SAP 4.6C Upgrade

4.6C upgrade was mainly driven by two factors, vendor’s sunset date and new

functionality in the software. The director explained, “That project was really two big reasons: one is we were off support. Two is we really wanted to implement some functionality that is just not in the older releases.”

A similar account was provided by the project manager, Sharon, “SAP told you that we are not going to support you after a certain date. That was part of it. That was a big part of it. The

other part was people in the group and the business started to see SAP has really added a lot of functionality.”

At the time they began planning in July of 2000, they had remained on 3.0F for almost three years. SAPSD was lagging behind on their upgrade schedule and were very close to vendor’s sunset date. “We were losing support from SAP on our current release, they only support it for three years and we were behind,” said the director.

According to the initial sunset date set in September 2000, the SAP department would have gone off vendor’s support midway during their implementation. SAPSD began planning in July of 2000 and didn’t complete the migration until December of 2000. Nevertheless, many organizations were still using version 3.0F and unable to meet the migration deadline. SAP ended up extending the support after they finished the implementation. Because of that, CP never really got off vendor support.

According to the project manager, vendor support was the key reason for the 4.6C upgrade. The upgrade was not really a choice for SAPSD; it was an ultimatum from the vendor. A functional team lead, Rose, agreed, “We were basically up on our contract with SAP. So, we were told we needed to upgrade.”

One of the reasons SAPSD waited so long to upgrade was that IT personnel at the

department had been pre-occupied with different SAP projects as a result of business changes. In the several years leading up to 4.6C upgrade, CP had been in an acquisition mode. As a result, IT personnel had been busy meeting the business needs, implementing one SAP project after

another.

When SAP was first implemented in 1996, the systems were installed in one business unit hereby referred as the Consumer group. Immediately after the first upgrade, CP made a

decision to implement SAP systems in another business unit hereby referred as the Commercial group. The Commercial group had very different business practices, and the implementation was a massive undertaking. According to a functional team lead, “It was a much bigger division, and it was going to require a tremendous amount of effort to work with that division to understand business practices, business requirements, design, prototype development -- literally a new implementation.”

The Commercial group implementation turned into a huge project for SAPSD,

consuming two years of their time. Because SAP was designed to be an integrated system, IT personnel had to add great amount of new functionality for the Commercial group and modify the existing system to accommodate both business groups. The department re-implemented SAP to the Consumer group in July 1999 and introduced SAP to the Commercial group in October of the same year. Immediately after that, they performed another implementation in an acquired business unit outside of headquarters. Meantime, an ambitious acquisition of a company twice their size was in process. Rose, the functional leader recalled that CP was going through

tremendous changes during that period of time, and all of their attention was poured into meeting business needs.“We went from implementing a division to buying another company, so we ended up with another implementation, and then we ended up buying [NAC], which is a huge company. …so we had to put our upgrade aside so we were able to make those changes.” All of the competing projects caused the routine SAP upgrade to take a back seat.

Although they were many versions behind the latest 4.6C at the time, SAP 3.0F was described as a very stable software. After they had used it for many years, most of the known issues on the system had been identified and resolved. The director explained that their reliance on the vendor has subsided tremendously. “We had been live on that for several years so we

didn’t need a great deal of help from SAP at that point. …Yeah, the longer you’ve been on a release, your reliance on the vendor becomes less so your incentive for an upgrade actually becomes less,” said Angela

Nevertheless, vendor support remained important because SAPSD relied heavily on SAP Online Support System (OSS) to solve their technical problems. OSS was a database that

contained SAP native code solutions that could be downloaded and applied to problems. When IT personnel encountered problems, OSS was the first place they looked for a solution. IT personnel logged in through a personal I.D. and either created a case documenting the issues at hand or retrieved OSS notes.

Because of their dependence on the help system, it was important that SAPSD stay current with vendor support. Even though SAP continued to provide technical support after the sunset date, it was done at an additional charge. “You can receive support from them, but you have to pay for it and they also treat you with a lower priority than customers that they have a support agreement with,” said Tina.

One IT person had a similar observation, “We found that SAP was more responsive if you were on a newer release.” She explained, “SAP wasn’t going to continue to carry the overhead and the knowledge base to keep old people around for a very old release like 3.0.”

Unfortunately, because of the competing projects, SAPSD could not upgrade to 4.6C sooner. By the time upgrade was planned, they were many versions behind the latest release. As CP fell behind the upgrade schedule, it missed out on two benefits that new software offered: new functionalities and fixes to bugs in existing software.

We had the upgrade for a couple of reasons. One is some of the bugs in SAP weren’t going away and when we called SAP or sent an OSS note to say ‘this is not acting right’ and they’ll say ‘yeah, you’re right. All of our customers complained and we fixed it in release, you know 3.1.’ And, you’re still on release 3.0f so you need to get off that old version of SAP and move to a more advanced one. We found out that we were getting further and further behind

- Tina, Functional Team Leader

In addition, as CP experienced huge business growth in the late 1990s, SAPSD began to feel that the software was incapable of delivering some of the functionality that the business needed. “It was working okay for us, and then we started to acquire more businesses and we were growing. The flexibility that we want to have on our software was not there in the older releases. The newer releases were so much better than the old one so,” said the Director. One of the team leaders of a functional team recalled that functionality in 4.6C was one of the major reasons 4.6C was adopted.“So, a lot of different reasons; but the bottom line is, we need to upgrade because we needed a lot of functionality. We need a lot more functionality, a lot more flexibility with the system.”

Upgrading to new version not only allowed IT to receive new functionality in the software, it also reduced the need for software customization. From IT personnel perspective, that was an incentive to upgrade. “Well, if we upgrade there, we can get all these extra added benefits. We don’t have custom code, we just use what SAP has.” said Kellie, a team leader.

As packaged software, SAP was developed with general functionality targeted to a specific customer base. Although complex and filled with functionality, the software was not

custom built to meet the business requirements of every company. From time to time, business units submitted requests for additional functionality or changes to the existing SAP systems. When that happened, SAPSD looked at existing software to determine if the features had already been built into the system. The director explained they used about 50 percent of the features. If the feature existed but was simply not enabled, the preferred approach was to configure the software by turning on those functionalities. If a request could not be granted through configuration, an alternative was to implement a “user exit,” which was a “placeholder” pre- allocated by the vendor for SAP’s ABAP code. SAP clients utilized user exits to implement some of the functionality that they needed for their businesses. In very rare circumstances, a modification to original SAP code, referred by IT personnel as “core mod,” was conducted.

As long as the request for functionality was built into the system, business users did not care SAP personnel did it. As the director explained, “So, the business doesn't care, they just want the functionality; they don't care whether we program it or it is in the software. But for the support perspective, we care, because the vendor takes care of it if it is in the software.”

Thus, being able to use SAP code rather than having to develop was something that IT strived for. “If it’s something that we’ve had to program and make huge efforts to get done in 3.0, where here it is sitting right in 4.6 already there for you. We prefer to not have to do a lot of custom coding. So if it’s something that SAP is going to provide then that’s a definite factor in making the decision to go ahead with the upgrade,” said another tech lead. At the time of data collection, the SAP department was combining the SAP system between CP and the NAC and had no plan to perform any upgrades in near future.

6.3

4.6C Deployment

The 4.6C upgrade was led by Sharon, a cheerful and enthusiastic eighteen-year veteran at CP. As a project leader, Sharon played many roles: she managed the overall project, ensured the project timelines were met, devised the final rollover plan, published the newsletters, and hosted events to motivate IT personnel. The upgrade was a huge project and lots of preparations were undertaken to make sure the upgrade worked. “The people who are in our group, have to spend quite a bit of time just to be able to replicate the process in the new upgraded version,” said Sharon.