How to be successful with Run SAP Like a Factory

Heiko Zuerker & Michael Hofmann

Rockwell Automation
SESSION CODE: SM418

 Manufacturer of industrial automation

control and information solutions
World headquarters in Milwaukee, WI USA
Annual sales about $6.62 billion in 2014
400+ locations world wide
22,000+ employees

SAP Support @
Corporate Sponsored
SAP Program

Budget Flat

SAP Support Center

Vendor
Change

Single global SAP instance

Execution Model Change

Business Sponsored
SAP Projects
10% Labor
Reduction

RSLF

SAP related Incidents

48,000

8,300 medium & high active users

16 production

SAP systems
46 TB production databases
2.7 TB Solution Manager
Top 5% in solution complexity benchmark

44,000

42,000

2011

2012

2013

41,500

2014

Show Hands

Who has a network at their company?

Who has a Network Operations Center (NOC)?
Who has SAP?
Who has an Operations Control Center (OCC)?

Run SAP Like a Factory

Is a methodology
Is not about the tools
Is a lifestyle change
Will transform how you run SAP
Needs an OCC to be successful

Should be a function of IT Operations

Why did we start implementing RSLF?

No comprehensive monitoring
Incomplete or lack of actionable monitoring
High level of manual monitoring
Stability and performance problems
Data inconsistencies
Minor issues escalated to critical incidents
Large volume of technical errors
Lots of noise and non-value add activities
ITIL compliant

Why you should use Solution Manager

Its the foundation for RSLF

TechMon
BPMon

ALM

The price is right

You have it, might as well use it

ICC

BPA

OCC

BI

RCA

Becoming one comprehensive toolset

Consolidated landscape management

Dashboard

Better integrated than other toolsets

Single source of truth

Our RSLF journey

OCC Go-Live BPMon

More BI process chains

SAP Content Servers

RSLF Workshops
SolMan 7.1 SP4

TechMon BI, CRM, ECC

Root Cause Analysis

OCC Continuous Improvement

TechMon all of Production

Alert prioritization

Retired CCMS

Self-Check & Self-Monitoring

Cleanup BPMon & TechMon

SAP upgrades

Development Solution Manager

Support Pack 9 Testing

2012

2013

2014
SolMan 7.1 SP10

OCC Pilot BPMon

Business critical IDOCs

SolMan 7.1 SP7

Middleware Queues CRM & ECC

Agents-on-the-fly

Critical BI process chains

Wily Introscope MOM

Security Cleanup

TechMon Portals

Job Management

Our RSLF investment

MaxAttention Services

RSLF Resources

128
50

60

16
2012

2013

2014

2015

(estimated)

MaxAttention Days

5
2.5

2012

5.5

2.5

2013
Basis

2014
OCC

Design, planning, initial setup

No incremental cost increase

128 MaxAttention days

Reprioritized objectives

2.5 FTEs

Reallocated resources

OCC & RSLF Team

Onsite leadership, offshore execution

Dedicated resources
Leveraging freed up resources
Junior level OCC
3+ years Basis
Senior Basis Lead

Planning
Phases are just another project
Keep phases short (max 6 months)
Do not try to boil the ocean
Avoid big-bang releases

Use small and easily achievable objectives

Deliver content frequently
Avoid scope creep
Make deliverables department level goals

Example
Phase x

Detailed Scope
High Level Scope

Project Meetings

Kick-Off

Review

Technical Monitoring
BI
SNC
SEM

ECC
CRM

SLD
PI
Trex

Buffer
Portal
GTS

Business Process Monitoring

Preparation

10 Middleware Queues Weekly

10 IDOCs Weekly

Buffer

High Level Process: Monitoring Delivery

No

Request

Configure

OCC Lead
RSLF Basis
Functional Owner

Alert
Forecast
(7+ days)

Acceptable?

Yes

Communication
to OCC
(Thursday)
Yes

Write
Guided
Procedure

Review
Guided
Procedure

Approved?
No

Go-Live
(Monday)

Alert (Event) Management

Avoid noise

There are no good alerts

Not actionable? No alert! No exceptions!
No development or test alerts visible to OCC
No longer than 5 10 minutes per alert
Monitor overall alert volume

Alert notifications for critical alerts only

RSLF & Continuous Improvement

Improve
Recurring events Problem management
Remove non-actionable alerts
Adjust or disable noisy alerts
Enhance guided procedures

Run

Alert volume
Review alerts
Review actions taken
Review escalations to incidents

Plan
RSLF phases
Objectives
Requests

Build
Monitoring
Processes
Reports
Dashboards

Everything comes together

EEM

System

Batch

Middleware

IDOCs

Transactions

Interfaces

Data Readiness

Process Chains

How RSLF has transformed our Support

Significantly more pro-active

Stability issues
High level of manual monitoring
Incomplete or lack of actionable monitoring
No comprehensive monitoring of SAP landscape
Data inconsistencies between SAP systems
Minor issues escalated to critical incidents
Large volume of technical errors

Almost no manual monitoring

More transparency into health of SAP
More resources for incident management
Less impact due to resource reductions
Less escalations of systemic issues

What are we monitoring?

Batch Jobs
Middleware Queues
IDOCs
BI process chains

Number Ranges
Business Processes
Systems

SAP Master Data incomplete between systems

Issue
Product Master data inconsistencies
between ECC and CRM lead to
products NOT being available to order.

Solution
Enabled Queue Monitoring to inform the
OCC when the master data does not post
successfully. The OCC then notifies the
product master data team of the
inconsistency to resolve.

Better Partnership: OCC is able to inform the business when this condition occurs,
allowing the business to proactively resolve the issue before product is ordered.

SAP Billing and Tax Details Not in External Tax System

Issue
The RFC queue between SAP and our
external tax system (Vertex) would
periodically get stuck, stopping the flow
of tax details to Vertex. We would not
be aware until called by the business.

Solution
Enabled Queue Monitoring to inform the
OCC when the queue is in error or
pending items exceed a threshold. The
OCC then notifies the Finance support
team to take appropriate action.

Better Service: The support team is informed of the situation as

soon as it occurs and takes action before the business is aware.

Incident reduction and shift left

Issue
Analyst actions were to either stop or
restart a job based on a user request or a
high priority incident from the enterprise
scheduling tool.

CRM Services Batch Job Incident

Analysis
(100 Incidents from 5/22 - 5/31 2013)
80

73

70

70

Solution
Created guided procedures for re-start job
actions and configured job alerts for late start
or long running jobs to be handled by OCC.
Incident Management Event Management

60
50
40
30

25

20
10

13

12
5

Savings: Hourly rate for OCC

Resources is less than the SAP
CRM IT Support Analyst rate.

Duplicates

Cancel

Restart

Monitor

Other

No Action

Action

Providing Value Sending Reports to Business

Issue
Sales order synchronization fails
sporadically between CRM and ECC.

Solution
Enabled Monitoring to notify the OCC
when the condition occurs. The OCC
then delivers a list of failed orders to our
Customer Care team.

Business Partnership:
Helps the Business to proactively resolve issues before external customers are aware.
Provides the Business with information that is otherwise hard to gather.

Table inconsistencies
Issue
ECC SCM related tables (RESB /
PLAF) become inconsistent and can
lead to unnecessary purchase order
creation that causes excessive
inventory to be ordered.

Solution
Enabled table monitoring to notify the
OCC when the condition occurs.
Created guided procedures for
corrective instructions.

Hard Savings: OCC able to correct condition

using guided procedure instructions, before
purchase orders are triggered.

IDOC Monitoring
Issues
Due to internal audit
requirements, as well as
business impact, IDOC
errors must be monitored
and addressed quickly.
IDOC monitoring initially
done manually substantial
amount of time spent
watching for and taking
action on errors.
This forced us to develop a
complicated custom solution
to identify when there were
errors.

Solution
Enabled IDOC monitoring to notify the
OCC when errors occur. Create guided
procedures for corrective instructions to be
handled by OCC. Solution Manager
provides a more robust set of options for
monitoring different IDOC statuses.
Soft Savings: Support
resources previously
devoted to monitoring
IDOC errors were
freed up to work on
support issues that
provide greater value
to the business.

End User Experience Monitoring

Issue
After a recent upgrade, users are
getting a Portal runtime error.

Solution
Enabled End-User Experience Monitoring to
notify the OCC when the condition occurs.
The OCC creates a High priority incident to
our technical team for action.

Incident Avoidance: OCC and Basis teams are able to

proactively take action on a known issue. Users do not
have to call into the Help Desk to report a problem.

Number ranges
Issue
Number ranges filled to
capacity, if undetected,
required an emergency
change for resolution.

Resolution
Enabled monitoring of number range tables in
Solution Manager for ECC, CRM, GTS, SRM
and SNC. The OCC receives an alert when
number ranges reaches 90% capacity, then
creates a ticket to the functional support teams.

Distant early warning: Support team is able to proactively take

action on a known issue. In the past, number range issues resulted
in emergency changes. Now they are resolved as normal
maintenance, with no negative impact to end users or batch jobs.

Continuous Improvement Project Example

Mission: Stabilize CRM Order Create
Dedicated team: Basis, Functional, Developer, Lead

Duration: 6 weeks
Findings

Missing business partner role validation

Missing ZIP code validation

Insufficient check for blocked materials

Product listing error message not appropriate

Results

Labor cost to resolve identified problems: 81 hours

Estimated monthly labor savings: 300 hours = 2 FTEs

ROI: < 4 months

Configured BP monitoring and transitioned to OCC

SAP Service Level Dashboard

Underlying technical and functional

components drive the availability and
performance of the business
processes and associated KPIs.

Correlation of underlying technical IT

metrics to business processes
Visualization of existing metrics

Value Realization
Value is how YOU define it
Business process stability & performance
Visibility to events affecting the business
Pro-active problem management
Reduction of manual tasks
Incident reduction
Cost reduction
Shift left
value
/valyoo/

Understand
Your goals
Value of activities
So what?

the importance, worth, or

usefulness of something

Marketing & Communication

Keep Business & IT leadership engaged

Speak the language of your audience
Show value and showcase successes
Remind stakeholders how it used to be

Ensure momentum is not lost

Run SAP Like a Factory

Rocket science

Event, incident, and problem management leveraging Solution Manager

Hobby

Lifestyle change

Separate program

Function of IT Operations

Big-bang projects

Small and easily achievable objectives & short project cycles

Fire & forget

Continuous Improvement

Something to do later

Dont you have problems now?

Is just for IT

Has real benefits to the business

STAY INFORMED
Follow the ASUGNews team:
Tom Wailgum: @twailgum

Chris Kanaracus: @chriskanaracus

Craig Powers: @Powers_ASUG

THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING

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SESSION CODE: SM418
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