What is the average duration of 1 full SAP life cycle or 1 end-to-end implementation. How long does it take to prepare DEV, QAS and PRD?

[Former Member]

What is the average duration of 1 full SAP life cycle or 1 end-to-end implementation. How long does it take to prepare DEV, QAS and PRD in any company?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

At a minimum, you can implement SAP within 6 months with most of the key modules - MM, PP, SD, FI, CO. What makes it complicated and time-consuming is the fact that you have to consider localization work covering local, legal and statutory requirements which are almost always mandatory. The duration also depends on your user base and the amount of time it takes for you to train all of them and the size of your project team.

In one of my recent project, we covered 8 legal entities in both 2 languages with all the basic ECC functionalities like MM, PP, SD, FI, CO plus Fixed Assets, Quality Management and Plant Maintenance along with SRM in 12 months with 100+ users. Right now, I am working on another implementation that covers both ECC and SRM with all of the modules mentioned above for 10 months with less team members and with infrastructure being built alongside.

So you can expedite a project depending on your scope and budget. If you have a fixed scope but you want to finish the work faster, allot budget to add more resource to do the work. If you have a fixed budget and time, you can either cut or control your scope. There are different ways on playing with your triple constraints to manage the duration of an implementation project. You just need to be creative and resourceful. At the end of the day, experience will always be your best basis for estimation.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Dear Ryan,

Your explanation was very informative.

Regards

Anand

[janmusil]

Anand,

let me start with saying that the question you ask may not help you to determine the duration of your project. As Ryan and others stated the duration of the project is highly dependent on the scope of the solution you are implementing, geographical scope, amount of modifications/enhancements, number of languages, number of users that need to be trained, amount of standard processes customer is able to re-use in the implementation and many other factors (like quality of implementation contractor you will chose and availability of customer and implementors resources). I can probably go on for another couple lines, but I guess you get the idea.

With that out of the way let's talk about some example implementations that will give you an idea - Ryan did great job outlining what I would call traditional approach above. I have couple examples where customers leveraged innovative deployment strategies that are available today. In particular the project teams leveraged pre-packaged services like RDS, World Template or Best Practices as their baseline solution and they built from there. Second acceleration technique customers now leverage is the deployment in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud to accelerate the time to initial setup of the system and thus move from traditional blueprinting to scope validation exercise that further shortens the time. There are other acceleration techniques we see applied in some cases like use of iterative implementation of the delta requirements on top of the baseline solution.

Let me offer few examples to illustrate what I explained above:

• ERP implementation at Schaidt Innovations with 3 months long deployment of ERP solution using ERP RDS as a baseline (you can view their testimonial here - Schaidt Innovations: SAP ERP on HANA in the cloud - YouTube)
• Customer in Asia with global template deployment that leveraged SAP ERP for Manufacturing with deployment to cloud and 9 countries rollout (Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, UK, Germany and US). The initial deployment took 4 months for first country and 2 months for rollout into the additional 8 countries - so total of 6 months. The original plan using traditional approach with full blueprint and heavy configuration was estimated to be more than double of the actual deployment time.

There are many other examples where customers follow the assemble-to-order delivery model for their project and gain significant benefits doing so. I suggest you to review some of the recordings we did in 2013 about this approach and if you are member of ASUG review the Agile ASAP sessions we did for ASUG PM SIG.

Link to webinars:

Let me know if you have any questions.

Jan

[Former Member]

Hi All,

How to start career in SAP FICO. How will I get chance to start working in SAP every one is asking for experience.

[former_member200835]

Hello,

Kindly post your question in - 

Also there are lots of existing discussions and threads which you may find helpful go through them.

Regards,

Ajay.

[Former Member]

Thank you for the quick answer Sudheendra

[sudheendra_puthuraya4]

Minimum 8 to 12 Months . There on it would depend on the complexity of the projects.