapleton
Developers often struggle with custom ABAP/4 code or database logging to devise ways to track changes to data and then to trigger output of that changed data across outbound interfaces to non-R/3 systems. The onus of creating a way to track changes as they occur rests squarely on the shoulders of these developers, but it doesn't have to. There are easier, more automated ways to facilitate real or near real-time outbound interfaces: change pointers, message control, and workflow.
The benefits of tapping into these pre-existing SAP R/3 mechanisms can be significant. You can track changes to data and automatically trigger your outbound interface without writing any custom ABAP/4 code in Customer Exits and without turning on database logging. This article will show you that it's not difficult to do.
- SAP Solution Manager — 'Command Central' for Implementing Your mySAP Solutions
… and Much More!
by Matthias Melich, Technical Product Management, SAP AG
By now, most SAP customers are aware that SAP Solution Manager is the new standard environment for operating SAP solutions. What you probably don’t know is that it replaces ValueSAP/AcceleratedSAP as a tool for implementing solutions as well. This article shows you how Solution Manager can serve as “command central” in a multicomponent mySAP implementation project, as well as system consolidation, global rollout, customizing distribution, and BC Set integration projects, by enabling you to describe, define, and document your business processes, and by providing predefined descriptions of business scenarios and configuration guides, all in a single, centralized location.
- Test and Manage Your SAP Configuration the Smart Way: Start Using Your eCATT
Test Scripts and BC Sets Together!
by Jonathan Maidstoner, Product Manager and Matthias Melich, Director of Product
Management, SAP AG
Despite your most careful development and testing efforts, at one time or another you have probably encountered a problem in your production system, and then spent a significant amount of time and effort identifying the customizing settings related to the problem, and fixing and testing repairs to the problem. What you need is a reliable, transparent way to manage configuration changes and troubleshoot production issues on a large scale. Fortunately, you already have two tools available in your SAP system that can together provide the solution — the extended Computer Aided Test Tool (eCATT) and Business Configuration Sets (BC Sets). This article shows you how to set up an integrated eCATT/BC Sets landscape, and how to use it to improve your testing and troubleshooting processes.
- The Basics and Beyond: Manage Modifications Effectively with the SAP
Modification Assistant, Modification Browser, and Object Adjustment Tools
by Frank M. Neumann, Development Lab Boeblingen, IBM Germany and Anne Lanfermann,
Server Technology Product Management Design Tools, SAP AG
It is common practice to modify original SAP R/3 objects to tailor them to particular environments. However, once SAP upgrades or support packages are applied, standard SAP objects overwrite any modified objects, causing all kinds of conflicts that must be quickly identified and resolved. The introduction of the Modification Assistant and Modification Browser in Release 4.5B, and the enhancement of the object adjustment tools SPAU and SPDD, significantly simplified the tasks of creating, managing, and adjusting modifications to standard SAP software objects. This article explains the value of these multifunctional tools, which is not always obvious, and also answers the most common questions asked by users.
- What is change management and why is it important? An overview of change management and the seven precepts that can
help every SAP project
by Gerhard Friedrich, Consultant, RWD Technologies
Change management is the process of matching the expectations of those affected
by an implementation project to the results they are receiving — it helps
people decide whether a given project is good for them. This is the first of
two articles that help you successfully manage the change that comes with all
projects. This first article provides an overview of change management and the
seven precepts that you must address when considering a specific SAP project.
It provides advice to help you avoid the change management pitfalls that have
derailed many projects. The second article maps typical change management tasks
to the phases of an example SAP implementation project.
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