Solution Manager 7.1 - Installation from scratch or upgrade - Take a look at the real cost

[Former Member]

When, last year, we took on writing the first white book written on Solution Manager 7.1 in French (along and with the
support of the French Association of SAP users - USF), we had to provide some real data around the actual use of

Solution Manager in Europe. We interviewed 120+ major European SAP customers.

At that time, most of them had a plan for the migration or upgrade of the 7.1 release, and most of them were following

SAP official recommendations:

You should  definitely upgrade if	You may want to consider a new installation if
you are currently using SAP Solution Manager  systems are connected and data transmitted (e.g. SAP EarlyWatch Alert) business processes are documented inside SAP Solution Manager any data exists which you want to preserve	your SAP Solution Manager system is outdated and not really being used none of the information contained needs to be preserved It’s a sandbox installation used for evaluation purposes Main purpose is to generate keys and download Support Packages

In 2012, installation was preferred to upgrade scenario for 60% of those customers, not only because they had a

limited use of Solution Manager, but also because at that time, people would believe that installing New Solution

Manager would be easier than upgrading an existing one…and would avoid a drastic clean up of the existing system !

For the remaining 40%, the natural choice (upgrade) was guided by the need to leverage their investment and maintain

Service Desk and ChaRM history, Solution Documentation, Business Process Monitoring.

Today is November, 22^nd, 2013 and one could say “why are we still talking about it! “. However, given the fairly high

attendance to our conference session delivered during Las Vegas Teched with our Partner oXya, (“Install from scratch

or upgrade”) we thought it would still be useful to present you some facts and figures about the real cost of each
scenario.

Standard installation/upgrade scenario

Below are the average estimated effort observed for standard installation / upgrade scenario (MD = Man Day).

Average effort for standard installation/upgrade scenario

Basically, upgrade is in average 50% cheaper than a fresh install !

Keeping in mind that we have not yet taken into account the additional costs of data recovery, one could ask:

“why would a company choose register again and configure each and every system of the landscape, as
well as the Agents?

In other words….why even bother with this scenario?

Data recovery/transfer scenario

 

Let us take the case of one customer who decided to install from scratch their SAP Solution Manager systems,

with a landscape of 30 connected systems, 2 Solution Manager, and 3 projects including 500+ assigned

documents. In this case, only Early Watch Alert was actually used for Operations.

The total upgrade cost had been estimated to 10 to 15 MD, so between 40% and 66% cheaper!
Moreover, 1 month after the upgrade, they realized that EWA data would have been accelerators for

using Sodoca with the help of RPBD (statistical data…). Now, would it be possible, at that time, to

anticipate those “hidden” costs?

The response to the question “Why would NOT a company choose the upgrade scenario? “
is very simple : "ONLY IF they are not using Solution Manager AT ALL!"

Still, the upgrade scenario looks sometimes like a long and somehow uncompleted journey, especially

when it comes to the tricky part: the adaptation of Service Desk/ChaRM scenarios from the “old” to the

“new” interface, as 7.0 tickets Sap Solution Manager cannot be managed through this web interface.

• As of SAP Solution Manager 7.1 version, tickets are displayed and managed through a user

       friendly web interface, called “CRM UI”

• 7.0 Sap Solution Manager tickets cannot be managed through this web interface.

Consequently, two interfaces have to be used by end users :

This usually means at the end of the project a transition phase (weeks or months) where the users have to switch

between the two interfaces.

For those circumstances, one could implement some data migration toolkit (*), providing such features as:

• Migration of 7.0 tickets into 7.1tickets
• Creation of 7.1 tickets from external sources
• Capability to create ticket chains (document flow)
• Capability to retrieve migrated tickets history (log) and attachments
• Capability to reassign transport requests to ChaRM cycles
• Capability to address customer-specific fields and controls
• Analysis with test mode

Conclusion

• Consider the upgrade as a default scenario. Otherwise pay attention to side effects and impacts.
• Use Upgrade Planner to best prepare your installation or upgrade.
• Use Quicksizer for Solution Manager to safeguard the sizing of your infrastructure.
• Use “Content Transfer” Best Practices to quickly identify how your data can be transferred.
• If you are running CRM based scenario like Service Desk or ChaRM, consider a data migration toolkit
  usage.

(*) follow me for my next blog: “Ticket migration toolkits for 7.0 – 7.1 upgrade”