SAP Solution Manager for international application support at an energy provider and at a tourism company
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IT & Management Consulting, SAP Systems, SAP Transformation
The European division of a worldwide operating energy group of companies has been using the SAP Solution Manager successfully for more than four years for the processing of incidents. In addition, the tool is used in change re-quest management in order to be able to manage and control IT projects. noventum consulting provides adjustments in
customizing.
The generation of electric power and district heating, the sales of electric power, natural gas and energy services, as well as the trade in electricity are among the core activities of the energy group of companies. The emphasis of its activities is the exploration and extraction of fossil fuels.
The SAP systems of the whole group of companies are hosted at the German main site and the SAP Basis is located there, too. As such, the location is responsible for approx. 200 key users who create messages as point of contact for end users in case of an incident. Overall, approx. 1.000 users are working in the systems.
SAP system integrity ensures problem-free processes from the user request to the final system adjustment
The energy company utilises the SAP Solution Manager for the recording of tickets and the further processing in the Change Request Management (ChaRM, in short). The high system integrity is the great advantage of the tool. This way, it is possible to track the status of a user request from the incident via the problem to the necessary adjustment in the system. The Solution Manager is by now managed as a 3-system landscape. This way, various developments can be implemented in the test system and tested by the respective responsible parties in the consolidation before the development is imported into the productive end system. It is ensured that validated adjustments exclusively are transported all the way into the production system and that the performance of the ticket tool is not affected negatively.
The go-ahead for this project was given in April 2009. The focus was on the creation of a central core system for the management of incidents, problems and the change request management. The existing legacy system was no longer being expanded since the Solution Manager 7.0 could be used as a free tool for ticketing and ChaRM. For the implementation of the in-house requirements, a project team with external support was used. The adjustments in Customizing and through programming were guaranteed by noventum consulting GmbH. The project duration was limited to 6 months and was realised with a budget of 80 PDs. Thereafter, the go-live could be carried out and the first country companies were able to store their incidents centrally. In the subsequent years, more than 10 country companies were connected to date.
After one year, the adaptation of the ticket tool to the increased requirements posed by the controlling department became necessary. In this context, an agenda was developed which, in its first draft, encompassed 80 change s. Among them were small adjustments on the field level as well as large adjustments with impacts on the business process. One example for this is the utilisation of defined actions within the ticket handling in order to simplify the „agent determination“. Through this enhancement it was possible to not only reduce the total handling time but to also achieve an improvement of the quality. By now, approx. 200 modifications of the whole tool have been carried out.
SAP Solution Manager – adaptations are sometimes required
The customer‘s special requirements are the reason for the amount of modifications. The SAP Solution Manager is by default delivered as a product that can run. Subsequent to its installation, there is only minimal effort needed to adjust the Solution Manager to the existing system landscape. However, the business processes contained therein are to be understood as a template for standard processes. By now, the business processes are ITIL compliant. However, quite often an adjustment is carried out upon a customer‘s re-quest. Maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.0 expired at the end of 2013. The customer has conducted preliminary research regarding a release change. The new system is already available in a sandbox client and can be validated in a test environment with respect to the customer-specific adaptations. The incident management and the change request management have not yet been changed to the new document types.
Solution Manager 7.1 SP10 at a tourism company
In a current project, the SAP Solution Manager is implemented for a tourism company in its presently most current version. The tools implemented are utilised for the implementation phase of an SAP ECC introduction. The company is acting worldwide, the commercial controlling is carried out from Germany, where also the company‘s IT is located. In this, the documentation of the ECC systems is a welcome foundation that can be utilised later on for support tasks. In addition to the documentation of the process overview, an exact presentation of all Customizing and Workbench objects used is carried out. The automatically generated documents are particularly appreciated by the customer.
In this SAP Solution Manager project, the main focus, however, is on the support by the change request management. For this, a project is created and the whole system landscape is assigned in SAP Solution Manager. As such, the Solution Manager links the complete systems with one another and controls authorisations for the different system in the different project phases. For example, the importing of transport orders may be prevented during the project phase „test“ in order to be able to ensure quality.
Incident management is implemented as the third functionality. Since version 7.1, this tool is available as WebUI and this way eases access to all data. The process for the support of the handling of the incidents is already well developed in the standard. In the implementation of the SAP Solution Manager, only small adjustments have to be carried out, such as number ranges or the copying of document types. As such, the Solution Manager is to be understood as the standard tool for differentiated solution landscapes.
