Designing a SAP NetWeaver System Landscape

If you've read any of my blogs, been to any of my conference presentations, or just spoken to me for a while about SAP, you probably know that I am very passionate about the topic of system landscapes. Because I have such interest, a couple of years ago my colleague Mike Eacrett and I decided to write a paper about how to design a SAP NetWeaver system landscape. Boy, if I had only known what I was getting myself into... I've been with SAP 10 years come April. If you worked around SAP back around the turn of the century (wow, that's actually a while ago!) you may remember the "Made Easy" guides. These were great guides, especially for newbies at the time like me. They were called things like "R/3 Authorizatoins Made Easy" or, "R/3 Made Easy" and the such. They were part of the old R/3 Simplification group's AcceleratedSAP (ASAP) program. The inspiration for our paper was an ASAP made easy guide called The R/3 System Landscape - System and Client Deployment Strategy. Like I said, these were great guides since they were a catchall for information that was spread out, hard to find or otherwise non-existent in the SAP world...and back then the documentation was, well, let's just say much different than today. This guide had a bunch of great sections that explained what SIDs are; the difference between customizing and development; the reason for DEV, QAS and PRD systems; client roles and strategies; change management; and how to administer one-, two-, and three-system landscapes. It didn't tell you everything about everything, but it armed you with enough education so that you could take the concepts and apply them to much more complex landscapes -- like 5-system, or 7-system -- if necessary. Well, Mike and I wanted to do the same thing with SAP NetWeaver systems. We wanted to lay the basic groundwork and explain as many pros and cons as possible so someone who had to design a SAP NetWeaver landscape could read it and apply it to their own situation. We began by brainstorming system aspects with some of our colleagues. We wrote, discussed and argued. We compiled and reviewed. And that was just the first year! Once I thought we were done, at least with the writing part, we had to go and get the darn thing published. This is much more difficult than I thought when I started, and there were many days when I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew. You see, when publishing something with so much information in it, it must be internally reviewed for accuracy. The problem is, SAP software is dynamic. So during the very review process some of what was written, while accurate when typed into my computer screen, had became out of date or otherwise changed. But nirvana came to me last week in the form of a simple email in my inbox. It began with "I only have one comment" and ended with "The rest is fine with me." Wow, and that was it, the paper had approval to be published. We think this is a great paper that will be very useful and helpful for the field and our customers. It is a RIG How To Guide called How To Design a SAP NetWeaver - Based System Landscape and is available here on SDN. Now, this is version 1.0 of the Guide, so we would like to collect your feedback. Instead of all of the feedback hitting my inbox or trapped here in the blog comments, I have created a thread in the SAP NetWeaver Platform forum Feedback thread for "How To Design a SAP NetWeaver - Based System Landscape...use it for your comments or just general discussion. Happy reading...

BI- Soft yet Hard Challenges This blog covers some of the difficulties that users, technical team and the stakeholders face during their course of implementing a BI project. These kind of issues can typically be witnessed when working closely with the client. Lets see a typical day of a BI Consultant trying to educate the end user about BI reports. Hello dear, How are you? Dont worry, your work will be reduced very much with our new Business Intelligence reports is one the most common catchy lines spelt to the user by the SAP BI team. Thats the starting point of a SAP BI reports users dream, not actually realizing whats in store for both the BI team as well as the user. It becomes an important factor for the technical team or at least the lead consultant to be in good touch with the end users. They are the customers of BI report and hence, we know how customers need to be treated. Maintaining a friendly relation with whom we work always will make our life easier and less stressful.

The end user in our illustration is currently using Excel as his tool to check/analyze various figures through his daily/weekly/monthly reports. He is more than an expert in using Excel. He is one of the most Sr. Managers whose report analysis is highly critical for the various activities in his company. Our illustration here is in a phase where the BI reports are implemented and Productionized. Aaah! All reports are now in portal, soooo , good looking, soooo nice to see!. BI team tries to sell it to the users. The end user gets very much excited to see the portal, his dreams still running in his mind...he sees his report link and clicks it,... waits for it to come, waits, waits , waits waits... oh no... Request Timed Out. Oh! Man!! He stares at the BI Consultant who is with him to impress the user. He curses himself, In this whole big world, Why Me? . He calls up the network team and hears that the network connectivity is very slow. Our BI Consultant is quite happy that he could say very well that, BI is good, but network is not good. Still, our end user says, whatever you say, ...Finally, BI reports are not working. The user is not really ready to listen to technical stories about the network and hardware. All they want is a properly working report. Network Infrastructure of the organization is one of the major factors that can make a BI project success or failure. The network infrastructure should be better to serve data to the end user, so that the response time of reports are faster. Looking deeper, well see whats happening at the high level c ommittees. The Head of IT department in that company is quite tensed about BI implementation, since, he is the one getting brickbats during the weekly status meeting. He has been saying the same reason for days, weeks and months to the user heads about the networking issues surrounding BI implementation. Final word that would come out of the user is BI reports not working!. He interacts with the infrastructure head to know where they are in terms of laying fibre optics and its completion date. His frustration descends down till our BI Consultant, who just said, In this whole big world Why Me. Hence, its a rippling effect that spreads across the various levels of personnel. With the available network connectivity, the BI consultant convinces the user, that particular report has huge data, hence, lets look at a simple report. The user finally sees a simple report. BI Consultant is quite happy, but...the users eyes directly lands on the final figure which is too deviant from the everyday value that it is supposed to have. Annoyed at the figures, he says, Allow me to work with my Excel pleeeeze. BI Consultant is totally frustrated on the happenings. He calls up his team and asks them to find out the cause. He comes to know that the data load has failed for that infoprovider. All he could say to the user is, We will get back to you sir and he vanishes. Though this illustration sounds like a story, there is a greater insight into the difficulties of stabilizing the BI reports and convincing the users to accept it and feel comfortable with it. So, the role of a BI team doesn't really end up in just delivering the reports, but a lot more....Data model, hardware profiles, database sizing, network infrastructure need to be really good to make the support activities lesser. In such circumstances, users will not really prefer using BI reports with so much of complexity and so much of errors and hence, affecting, various lines of their productivity, especially when they have an alternative Excel and R3 reports. Hardware profiles need to be up to the mark and sized appropriately to handle various workloads of the servers. There are reports that are viewed every one hour. Imagine a data load takes 25 minutes for the entire loading and indexing. Over a period of time, due to the increase in the volume of data, indexing alone takes more than 55 minutes. The report wouldnt get the required data. Hence, there is no use for the end users. The database statistical updates and regular housekeeping activities need to be done as a discipline, apart from implementing BI performance related techniques. Because of the reason that the users initially use Excel as their analytical tool and they also use R3 reports, the users have a considerable comfort in using them. Now, when BI reports come into place, it requires utmost importance and focus in making the users feel comfortable in smoothly transitioning themselves to use BI reports. This is one typical scenario when the users will not hesitate to use R3 reports or Excel. Again in such situations, BI reports lose credibility. The sensitivity of the information to the users need to be understood to understand their stand. We actually see a hidden issue here Access to R3 reports need to be denied to the end users, hence, forcing them to use BI reports. There have been situations where the BI team thinks they are OK, because, the end users did not

come back with issues. The reason may be that they are not even using it. So, Portal statistics need to be taken periodically to ensure all the end users are logging into the portal and using the reports regularly. This activity has actually helped us in understanding their reluctance factor to use BI reports. Another important factor role of Change Management. There are organizations where the Change Management team is not in good accord with the Technical Team. This is one major pitfall. They both need to go hand in hand to ensure smooth transitioning. The end users should feel good to move away from their old technologies to the new way or working to boost productivity. Adequate number of trainings needs to be conducted in appropriate intervals to educate the end users about the various benefits that they get by adopting the new technology. The content of trainings needs to be appropriate based on the end user audience. The role of Change Management is another big topic to understand its importance for the success of a BI project.