Written by Axel Buelow, SVP & Head of Application Services

Innovation without disruption – We did it!

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On March 4, SAP went live with SAP CRM on HANA after a two and a half month implementation project. Key for us was to ensure that SAP’s 14,000 business users did not experience any disruption.

However, we are now live with one of the biggest projects on HANA across the globe, supporting daily peaks of 9,000 concurrent users and one billion SQL statements per day. We are live in 70 countries, 251 locations – and all on a single global business system instance of SAP CRM.

And, as program sponsor, I can safely say that we achieved this without disruption to the business. Here’s an overview of some of the steps we took to ensure this:

First of all, to keep our CRM processes running, we started in a prototype environment. We kept our custom code, our applications and our transportation mechanisms above the database layer, and so were able to protect their integrity.

The software upgrade to CRM 7.12 / NW 7.40 took us about two weeks – much the same as a standard enhancement pack upgrade. We had no issues here. For the following migration we held many rehearsals and thus our team gained a very good understanding of the migration process itself and optimized the overall downtime, which was over an extended weekend.

Many customers are concerned about their custom code. We were certainly concerned about ours, as we knew we had areas with lots of custom code. Using the code scans offered by SAP’s AGS services, we were able to identify which custom code objects needed adaption – and we adapted them in less than a week. This was entirely manageable.

As the first customer on CRM on HANA, we made sure we did extra testing. Using our testing procedures, we found relevant topics and fixed them in time. We also tested with a load profile that reflected the load pattern of our productive system including batch jobs. Finally, we were able to show major database time improvement on many of the top business scenarios, such as in our call center environment which will pay off in better customer experience.

We would not have been able to go live without our disaster recovery approach. Since HANA is a new technology, we wanted to have the same level of confidence on our hardware failover scenario that we had in place prior to the migration.

Now, nearly three weeks since the go-live, we approach our first quarter end closing period.

(This is the first in series of blog posts on the SAP CRM on HANA go-live. The second post will talk about our collaboration and teamwork across the lines of business as well as within the IT organization and in the third, I’ll deal with the business and costs benefits of CRM on HANA.)

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Written by Axel Buelow, SVP & Head of Application Services

The Migration to HANA should not be seen as a normal, technical database migration. It provides a huge opportunity to positively impact the business – to run faster, smarter and simpler. Companies can and should use their HANA migration to assess which business processes need acceleration or to think about areas where they could run processes differently or even introduce brand-new ones.

In order for this to happen, IT and the business need to collaborate. It’s a process of education. IT can educate the business on HANA’s potential to bring about change. This sparks ideas and the business is able to come up with new and better ways to do things. The business can educate IT on processes, process pain points and new business potential.

I saw this when SAP Global IT implemented HANA for the SAP Facility Management. We now use smart meters to capture energy consumption in our data centers and company facilities and have captured millions of records that provide a real-time view of our energy consumption. We can react now much faster, avoid unnecessary energy consumption and contribute to our sustainability targets. IT couldn’t have built this kind of analysis without the process knowledge of the facilities team.

This is why IT and the business have to collaborate. In our recent CRM on HANA migration, we worked closely with the business. These were our three key steps to collaboration:

1. Roadmap: We had a joint business and IT roadmap, which I referenced in my last blog post [link]. Two years ago, we started with by-side scenarios, which swiftly ramped up our HANA knowledge. Then we implemented BI on HANA, which gave us the chance to test our new apps. And now we are working on our big Business Suite on HANA migrations: CRM on HANA is already migrated, followed by ERP on HANA later this year.
2. Collaboration model:  We established a clear collaboration model, with one CRM on HANA sponsor from the business and one from Global IT. All the HANA responsibilities were bundled under these two sponsors, who had regular meetings to align before reporting jointly to top management.
3. One team: we drew resources from all over SAP, but during the 2.5 month migration of CRM to HANA, we worked as one team under one roof. Our project team came from the business units, Application Services and Infrastructure Services (both within IT), from development and from our support organization. Having such mixed project skills meant that we overcame the project borders and everyone worked as one team. We were partners.

Having had our learning curve with CRM on HANA, we are now working on the ERP on HANA implementation. It is a far larger project for us, with more users, modifications, add-ons and interfaces. However, we are also able to focus on more value scenarios, so will be able to include Fast Closing  and the Financial Cockpit in one program with the migration. The business now better understands the potential that the HANA in-memory technology can provide to them, and we in IT understand much more about business processes and priorities.

(This is the second in series of blog posts on the SAP CRM on HANA go-live. To read the first post on the migration of CRM on HANA please follow this link: “SAP Runs SAP CRM on HANA“.)

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SAPPHIRE NOW 2013/Session #64983
Presenter: Axel Buelow, SVP, Head of Applications Services and Acting CIO, SAP AG

For SAP, there is no mission more critical than satisfying customers. So when the company decided to move its SAP CRM application onto SAP HANA, it was not a decision that was made lightly. At this SAPPHIRE NOW 2013 theater presentation, Axel Buelow described the impact of SAP CRM on SAP HANA – and the implementation process that has made it an unqualified success.

A New World

Axel began by putting the new application into context, including such megatrends as the increasing need for pervasive access, the rapid accumulation of “Big Data,” the move toward “global-class” delivery through the cloud, and the emergence of a generation that was raised on social media.

Customers, he said, look to SAP for innovation and inspiration. And SAP CRM on SAP HANA illustrates SAP’s ability to deliver.

Bringing Innovation to Life

“SAP Runs SAP is bringing innovation to life with 100 projects and five percent of the project portfolio,” Axel said. “Our job is to assess, evaluate, and prototype new components to see what value they bring.”

Axel also described SAP’s internal roadmap for the adoption of SAP CRM on SAP HANA, which included side-by-side operations for functions such as the SAP sales pipeline.

Going Live

After a migration period of two and a half months, SAP CRM went live on SAP HANA in March, 2013. Today, Axel reported, “SAP CRM on SAP HANA supports 15,000 business users – including up to 10,000 users per day.

“It was a ‘big bang’ implementation,” he added, “reaching all users in all geographies. Our search performance improved by a factor of 250.”

Early in the process, Axel said, “There was a lot of concern in the area of custom code. But in the end, we had to adjust less than five percent of the custom code.”

New Business Scenarios

Axel cited examples of how SAP CRM on SAP HANA enables new business scenarios, including:

• Faster profitability analysis: The time required to conduct profitability analysis has been reduced from      26 hours to just four hours – while providing even greater detail.
• Sales pipeline management: SAP’s sales pipeline management once had a latency time of 12 hours.      Today, that information is available on iPads and other mobile devices in a matter of seconds.

The Roadmap Continues

Axel closed by discussing SAP’s future plans, which include leveraging SAP HANA for receivables management; fraud management for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC); and procurement.

Most significantly, Axel said, “We will continue by moving SAP ERP to SAP HANA in August, with 50,000 to 60,000 users.

“Our roadmap,” he concluded, “is not at an end yet.”

Author: Bill Kozel

Axel Buelow, Interim CIO, SAP AG, has written a blog on the Oxford Economics Cloud Platform Trends site.

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“With all its economic, technological, and strategic advantages, the Cloud is clearly here to stay. But that doesn’t mean it is fully formed. In the years ahead, the Cloud and its related technologies will continue to evolve. Among the developments I envision for the future are…”

Read the full blog here.