Improving SAP Projects with Model-Driven Technologies for Global Delivery

In order to support global delivery of goods and services, enterprises are moving to consolidate and harmonize their IT infrastructure around packaged applications, such as SAP.With a common infrastructure and harmonized business processes, an enterprise is globally integrated and can service its customers in a way that best leverages its global resources, at a reduced cost and with better visibility into its global operations. The worldwide market for implementing such transformations is very large and mature, yet continues to grow quickly. Service engagements in this domain are intrinsically complex due to the sheer number of available business processes, transaction and configuration options. Moreover, understanding the current “as-is” state of a business is difficult because of the number and variety of IT systems in use and the customizations done to these systems by clients. Defining the desired “to-be” state and deciding the required steps to evolve from “as- is” to “to-be” is time-consuming, and therefore expensive. In part, this is due to the widespread use of general productivity tools, such as MS Word, PowerPoint and Visio, which have very limited analysis capabilities, are not designed for the task at hand and do not promote asset and knowledge reuse.

This paper describes a comprehensive approach to SAP engagements based on model driven tools which enable efficient global delivery. The tools are collectively called IBM’s Next Generation Tools for SAP Deployment. The tools consist of the Solution Workbench, the Hierarchy Wizard and the Reusable Asset Library. The Solution Workbench can connect to one or more SAP systems and extract, analyze and compare existing implementations, in order to establish the “as-is” business processes. To assist with creating the “to-be” business processes, the Asset Library provides practitioners with access to a large base of approximately 14,000 assets which embodies the collected experience of IBM’s SAP practice and enables faster delivery with improved quality. The library provides semantic based classification, automatic migration of assets from legacy stores to standards based on Rational Asset Specification, RAS. The Hierarchy Wizard provides a graphical interface for viewing, manipulating and merging Organization Hierarchy configurations. It allows clients to visualize their business organization, to compare models from different systems, to directly manipulate the model to reflect the current business structure and finally to automatically configure SAP using the model. Finally, The solution workbench provides mechanisms for reusing client developed assets, like custom code and configuration, when building the “to-be” system.