Tuesday 11 October 2011

ASAP Implementation Methodology

ASAP methodology means nothing but standard process for implementation of SAP,  It consists of 5 phases.

Project preparation : consists of identifying team members and developing strategy as how to go. Look at the project scope document carefully it will tell you what SAP sub-modules in SAP you should be prepared for.It also Involves Project Plan preparation.

Business blueprint: Its the most Crucial phase in the entire project.

As is - Here you understand the existing business processes of the client . Your Business Process Owners collect all the ISO-documentation (if client is ISO certified), reports and forms at this stage and you analyze how and when the reports/forms are generated, where the data is coming from. You also do a Level -2 training for your BPO so he is made aware of all the required transactions in SAP.

Once this is over BPO can start learning with the consultants help more about SAP. This is crucial because if you miss out any transactions the BPO may forget about some of his Business processes which may come up later. It is a good practice to ask the BPO to make flow charts to explain business processes.

To-Be - Parallely you map these processes to SAP. Processes that you are not sure of as to whether they are present in SAP or not you try to do a configuration of those processes, and along with the BPO(Business process owner he is the clients employee who knows about the clients business processes probably a middle management guy, there can more than one), BPO involvement is required as he may be able to tell you his requirements better. Once you do the business modeling you will also be made aware of the gaps between as-is and to-be , here decisons have to be made as to wether a ABAP development/system modification is required or not and so on. Involve the BPO as much as possible and document everything it is good practice do not be lazy about it.
Here the as-is and to-be and gap analysis is explained. This is the document that you will be using to do your configuration in the realization phase. Make sure that you prepare the AS IS documentation and the TO BE Documentation and get it signed-Off from the customer. If both of these documents are not signed off then there will be definitely some problems when we proceed further for implementation.


Realization phase: The purpose of this phase is to implement all the business and process requirements based on the Business blueprint.
   
Here you do the configuration in the development server (there are three clients -development,quality, production). You also decide on the master data format, so that BPO can go collect the master data. You also gove ABAP specifications for forms, reports etc, system modifications etc. Unit testing: Your BPOs and a few key users sit down and test your configuration in your module only. It is good to test the BDCs that you need for uploading data at this stage so you have more realistic data and your BDCs are tested.

Final Preperation and Cut Over activities
Once all modules unit testing is over then the configuration is trasported to the Quality server, where testing for all the modules is done by BPOs and end user, this is to check if any problems are there in integration between various modules. Once all is okay from the QA server config is transported to the production server.
Go live preparationThe collected master data is checked and the uploaded into production server(sever and client I have used interchangeably). Now you are ready for go live i.e. users can now use the production server.
GO-Live and support:The Go-live milestone is itself is easy to achieve; a smooth and uneventful Go-live is another matter altogether. Preparation is the key, including attention to what-if scenarios related not only to the individual business processes deployed but also to the functioning of technology underpinning these business processes and preparation for ongoing support, including maintenance contracts and documented processes and procedures are essential.

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