The next step is to set up the SAP data center. This means either building a new data center facility or transforming the current data center into a foundation capable of supporting the SAP solution stack, i.e. all of the technology layers and components (SAP software products) in a productive SAP installation. The most important factor when designing the data center is availability. The high availability and disaster recovery requirements which should have been defined earlier, give a good idea of the required data center requirements to host the SAP software. Data center requirements can be a:
- Physical requirement like power requirements
- Rack requirement
- Network infrastructure requirement or
- Requirement to the network server.
Perform installations
The following step is to install the required SAP software parts which are called components and technological foundations like a web application server or enterprise portals, to a state ready for business process configuration. The most vital sub steps are to prepare your OS, prepare the database server and then start installing SAP software. Here it is very important to use installation guides, which are published for each SAP component or technology solution by SAP AG. Examples of SAP components are:
- R/3
- mySAP BI — Business Information Warehouse
- mySAP CRM — Customer Relationship Management
- mySAP KW — Knowledge Warehouse
- mySAP PLM — Product Lifecycle Management
- mySAP SCM — Supply Chain Management
- mySAP SEM — Strategic Enterprise Management
- mySAP SRM — Supplier Relationship Management
- mySAP HCM — Human Capital Management
Round out support for SAP
Before moving into the functional development phase, the organization should identify and staff the remaining TSO roles, e.g. roles that relate to helpdesk work and other such support providing work.
Functional development
The next phase is the functional development phase, where it is all about change management and testing. This phase is depicted below.
Address change management
The next challenge for an organization is all about change management / change control, which means to develop a planned approach to the changes the organization faces. The objective here is to maximize the collective efforts of all people involved in the change and to minimize the risk of failure of implementing the changes related to the SAP implementation.
The implementation of SAP software will most surely come with many changes and an organization can expect many natural reactions, i.e. denial, to these changes. To fight this, it is most important to create a solid project team dedicated to change management and to communicate the solution vision and goals of this team. This team should be prepared to handle the many change issues that come from various sources like:
- End-user requests
- Operations
- Data center team
- DBA group
- Systems management