Our SAP Upgrade Initiative

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). 

Although SAP upgrades may not be the most interesting topic, they can represent both a compelling necessity and a unique opportunity to enhance business value. As such, Deloitte believes that upgrades warrant whole-hearted consideration. That’s why we’ve created a practice focused specifically on SAP upgrades. In addition, our efforts are part of a global initiative, which is staffed with experienced upgrade practitioners in Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu member firms in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, dedicated to providing the methodologies, tools, solutions, and resources needed to help organizations in their efforts to manage and deliver SAP upgrade projects.

Deloitte is uniquely positioned to help organizations achieve value from SAP upgrade projects in other ways too. We have a strong relationship with SAP, having been awarded the SAP Award of Excellence each year since the award’s inception in 1995. Plus, as a full-service organization, we can help you in your efforts to better understand how your SAP upgrade project fits into the big picture, including important issues as compliance and the increasing need for more robust information management capabilities.

Services:

Instance consolidation framework
Our SAP Instance Consolidation Framework is a solution set designed to help evaluate 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 can help you in your efforts 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 service offering is designed to help enterprises quickly generate business value. It is based on successful integration experiences across numerous global projects using Deloitte RealTime Solution model. This model offers pre-built 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 effective practices, methodologies, tools, templates, and pre-built technical and business services.

SOA
As Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) emerges, Deloitte 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 re-used and combined in different ways to create new and enhanced capabilities and applications. SAP is re-architecting 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 is among the first consultant's to develop SOA implementation related services, and we have been developing thought-leadership materials in conjunction with SAP to help companies learn about SOA’s capacity to help them with such things as 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 for you to combine an upgrade effort with a unicode migration project. Our SAP Upgrade services include a comprehensive upgrade/migration package consisting of a time-tested methodology, project plan templates, and a variety of tools, as well as on-site and outsourcing related components. This comprehensive package is designed to help organizations in their efforts to create synergies that enable them to spend less time and resources on these two major activities, and it set the stage for new implementations to come.

Offshore capabilities
Through our outsourcing related services, 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 on-site SAP practitioners with certified (CMM Level 5) offshore SAP resources. This offering encompasses a variety of services involving such activities as SAP implementations, ABAP development, upgrades, testing, custom application development, Web application development, and legacy application maintenance.

Enterprise Value Map for SAP
“Technical upgrade” projects are being challenged to demonstrate the value they provide to businesses. To help companies in their efforts to both demonstrate and achieve high value from their SAP upgrade projects, Deloitte has created the Enterprise Value Map. This powerful tool is designed to help organizations in their efforts to map business processes to ROI and identify actions that they can take to improve the value delivered by their current and future SAP investments. The tool is based on effective industry practices, tying together processes, actions, business value, and SAP software.

Enterprise Value Delivery Methodology for SAP Upgrades
Over the years, Deloitte has been very successful in assisting organizations with SAP upgrades. Building on the effective practices and lessons learned from this experience, Deloitte has developed a complete Enterprise Value Delivery Methodology for SAP Upgrades, which is based on a hybrid of SAP’s ASAP and Deloitte’s internal SAP implementation methodologies. The Enterprise Value Delivery Methodology outlines step by step, a clear path for organizations to strategize, plan, and deliver an upgrade project on time and on budget, while effectively managing risk.

SMART Tool
The SMART tool is designed to enable us to help you in your efforts to diagnose your current SAP environment and identify risks and challenges that may be encountered during the upgrade project. It can help accelerate the upgrade process by helping you to reliably detect potential failure points in your environment before the actual upgrade begins. It often results in the identification of corrective actions in areas such as: modifications in SAP, data requiring SAP repairs, version consistency of all custom and repaired objects across the system landscape, verification and enforcement of code optimization, facilitation of role rationalization and authorization administration, and potential impact on customization changes. SMART is modular, enabling it to be deployed piece by piece or all at once depending upon your requirements.

IndustryPrint
IndustryPrint is a proprietary tool built based upon Deloitte’s extensive experience in providing industry specific consulting services. It is composed of detailed effective practices and business processes specific to a particular industry. The tool is designed to give companies the capability to create a comprehensive process model combining effective industry practices and unique organizational variations. The detailed business process model can then be mapped to SAP transactions and reports. This can help organizations quickly adopt upgraded features as well as look for opportunities to take advantage of newly released SAP functionality.

ValuePrint
Our ValuePrint tool is designed to assist organizations in their efforts to develop the business case to justify a project by identifying ways to measure increases in productivity or reductions in IT ownership costs. It is a structured, experience-based methodology and toolset for developing a business case more quickly and with fewer resources.

RoleManager
RoleManager is a Deloitte tool that was developed specifically for SAP projects. The RoleManager database is a multi-application repository designed to help accelerate design, testing, mapping, and documentation of an SAP Security upgrade. It contains two modules: Pre-configured SAP Security Roles and Segregation of Duties Reporting.

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