AWC Case Study: Implementing SAP HANA Solution Manager 7.2

Background Analysis and Description

AWC started their journey with small private-owned winery in Clare as operate with a partnership of three brothers in 1994. Most of the wine sales were done through the single cellar door. During 2000, the local outlets are involved with two new wineries in the Barossa Valley and in Barmera. The output capacity was increased to 255,000 barrels per year during 2002 and reached up to 990,000 barrels per year during 2004. More capacity increased over next 10 years and currently capacity is estimated at 2,486,000 barrels. In 2004, restaurant was established in Barossa Valley and it was successful during that year; in 2006, the organization constructed glass bottle plant in Adelaide for increasing productivity and another warehouse for inventory management. For next 5-6 years, more capacity increment is planned with more wineries or more capacity increment in existing wineries. By the year 2020, AWC requires to reach double revenue by constant productivity, manufacturing, inventory procedure improvement.

In current system and working process of AWC organizational system, the administration team is using DataAction software for financial accounting activities in order to manage internal accounting, invoicing, and billing for customers causing several issues. Multiple departments exist where the company faces lower integrity in data and chance of facing problems is quite high. Manual tracking and payment processing is more of an issue where lacking in accuracy and delay in operation causes other problems. The problems caused due to lack of automation in payment system and billing module along with customers and vendors. The existing system does not integrate with handling international sales as well as hindering the process. Existing management team cannot track the international sales; though the implementation of ERP can easily counter their issues caused due to lack of streamlined processes.

Lack of availability causing massive delays in existing invoicing process that hampers the manual remainders sent to customers. The implementation of SAP can easily reduce this limitation accordingly to address payment process as well as contacting customers with emailing or fax. The financial estimation and overall financial tracking and analysis process is performed manually from finance personnel. Once, SAP ERP will be implemented; the software will automatically calculate the financial repot overnight to provide flexibility in decision-making and overall strategy formulation. Peartree module software is utilized for tracking inventories in glass bottle plat in Adelaide. Currently, AWC required employing personnel who is skilful to work with Peartree software for inventory and raw material tracking activities. After SAP implementation, the inventory tracking process with be automated and no expertise will be required for employing. Hiring cost and expenses will be lower than it was earlier; that is before SAP ERP implementation. Existing Sales and marketing department can expect more benefits due to SAP ERP implementation with centralized database access.

In a short overview, SAP Solution Manager 7.2 is recognized as focused built for SAP S/4 HANA solution. The Solution Manager 7.2 holistically supports the administration with implementation, operations, and providing control over traditional and new system and business applications such as SAP S/4 HANA (Lee et al. 2014). It provides significant level of improvements in build phase; it is an appropriate value companion for innovative projects in SAP S/4 HANA. The “Solution Manager” offers complete integration of SAP archive so that innovation adoption framework can accelerate SAP S/4 HANA implementation (Kale 2014). The SAP archive incorporates ready-made digitized business processes for guiding configuration, and state-of-the-art methodology. 

Current Working Process of AWC

Figure 1: SAP Solution Manager 7.2 and Utilities

(Source: Marin-Ortega et al. 2014, pp. 671)

SAP Solution Manager is powered by “Focused Build” process and it is preconfigured with add-on solutions for 7.2 versions. It enables starting up SAP Solution Manager for innovation in projects. The Focused Build provides best practice for tool-based methodology in ready-to-deploy access (Debortoli, Muller and vom Brocke 2014). This module can properly supports SAP S/4 HANA along with best practice process model along with SAP Activate and reference solutions. 

Figure 2: Focused Build for SAP S/4 HANA

(Source: Ivan 2014, pp. 17)

Focused Build can be recommended for project based on some certain criteria and constraints. The project should be innovative; it should require solution validation and followed with Business Process Modeling (Otto et al. 2013). SAP Best practices benefits can be achieved with “Focused Build” module so that process repositories and project templates, agile development processes, and application operation could be automated. 

Figure 3: Use Case for Focused Build

(Source: Hawking and Sellitto 2015, pp. 310)

Above shown, use case determines whether the focused build will be used or not. “WRICEF” stands for workflows, reports, interfaces, conversations, enhancements, and forms (Dulabh 2014). In short, SAP solution manager 7.2 identifies either WRICEF has functional gaps or not; if it has functional gaps, then Focused Build is used as add-on in SAP Solution Manager 7.2; otherwise, standard Process Management with Test Suite is used for 7.2 versions.

Detailed implementation process is included along with migration process, strategy formulation, and timeline preparation. Implementation process is followed based in transiting the legacy process to newly implemented SAP HANA system; following ‘Big Bang approach’ for ERP implementation and overall time scheduling (Barenfanger, Otto and Gizanis 2015). Therefore, implementation process is completely based on migration from legacy to new system choosing ‘Big Bang Approach’ and timeline based activity completion.

The migration process considered five major processes that should be addressed while transiting to new system. The processes are mentioned as;

Perform Sizing of HANA Landscape: The HANA landscaping is most vital in terms of taking fundamental steps for creation of technical project plan. The maximum benefits are realized from long-term ownership, over-provisioned sizing can lead to capacity handling, and under-provisioning can cause unexpected delays (Necas 2016; Keskinen 2017). The appropriate sizing of SAP HANA followed with these mentioned steps: 

Memory sizing for dynamic and static data;

Disk sizing for persistent storage making;

CPU sizing for transactions, queries, and calculations

Choosing Right Platform and Strategy: The appropriate platform choice is essential along with premise deployment, the SAP HANA appliance should be certified from SAP hardware partners. The preconfigured HANA appliance should be performed with preinstalled from hardware vendor so that real-time power of SAP HANA can be harnessed along with in-memory platform at the back of firewall (Kumar 2014; Marin-Ortega et al. 2014). The preconfigured approach helps with gaining solution validated along side of SAP and hardware vendors. On the converse part, SAP HANA can provide Tailored Data center Integration (TDI) for providing more flexibility. SAP HANA can reduce architecture costs along with simplifying the SAP HANA integration process so that existing hardware and operations can be leveraged over individual data centers. 

SAP HANA Solution Manager 7.2 Tools and Facilities

Analyze Data: Analysis of data or cleansing data is another aspect to be considered for optimization of business operations. The cleansing of data is faster from all traditional databases moreover, it reduces operational costs (Ivan 2014). Data cleansing offers critical activities so that SAP systems can be brought into practice with better benefits. The benefits are stated to be;

Reduction in data footprint along with allowing architecture cost, hardware cost, and SAP HANA licensing costs;

Reduction in data size can allow the technical migration with reduction in business downtime;

Maintaining quality and essential data into system for SAP HANA performing to better technical transition process       

Application of High Implementation Standards: The implementation standards should be put together before the plan is executed. For technical migration, the implementation team should allocate the time for getting the outcome in proper manner (Hawking and Sellitto 2015). The implementation should not be considered with shortcuts or less quality approaches. The implementation process should be methodical so that required activities can be understood from planning to completion.

Performing “Proof of Concept”: The “proof of concept” is more important step for implementation so that following checklist can be met. The reasons are identified as;

Proof of concept provides general idea of operations;

Implementation team can identify potential issues and can reduce the project risks;

The migration and proof of concept can facilitate the business for realizing SAP HANA power;

This activity helps in decision-making along with project planning and with improving the overall productivity;

The activity should consider more testing and validation work over non-critical environment;

This step provides sense of momentum as well   

As per migration process and strategy, ‘big bang approach’ for ERP is chosen. The reason behind choosing ‘Big Bang Approach’ is that this approach supports migration to new system from old ones. On the other hand, ‘phased approach’ is only suitable for introducing new system into old system with replacing old system slowly (Plattner and Leukert 2015). The timeline is prepared considering all the migration activities underneath:

Primary Activities	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5
Project planning	•
Migration planning and choosing approach (Big Bang Approach)	•
Sizing SAP HANA landscape	•	•
Choosing correct platform for migrating		•	•
Data cleansing and analysis			•	•
Implementation and application of standards				•	•
Performing ‘proof of concept’					•
Maintenance and support					•

Table 4: Timeline for SAP HANA Migration

(Source: Created by author)  

SAP business suite comprises of several different components such as SAP SRM, SAP SCM, SAP ERP and SAP CRM. The modules considered as;

SAP Supplier Relationship Management: Supplier relationship management can provide holistic approach for running supplier and customer relationships. The module SAP SRM relates with appropriate supply chain base and it can obtain the value from proper mix of supply as well as from suppliers into SCM practicing so customer relationship can be used (Horakova and Skalska 2013). SRM includes individual supplier and relationship management so continues continuous on-board development with SAP integration improvements.

Customer Relationship Management: SAP CRM can handle the business suites and application of other activities so that the Customer Relationship Management. The SAP CRM provides helpful SAP HANA business suites provide addressing to short-term initiatives (Morgen 2014; Fleig 2017). The CRM provides overall decision-making so that opinions can be met with achieved along with differential capabilities of continuous improvement and innovation.

Migration, Migration Strategy and Timeline Based Detailed Implementation Steps

Supply Chain Management: SCM is proprietary for AWC currently, though SAP SCM provides number of applications and capabilities so that reduction of cost can be put into practice for application of innovation (Plattner and Leukert 2015). SAP SCM can provision collaboration, coordination, proper analysis, execution, and planning of stakeholders for relating with SCM empowerment for achieving the activities and business goals in competitive environment.

Enterprise Resource Planning: The SAP ERP essential functionalities in order to address Sales and Distribution (SD), finance (FI), production planning (PP), material management (MM), and controlling (CO) (Christensen 2015). SAP financial, operations, human capital management, and corporate services can be of significant value to business goals and other IT requirements as well.   

Business process re-engineering (BPR) functionalities support SAP S/4 HANA so that mentioned approach can perform redesigning along with rethinking the process in order to achieve cost reduction. This approach can be started with higher level assessment of mission, strategic goals, initiatives, and vision as per IT requirements (Harrison et al. 2014). Implementation process should include SAP for following the concept of BPR on second phase while migration in ongoing and some legacy process should be redesigned to reach the effect.

Stakeholder training and change management in process can administer the new system incorporation along with practicing decision-making for procurement as well. The schedule for training can include associative stakeholders for improving the work process along with increased productivity, profitability, and major benefits in performance wise (Spiri 2015). Planned way of training can be mentioned as following:

User Assistance Training (UAT): The User Assistance Training (UAT) should be performed for providing training to the personnel associated with interactions and access to system. UAT should provide proper assistance along with customers and between the assistance to the users in proper way.

Stakeholder analysis: Stakeholder analysis is essential for analyzing stakeholder roles, activities, and responsibilities so that individual worker can be used into the project as per their individual working expertise and capability.

ERP solution can provide competitive advantages in terms of following aspects as: 

Scalability: The ERP with structured system can follow some scalable functions in order to attract additional users alongside functional growth for the solution’s initial implementation over stipulated timeline (Dulabh 2014). ERP can be able to identify the future business growth in order to assess and align the current business objectives and goals. 

Integrated Information: ERP integrates information with information sharing among all departments and avoids information disruption for continuous data flow inside the working system.  

Efficiency: ERP exponentially increases efficiency of work as it recurs repetitive activities in entire system (Lee et al. 2013).

Mobility: ERP increases mobility as it operates with centralized database from different remote locations and access points. 

Productivity: SAP ERP increase productivity as it includes team management skills for each individuals along with helping them. Management bodies can take strategic edge from SAP ERP solutions.   

Cost reduction: Cost reduction is another potential advantage of SAP ERP solution as realistic information sharing and database usage is considered.

References 

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