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    May 2012 Previous month Next month

    Having spent the full week in ultra-authentic and super-humid Orlando, I wanted to wait a bit and reflect before sharing my perspective of SAPPHIRE NOW.

     

    This was my 8th SAPPHIRE NOW, and I must say, it was the most exciting and upbeat for a number of reasons.  The energy level, buzz and enthusiasm from our customers, partners, and yes, employees(!) was greater than ever.  Perhaps it was the humidity, not sure, but the enthusiasm was palpable.  I would highlight that the partners in particular seemed to be more engaged, striking deals, speaking with analysts, and the like than ever before.

     

    Regarding SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions, SAPPHIRE NOW Orlando 2012 represents a “tipping point” (to steal an oft-over used term). I started working with Rapid Deployment Solutions three years ago to the day (June 1) when it was merely a skunks-work, conceptual idea (internally dubbed “Productized Solution Packages”). Back then, we wanted to build “some packages” that allowed customers to go live quickly on many of the business applications, such as CRM, SRM, and various SCM-related functions. Launching with just five packages in October 2010, we have grown dramatically: 70+ packages today spanning both mature software and our latest innovations (e.g. Mobile, HANA); To date we have sold over 1,400 packages; to more than 1,000 customers; across all industries; to both large and midsize companies and have over 100 qualified partner offerings.  Why have we seen this market adoption? It is because the offering is simple (at least relatively simple…this is enterprise software, after all), it allows companies to start small and grow over time; and the value proposition is clear (fast, simple, extensible, low-risk), and we now seeing case studies and proof points to back up these claims. 

     

    That said, we are not anywhere close to where we need to be.  We see rapid-deployment solutions as a great channel for partners to help their customers, thereby extending SAP’s reach dramatically. And partners are just now ramping up these past 4-6 months.  And customer adoption, while encouraging and trending very positively, is only a fraction of where we believe this model should move.  Internally at SAP, we are committed to making rapid-deployment solutions work because we understand that customers do not gain value by buying software. Rather, they gain value by USING the software, and rapid-deployment solutions provides that vehicle to get organizations to actually deploy and run SAP software as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

     

    Please check out the rapid-deployment solutions material from the event by visiting SAPPHIRE NOW online. You can easily find all of the rapid-deployment solution related sessions by filtering on the rapid-deployment solution “Hot Topic”. And if you haven’t heard enough from me yet, check out my video on what excites me about rapid-deployment solutions.

     

    And as always, your feedback is more than welcome.

    SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando is over – and I’ve heard it was yet another stellar event. Sure, you might want to argue I have to say this, since it was my company’s event . However, when looking at the great rapid-deployment solution session recordings available online, I really get excited about this, even without having been there. So, whether you haven’t had the chance to attend this year’s event in person, or if you simply missed out on this session, I would like to encourage you to tune in and view the replay of the rapid-deployment solutions broadcast studio session “minimizing risk and maximizing value with rapid-deployment solutions”.

     

    What I really liked about the session was the style – not your typical 60 min event presentation, but a 20 min short, quite entertaining and easy to follow, casual interview style. This is very refreshing, especially since it’s sometimes tough to keep yourself from multitasking when listening to a replay.

     

    And then there was great insight from our customers Doreen Kendo, Managing Director of Operation Support for Westinghouse, as well as Mike Elmore, CIO of Ace Hardware. Both did a fantastic job explaining key benefits and challenges of their companies during the selection and implementation process of their rapid-deployment solutions – there is nothing more insightful than hearing success stories directly from our customers. And because at the end of the day, you really want to get good information and learning’s out of a session, I can tell you this is time well spent.

     

    What came out loud and clear during this session was to avoid the typical urge or demand for customization. Customize where absolutely necessary to keep your competitive edge, but since rapid-deployment solutions include best practices and defined business processes, it really comes down to managing expectations and process changes with the users. Mike Elmore really summarized it well when saying “I want a coffee cup for a dollar” and not all the bells and whistles that can be done but are mostly not even necessary.

     

    So pour yourself a nice cup of coffee (don’t be shy to make it a fancy one), and listen to this insightful replay to learn more how SAP Rapid Deployment solutions can help your company grow – one business process at a time!

    Let’s start with a scrumptious question, do you like Chocolates?


    If yes (I pity the less than 1% population who doesn’t ), let me sketch a portrait of how chocolates were sold and consumed some decades ago.


    Imagine it was 30 years ago and you were experiencing those pleasurably guilty feelings for chocolate, back when chocolates were only sold in large bars/sizes. Now consider that at this time, a single chocolate bar cost approx. $1 - and if you only had 25 cents in your pocket or didn’t have an appetite for the whole bar itself, the only options remaining were to either; 1) to pay the extra price, 2) decline to purchase the chocolate, or 3) feel pity about the whole situation.


    Come the early 1990’s we witnessed a revolutionary marketing strategy: the same ingredients, the same brand, the same chocolate  started coming out in smaller packages to satisfy the world’s bite-sized craving for chocolate. As a result, chocolate companies were able to increase profits and satisfy customer demands by offering the exact same product but in smaller portions and at a more affordable price.


    The same concept and strategy can be related to SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions (see SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions – The Basics) to address the specific business needs of the masses. These packaged solutions from SAP help our customers consume business management software easier, faster, and with more predictability.


    For addressing the need of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), SAP followed the ‘chocolate’ approach by offering smaller consumable packages of SAP CRM, which can easily be integrated into the SAP CRM portfolio:

                                                      CRM1.jpg

     


    These Rapid-deployment solution offerings for the CRM Line of Business (LOB) Customer enable customers to ‘devour the CRM giant’ one bite at a time.


    These solutions deliver best practices for powerful sales, service, and marketing processes  which when combined with the know-how of certified SAP CRM consultants, enables the implementation of a robust CRM solution in as little as 6-8 weeks; at a drastically low services-to-software cost ratio.


    Isn’t the scope pre-defined?  ( The limited dimensions of chocolate in packages )


    Yes, but only initially. Customers can start with the core processes of Sales, Service, and Marketing and then can grow, extend, and innovate to: go Mobile, setup a Service desk/Call center, or use high performance analytics by leveraging the in-memory power of SAP HANA.


    CRM_2.jpg

     

    Each of these solution offerings contributes to the total CRM objective - with a fixed price tag and the ability to seamlessly integrate with other SAP software investments.


    Lifting the Gourmet spirit, how about the anonymous box of Pralines?


    CRM3.jpg


    To learn more about SAP Rapid-deployment solutions for CRM, check out these videos:


     

     

     

     

    This is the second part of my blog about a better way to migrate data to SAP systems with rapid-deployment solutions. In this blog, I will provide a step-by-step deep dive into using the provided migration content in SAP Data Services.

     

    The following is a list of all software components for data migration included in the RDS package: 

    ·     SAP Data Services: Data management platform to support all migration tasks

    ·     SAP Information Steward: Data profiling and assessment as well as data lineage and reconciliation from target to source

    ·     SAP BusinessObjects BI platform: Includes SAP Crystal Dashboard Design (formerly known as Xcelsius Dashboards), SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, and SAP Crystal Reports

     

    The following is a list of content for data migration included in the RDS package:

    ·     Migration content (available here) loaded into Data Services for mapping (field mapping) and validation

    ·     SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence reports for monitoring the data migration

    ·     Migration Services tool to map source data field values to SAP business context (value mapping)

    ·     Migration content for reconciling what was loaded in the target to the source

     

    As mentioned in part one of this blog, the leading software for SAP Data Migration is Data Services. Data Services is a well-known and scalable data integration platform for ETL processes (Extract, Transfer, Load). Some of the key features of Data Services include:

    ·     A single interface to design data structures and build transformation rules

    ·     A visualization of source-to-target metadata to analyze data lineage and impact

    ·     Profile and analyze any source data 

    ·     Database extraction to easily extract legacy systems

    ·     Easy mapping (reusable)

    ·     Reusable and sharable transforms and functions (drag and drop) to minimize own programming

    ·     Web-based administration to manage job operations

    ·     Operational dashboards to monitor job execution and trends

     

    Data Services can connect to any source or target system via the adapter framework. While it does have native connectivity to SAP systems, it also has connections to files, ODBC, mainframe, XML, Excel, and many other connectivity options. Architecturally, Data Services resides in the orchestration and integration layer of your existing architecture.  

     

    From a business perspective, you can reuse Data Services after the data migration project for ongoing integration (e.g., master data integration with multiple systems). You can also use it for ongoing data quality, including an on-entry quality check within the SAP application. Additionally, it can help you drive data governance projects, especially as they relate to cleansing, quality, and the synthesis or removal of duplicate data.

     

     

    Step-by-Step Demo on Using the Migration Content in Data Services

     

    Now that you have a basic understanding of the solution, the software, and the content, the following is a step-by-step example of how to get started with SAP Data Migration. In this example we are going to migrate customer master data to an SAP CRM system. Normally companies do not embark on a data migration project alone, especially on their first data migration project to the SAP system. Use these steps below to get started with the software and the content:

     

    Step 1. Go to http://service.sap.com/bp-datamigration to check for an overview and to download the package. Optionally, you can review the overview presentation and watch demos. Also you can download the DVD content in the Software Download Center even if you do not own the software.

     

    Step 2. Once you complete the download, you can start to explore the content, accessing the getting-started guides and the documentation to get a complete picture about the content and the deliverables of the data migration package.

     

    Step 3. At this point, even without the software installed, there are still key guides and places to start planning for the migration. The migration content has Word documents and Excel templates for each of the objects in the SAP system (e.g., a document on business partner contact data, and another on quotations). You can read the document to understand the object and use the Excel spreadsheet to start the research on how the source data maps to the target.

     

    Step 4. When you do decide to install the software, you can get a temporary key from http://service.sap.com/licensekey. However, if you already have Data Services installed, you can use the guides to install the content manually. In addition, the RDS package contains a services component that helps you to deploy the entire package including the software and getting started with the first business objects within weeks.

     

    Step 5 (optional). If you are new to Data Services, you might want to start by going through the Data Services tutorial that is included in the documentation when you install the product.

     

    Step 6. Once everything is installed, you can see a project called AIO_BPFDM_IDOC that exists in Data Services. This project has jobs for each of the business objects, such as customer master data or material master data.

     

    Step 7. Drill into the the job and you can see the mapping and validation that takes place (Figure 1). The validation is against required lookup fields in the SAP system, validating mandatory fields as well as the format (e.g., if the phone numbers all include country codes and if the U.S. ZIP code is in 5+4 format).

     

    Blog1.png

    Figure 1 Mapping and validation in the Business Partner job

     

    The mapping within the job, as shown in Figure 2, has the source fields on the left and the target fields on the right. This example shows the mapping of the country from the source to the target, which is done using drag and drop.

     

    Blog2.png

    Figure 2 Mapping within the job

     

    Step 8. The migration content includes Word documents explaining each IDoc, as well as spreadsheets for mapping the legacy Business Partner data to the SAP IDoc structure. Use the pre-delivered Excel template to start the mapping research of the source to the target prior to the mapping in Data Services. 

     

    Step 9. The other component that is important during the migration is the Migration Services tool. This tool, which is delivered by SAP Best Practices, reads the IMG configuration data from the SAP system and enables mapping of source values to SAP configuration values. In this example, U.S.A., US, and Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika in the source system should map to US in the target system (Figure 3).

     

    Blog3.png

    Figure 3 Migration Services tool

     

    Using the steps above, you can smoothly and securely migrate your data into new systems. SAP Rapid-deployment solutions for Data Migration allows you to confidentially map, cleanse, transform, and load you data  - thus ensuring your data migration project is a success! The following solutions are currently available:

     

    Look out for our next blog on data migration rapid-deployment solutions - explaining how to visualize your data migration projects. Please read part 3.

    At SAPPHIRENOW Orlando, co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe laid out his concise vision of the future of the software industry, and how SAP’s strategy aligns to the themes of mobility, cloud, and in-memory computing  - a powerful combination that we are just scratching the surface of. In particular, many in the audience may have been surprised by Jim’s statement regarding the cloud: that in less than 5 years, “…everything is cloud… …private or public…” and that how the word “cloud” itself would cease to be a buzz word, since it will just be the way things get done. I couldn’t agree more, as this was one of my main areas of discussion on the radio show ‘In the Cloud with Game-Changers’, just prior to SAPPHIRENOW.

     

     

    So if cloud is the future, what do users need to do today to remain competitive and agile in this environment?

     

     

    Lars Dalgaard, who manages SAP’s newly formed Cloud business unit and remains CEO of SuccessFactors, an SAP company, mentioned during his main Sapphire session that a set of loosely coupled SaaS solutions will arrive from SAP, extending and complementing SAP’s core competencies for delivering strategic, core-industry solutions on-premise.

     

     

    This approach really hits the mark, since SAP SaaS solutions will be very easy to deploy and use with a level of integration that will improve their value and data consistency versus stand alone “SaaS Silos,” while not bogging them down in complexity. On the other hand, what about enterprise solutions today that must go well beyond the configuration available in SaaS? In this middle path, where companies require solutions that not only provide standard functionality quickly, but also support customization, complex industry functionality and high transactional volumes; is there not an opportunity to leverage the cloud here, too?

     

     

    Since their launch in late 2010, SAP Rapid Deployment solutions have transformed what was once a slow, and at times, expensive process to implement SAP software, into modular solutions that are fast and simple for the customer, yet addresses very specific business needs across all areas of SAP. In fact, looking at one of SAP’s big innovation areas, SAP HANA, approximately one-third of live customers have gotten there with a rapid-deployment solution!

     

     

    Now, SAP can deliver rapid-deployment solutions, leveraging the power of the cloud. Through Cloud-based Quick Start, customers can leverage a SAP private cloud to accelerate their rapid-deployment solution implementation, using their own data, in a secure, sandbox environment. This allows the customer to fine-tune standard processes delivered by the rapid-deployment solution, and then customize and extend the remaining ~20-30% of a solution that will bring added value and differentiation. Then once testing in the cloud is complete, the solution is migrated to the productive environment, either on-premise or in a partner/customer private cloud, thanks to cloud logistics through SAP Services or partner.

     

     

    Following Jim Hagemann Snabe’s line of thought, it could be possible that customers will have a mix of private and public cloud solutions, depending on the functional needs, leveraging a set of SAP core industry and rapid-deployment solutions through a private cloud, and more standard, peripheral SaaS through the SAP Cloud, all with a seamless look and flow, thanks to SAP’s continued investments in SAP Netweaver Cloud, and its open middleware strategy. This would truly be the best of both worlds!

    Banking industry information is exploding! Driven by the combination of low-cost in-memory technology, the explosion of social data, the need for immediate customer insights, and internal operating performance reports; Big Data has become one of the most important technology trends for banks. Analyzing huge amounts of data on the fly to get real-time and trustworthy reports will help make banks more successful.

     

    SAP HANA, based on the SAP in-memory computing technology platform, is the perfect starting point for organizations that need to analyze high volumes of transactional and historical data in real-time. It enables organizations to analyze business operations based on large volume and a variety of detailed data in real-time, as it happens. By running in parallel to SAP Business Suite Applications, SAP HANA allows users to query large volumes of data in real-time without having to wait for scheduled reports to run or traditional data warehouses to be populated with aggregated data.

     

    SAP HANA for banking means better customer service through fast analysis of customer data; real-time finance and risk management processes and any volume of transactional data is available for real-time decision support. SAP HANA helps banks in the areas such as risk management; transactional banking; sales, service and marketing; financial accounting and operational banking.

     

    To help banks to speed up the adoption of SAP HANA, SAP offers Rapid Deployment solutions for banking:

     

    “SAP Bank Analyzer rapid deployment solution for financial reporting with SAP HANA” offers a SAP Bank Analyzer customer real time subledger reporting for “Subleger Balance Sheet” and “Subleger Profit and Loss,” presented with preconfigured SAP Crystal Reports templates with embedded drill-down function. Real time subledger details data can be on the fly analyzed with predefined SAP BO Explorer.  This solution offers executives standard financial reporting information at finger tips to support for fast decision making. Furthermore it enables accountant in Fast Close with the capability to prepare reconsolidation data at any time.  All in all this solution supports a streamlined reporting process to save time in terms of manual intervention, error reconciliation, variance analysis, and data processing.

     

    ”SAP Deposits Management rapid deployment solution for transactional history analysis with SAP HANA” grants banks service employees and investment advisors fast and real-time access to multi-year payment transaction histories for a quick customer insight and a better customer service. An intuitive Dashboard is delivered as predefined template, deriving real time data from SAP Deposits Management application without interruption to the application performance.

     

    Both Rapid Deployment solutions offer banking customers the unique opportunity to quickly adopt SAP HANA technology with predefined Best Practices content, with fixed scope implementation service for a fixed price. And the good thing:  the implementation itself only takes 4 to 5 weeks.

     

    For those who are interested in rapid-deployment solutions for banking in general: There are three more rapid-deployment solutions for banking available (without the SAP HANA technology included) and there are even more to come. Availabe are:

    "SAP Loans Management for Banking rapid-deployment solution",

    "Rapid Data Migration to SAP Loans Management", and

    "SAP Deposits Management rapid-deployment solution".

     

    By the way – if you are interested in rapid-deployment solutions for HANA–attend SAPPHIRENOW on May 14-16 in Orlando. There will be sessions just for HANA! Check out the agenda builder

    Data migration is a major task and key for a successful SAP implementation. SAP Rapid Data Migration with SAP Data Services enables you to migrate your data, ensuring your data can be trusted by the users and is ready for business process execution within SAP systems as ERP, SAP Business All-in-One, CRM, and SAP industry solutions such as utilities and banking.

     

    Data migration projects are relevant for all companies that need to move data from one application to another but planning for a data migration project is a major task. Migration projects are risky. If not done correctly, they can cause a myriad of issues, including delayed production go-live, poor data quality that prevents core business processing, and poor user adoption of the new or upgraded SAP system. Cleansing, transforming, and loading data into a new SAP application can seem like a daunting task. For those of you interested in data migration solutions that are fast and easy to deploy or want state-of-the-art data migration best practices so that you can be a data migration maestro, check out SAP’s Rapid-deployment solutions for Rapid Data Migration. You’ll also find more details about resources in this blog: A better way to migrate.

     

     

    Understanding SAP Rapid Data Migration

     

    SAP Rapid Data Migrations has three major components:

    • Software driven by SAP Data Services (hereafter Data Services)
    • Migration content developed by SAP’s Rapid-deployment solution organization
    • Consulting services provided by SAP Services and partners

     

     

    The combination of the software, migration content, and optional consulting services provides a complete solution for migration to SAP applications.

     

    Data Services is a key element of SAP’s solutions for enterprise information management (EIM).  Data Services provides capabilities for data integration, data quality management, and text data processing. If you’re looking for more information about SAP’s EIM solutions, there is a new book EIM with SAP that explains the changing face of EIM at SAP: what the different products are, how they work together, and how to get started using them. For the purposes of data migration, the focus is on the data integration and data quality management capabilities. The piece for data integration is an extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tool for ETL aspects from one or many sources to one or many target systems. Together with the data quality piece it is best suited for migration between non-SAP applications to SAP.

     

    Leveraging the SAP BI platform, the data migration solution also enables BI reporting and contains dashboard analysis. The migration content includes some SAP Web Intelligence reports to get a better picture of the entire data migration process and its progress also for business users.

     

     

    SAP Data Migration software is used across the following steps:

    1. Profile and extract data from the source system 
    2. Map the data to the target data structures
    3. Validate the data against the target business context (i.e., the business rules of the target system, such as if there are specific fields required or if the country codes are correct)
    4. Load the data into the target SAP system
    5. Reconcile the data between the target SAP system and the source system
    6. Repeat the entire process iteratively until the data is ready for loading into the production target system

     

    Let’s take a look at the architecture of data migration in Figure 1. We’ve called out six specific areas, which we discuss in more detail.

     

     

    DataServicesArchitecture.jpg

    Figure 1 Architecture of data migration using SAP software and SAP Rapid Deployment solution components

     

     

    1.   Source and target systems: First look at the target environment and legacy data environment. These show the source and target applications. When using the Rapid Data Migration for SAP content, the environment is always an SAP application, typically including the rapid-deployment solution for Data Migration package. The legacy environment can be any non-SAP environment, from connectivity to databases, legacy applications, flat files, or XML. 

    2.   Extract and profile: The staging area is provided using Data Services. In this staging area, you extract and profile data from the source systems. The profiling of data is a critical step as it provides insight into the state of the existing source systems. Examples of important details you can check for are patterns across data. For example, in the U.S., ZIP codes are five digits plus an optional four-digit code. A data assessment can determine how many unique ZIP codes you have and how often the ZIP+4 extension is used across your source systems. Another example is to know the pattern of country designations. For example, for Germany the terms Germany, DE, or Deutschland could be used in the source system.

    3.   Cleanse, transform, and validate: This includes updating the data so that it meets specific patterns, transforming the data according to rules, and validating data against the SAP business context. This can involve combining two fields into one, splitting fields, updating the data within a field to match certain rules (for example, telephone number formats), and validating data against required fields and lookup values from the SAP business context and configuration. 

    4.   Extraction of SAP configuration: As part of an SAP implementation, SAP is configured with many values such as plants, material types and groups, and sales territories. Mapping of the source data normally requires mapping fields that comply with the SAP configuration. The extraction of SAP configuration data takes the settings in the SAP system so that the source data can conform to the required format in the target system.

    5.   Reconciliation: Reconciliation looks at what was actually loaded versus what was expected to be loaded.

    6.   Reporting and dashboards: Throughout the process, dashboards are available for people involved with the project to know the status of the migration. Additionally, the migration starts the process of data quality expectations and governance around data management.  

     

     

    The process outlined in Figure 1 enables companies to migrate data quickly and effectively – data migration is no longer a daunting task. The SAP Rapid-deployment solutions for data migration will empower you to cleanse, transform, and load data like never before. 

     

    Look out for our next blog on data migration rapid-deployment solutions - including a step-by-step deep dive on using the migration content in Data Services, please read part 2 for that. If you want to know how to visualize your Data Migration projects, check out part 3.

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