Some companies perceive an upgrade as merely a pain from which they want fast relief. Others see it as a small stepping stone to achieving more business value from their current SAP investments. And still others view it as the foundation for a whole new realm of business expansion into areas such as Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM). 

Over the years, Deloitte Consulting LLP's (Deloitte Consulting's) SAP upgrade practice has developed a suite of powerful tools and solutions to help speed delivery, reduce risk and generate returns from SAP Upgrade projects.

Solutions:

Sarbanes-Oxley
To fully address the complexities of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, know-how is required in assurance, financial reporting, risk and control, information technology, governance, tax reporting and process. Deloitte Consulting is the only professional services firm that can offer you all of these disciplines. We have developed a toolkit to facilitate the assessment and implementation of a compliant SAP controls environment:

• Risk and Controls Knowledgebase (RACK) – a repository of industry-specific risk and control information, structured according to business process.
• Risk and Control Tracking System (RCTS) – a system that documents, monitors and assesses the effectiveness of controls and risks to help organizations meet their Sarbanes-Oxley certification requirements.
• Instance Consolidation Framework
  Our SAP Instance Consolidation Framework is a solution set that evaluates all aspects of how multiple SAP instances may be consolidated, both from a functional and a technical standpoint. It provides methodologies and tools to enable you to consolidate your SAP environments. Specifically, it helps you to make effective decisions regarding instance consolidations, including rationalization of business processes associated with SAP configuration and custom development objects, landscape remediation, hardware sizing, archiving, data management, system and application management, IT ownership costs and much more.

NetWeaver
Our NetWeaver initiative helps enterprises to quickly generate business value. It is based on successful integration experiences across numerous global projects using Deloitte Consulting’s RealTime Solution model. This model offers prebuilt services to complement NetWeaver’s capabilities as a BEI platform, a well-defined BEI framework and a comprehensive set of integration accelerators, including a repository of leading practices, methodologies, tools, templates and prebuilt technical and business services.

SOA
As Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) emerges, Deloitte Consulting and SAP are on the cusp of this trend. SOA provides a framework for breaking monolithic IT capabilities down into discrete pieces (services) that can be reused and combined in different ways to create new and enhanced capabilities and applications. SAP is rearchitecting its proprietary applications into flexible building blocks based on the SOA open standard. Furthermore, it is also releasing its core SAP applications in an SOA framework called Enterprise SOA. The platform that supports this architecture is already in place with SAP NetWeaver. Deloitte Consulting has been among the first consultancies to develop SOA implementation capabilities, and we have been developing thought-leadership materials in conjunction with SAP to educate companies about SOA’s capacity to rewrite the rules concerning rapid innovation, business process flexibility and integration of heterogeneous environments.

Unicode
For companies with multiple languages (MDMP or single code pages) that are considering a move to SAP Unicode functionality, we offer an effective way to combine an upgrade effort with a unicode migration project. Our SAP Upgrade Practice delivers a comprehensive upgrade/migration package, including a proven methodology, project plans and tools, as well as onsite and outsourcing capabilities. This comprehensive package creates synergies that enable companies to spend less time and fewer resources on these two major activities, and it sets the stage for new implementations to come.

Deloitte Consulting Offshore Capabilities
Through Deloitte Consulting outsourcing, we are able to offer our clients a cost-effective and low risk way of conducting their upgrades. This is typically accomplished by blending highly experienced onsite SAP practitioners with certified (CMM Level 5) offshore SAP resources. This offering encompasses a variety of service areas, such as SAP implementations, ABAP development, upgrades, testing, custom application development, Web application development and legacy application maintenance.

Related Content:
Overview: Our Alliances: SAP 
Overview: Our SAP Functional Experience 
Overview: Our SAP Industry Experience 
Overview: Our SAP Technology Experience 
Overview: Our SAP Governance, Risk and Compliance Initiative