SAP : February 2009 Archives

What is your ILM strategy today? Is it more than archiving?

With the exponential growth rate of data in enterprise business systems, it becomes billion $ challenge to manage information to meet the legal and business mandates in the increased global economy threat today.

Legal and business requirements

Government regulations such as SOX, GLB and HIPAA require auditing of updates and disclosure at business process level.

Business mandates improved system performance, reduced risk, reduced TCO and legal compliance.

Global business units and their process leaders from each of their regional business units with the leadership of a compliance teams engage to address this challenge from all compliance (legal and corporate governance) mandates requirement to create, store, retrieve and delete – information lifecycle while improving their services to customers. Mergers and acquisitions pose additional standardization challenge.

The process we adopt to create, retrieve and destroy information is termed as information lifecycle management (ILM).

ILM little deeper

The key for ILM is the meaning and context (semantic) of data used. The alignment of this information with business processes through management of policies and service levels associated with application, metadata, information and data.

ILM is comprised of polices, processes, practices and tools (PPPT) to align the business value of information with business processes from the time it is consumed till its final disposition.

The three cornerstones of ILM could therefore be:

· Manage Database volume

· End-of-Life Data

· End-of-Life system

Manage Database volume: Data archiving processes that include categorization /analysis archive and delete, storage, indexing data access helps to address the performance area.

End-of-Life Data: Retention management process tool offers Retention manager that include maintaining retention policy (centralized retention policy management - define, maintain and verify completeness), ILM aware storage integration and legal case management address this space.

End-of-Life system: Legacy system decommissioning (including mergers and acquisitions), independently understandable archive (WORM like storage)

If you are already using ILM, it is high time that you do a cross-check on how much you could leverage on the base points above.

Additionally, I believe the following business cases would be a best-fit to implement ILM:

· Business units already using data archiving can gain more automation and streamlining through ILM.

· Business can cut costs during legal proceedings and reduces the risk of losing information.

· Mergers and acquisitions

I would be interested in knowing your point of view regarding this.

Posted by Senthil Muthuvelu at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

BO and BIA Combo - How does that look like ?

A quick look on how BO fares on top of BI Accelerator enabled datamarts.

In the SAP BI world ,we are all aware that the BI Accelerator (now termed BWA- BW Accelerator) works very well for queries with huge data volumes.

In this blog I would like to share our Infosys experience on using BO Front end Tools in combination with BIA and its effect on queries on top of datamarts with huge volumes.

The SAP Integration kit is used to interface BO and SAP and at the Infosys Lab we tried this integration with BO Front end Tools such as WebI, Crystal & Xcelsius.

The integration layer helps BO access the database using a semantic layer called Universe,which is typically built using the BO Universe designer.

Main components of the integration kit include , Database drivers for Data access,SAP authentication to map existing SAP roles to BO enterprise ,Transport files to connect SAP to BO and BW publisher to publish reports from BW to BO enterprise

A brief summary of the response times of the BO reports on BIA enabled cubes is as follows -

WebI has shown an improvement of around 44 times with BIA , Voyager has shown only around 16 times whereas Crystal performed significantly better with an improvement factor of around 87% on Sales Cubes having around 100 million .

A note on Voyager which caters to aggregated data, the performance improvement with BIA is huge while expanding each dimension object ( drill-down or drill-across), even though the time to access the first dimension is almost same with or without BIA.

With SAP further refining its integration aspects of BO and SAP BW , the above results are definitely set to get better.

Also read Infosys white-paper on BIA using link below

http://www.infosys.com/SAP/thought-leadership/SAP-NetWeaver-BI-Accelerator.pdf

Posted by Meena Iyer at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Arrival of SOA-based Composites: What makes sense – Reuse or Replace enterprise applications?

Continuing from my previous blog post….”Composite applications and the 3 "R's" of your "Green" SAP” ; http://www.infosysblogs.com/sap/2008/12/composite_applications_and_the.html#comments

CIO in many organizations is struggling with the fact that over the years IT application landscape grew in a heterogeneous manner where individual division cherry picked applications to meet their division specific requirements. Further, a lot of custom application development also took place on platforms that are outdated now. Business divisions are also looking at newer capabilities from IT application for web support, better process control and visibility into important business events early on to become more proactive. Further, business divisions expect IT capabilities to support quick expansion into newer markets and customers.

CIO faces dilemma whether to modernize by replacing what they have or by reusing them in newer and innovative ways. Replacement has its own set of difficulties related to unearthing the business logics coded into custom developed applications, risk of broken interfaces, higher IT budgets requirement as modern IT applications need modern hardware as well. This situation further gets complicated where 50 to 60% of the business is supported by ERP applications and rest is supported by heterogeneous applications. Any upgrade of one application can throw the whole landscape unstable. For example, latest ERP application is Unicode compliant and if other legacy applications are not then this will lead to broken integration. So modernization brings its own set of non-negotiable architectural requirements. On the other hand, latest ERP can fulfill all the business process requirements that were not supported by previous releases of ERP application. Hence there is also a chance for the organization to bring standardization and get rid of heterogeneous landscape. But it is left to any body’s guess and it is not future proof.

Reuse on the other hand has its own set of challenges related to building and supporting newer business requirements under the constraints of older application infrastructure. However, recent advancement in Web Application server (WAS) platform has made it possible to bring live newer business processes through reuse of existing application landscape without any need for replacement. Composition environment supportedby WAS goes further to even help organizations in building their own custom application. Service enablement of legacy applications allow them to getting reused in newer business process scenarios. The workflow created using Composition environment can integrate any system from like R3, web service(third party ) and other software(.net, oracle or other home grown) with in the organization. This provides flexibility to organizations to meet division specific requirements at low time to market today as well t’row. But then it can take organization away from standardization of business process and IT landscape.

It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on this.

Posted by Ashish Tewary at 3:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Decision making for managed services engagement

Many times the decision to outsource a particular business process is limited to only a few stakeholders. The scenario is very different for a managed services outsourcing. An effective decision making process for platform based outsourcing (managed services model) should involve

1. Business process owners

2. Technology team

3, Finance team.

A process involving all these stakeholders ensures that all aspects like quality of service, business process requirement, technology architecture are addressed at the beginning itself and correct comparison of existing & future costs is achieved. Such a process will ensure that real benefits of the outsourcing engagement are brought out and understood by every stakeholder.

The challenge before many organizations is that seldom do all the key stakeholders get on-boarded from day one. Internal structures also sometimes make it difficult to have a process centric view.

Posted by Nitin at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Introduction to Result Orientated Maintenance

What is Result orientated Maintenance?

Results Oriented Maintenance (ROM) describes the maintenance processes required to achieve world class manufacturing results.

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ROM can only be achieved through the combined efforts of operators, maintenance and management.

Operators

Operators are the front line in any maintenance efforts. They know the machines better than anyone in the plant and through good housekeeping and maintenance can keep a machine in good running condition every day. In addition, operators can often sense problems before machine breakdown or failure occurs.

With a team approach, Maintenance and Operators can work together to maintain machine condition in order to minimize unplanned machine downtime. Maintenance personnel must be more than breakdown experts who fix a machine after it has failed. They must be proactive troubleshooters and analysts who use history of past machine failures and good Condition Monitoring practices in order to identify and prevent problems before machine failure.

Management

Management must provide the direction, set clear expectations, ensure accountability recognize results and provide the necessary resources in order to improve maintenance practices. Management must recognize that initial costs may increase, but overall cost will be reduced with the implementation of effective Results Oriented Maintenance.

Maintenance

In the coming series we will discuss about the different stages of maintenance effectiveness – from Reactive Maintenance to Preventive Maintenance to Results Oriented Maintenance. Where does your plant fall? The principles / reliable methods described in this article might will help you move through these stages in order to achieve World Class Manufacturing Results.

Summary

Are you doing the same things and expecting different results? If you experience any of the common problems listed below or are interested in achieve any of the goals listed below, the solution/thoughts expressed in the coming series will help you lay out a plan to move toward the ideal and achieve these goals

– Increase the quality and effectiveness of maintenance.
– Improve safety by reducing upset conditions.
– Increase machine availability and productivity.
– Reduce emergency repairs.
– Move from reactive unplanned to time & condition based planned maintenance.
– Increase the useful life of our machinery.
– Increase maintenance labor productivity.
– Reduce total maintenance cost. (Improve the ratio of Maintenance Cost per MSF vs. Machine & Process Downtime).
– Improve product quality. Reduce maintenance parts & supplies inventories (excess and obsolete parts) and improve storeroom asset management.
– Improve productivity & profitability of overall operation.

Note – Reference from different articles.
– In the next article we will discuss about Reactive Maintenance

Posted by Gopal Krishna at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Branding changes for SAP BI

A quick look at what BI is going to sound like in 2009 from an SAP stand-point.

Starting with the 2.x versions until 3.5 , SAP called its BI product as SAP Business Warehouse(BW).
Once version 7.0 was launched , BI was termed as SAP Netweaver 2004s and associated with the Netweaver components of the SAP Business Suite.

Now,we have come full circle and the name BW returns and Business Warehouse will be name for the data integration across the enterprise.SAP Netweaver prefix will still remain for Enterprise Portal , MDM and Enterprise Search, Mobile etc.

So what will BW now support ? It will cater to traditional Data warehousing,Business intelligence ( read as BO suite), Business planning,Measurement and management (Business-content management, metadata management, and collaborative business intelligence ),Open hub services,Information broadcasting,and Accelerated business intelligence ( BI Accelerator).

So we have all embarked on a new journey where BW and BO co-exist and we need to give clarity to the customers as to which is the right migration path to take, when to migrate , what new features to implement and so on.

Posted by Meena Iyer at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )