Application Lifecycle Management at AusPost

Application Lifecycle Management

Introduce operational cost savings though innovation.

Solution Manager is the platform where we build the ALM tool portfolio.

Solution Manager is a key enabler for measures to reduce costs of implementation, operations, and upgrades.

Gartner recommends Agile Operations, Lean IT with Centralization and Standardization.

Motivation

Large investment in NetWeaver technology (over 80 instances)

Several NetWeaver usage types (CRM, ERP, PI, BI, EP, SRM, GRC, SCM, etc)

Allocated budget to deploy cost saving initiatives and improved quality through Solution Manager deployment

SolMan landscape designed on scalable IBM PowerVM technology.

SolMan Production and Non-Production systems deployed

Large support workforce makes slows down reaction to business needs

SAP Landscape – AusPost view 2008

DEV TST

•R/3

PRD

•PI

•Solution Manager

•MI

•SRM

•R/3

•PI

•MI

•SRM

•R/3

•PI

•MI

•SRM

SAP Landscape – AusPost view 2010

PRJ TST DEV TST

•R/3

•BW

•EP/KM

PRD

•PI

•CRM

•SCM

•Solution Manager

•NWDI

•MI

•SRM

•GRC

•CE

•WAS

•IDM

•R/3

•BW

•EP/KM

•PI

•CRM

•SCM

•MI

•SRM

•GRC

•CE

•WAS

•IDM

•R/3

•BW

•EP/KM

•PI

•CRM

•SCM

•MI

•SRM

•GRC

•CE

•WAS

•IDM

•R/3

•BW

•EP/KM

•PI

•CRM

•SCM

•MI

•SRM

•GRC

•CE

•WAS

•IDM

•R/3

•BW

•EP/KM

•PI

•CRM

•SCM

•MI

•SRM

•GRC

•CE

•WAS

•IDM

•BWA

•Solution Manager

•NWDI

•BWA

•R/3

•BW

•EP/KM

•PI

V-TST

•SCM

PRJ DEV

Innovation

Something that is not business as usual but adds business value.

Innovation must:- Reduce of operational costs; Accelerate the deployment of high quality SAP solutions; Help manage complexities that new technologies bring.

Must be funded and encouraged

Incrementalism

ALM functionality should be grown in incremental development Each deployment laying the foundation for subsequent deployments Select and prioritise ALM features which reduce operational costs rapidly

and address your immediate pain points – fast payback… Specify, deploy, document and introduce to core Support Team before

moving onto the next piece of functionality Every support person should have the opportunity to configure a piece of

ALM functionality more than once Demonstrate support cost savings as you unlock additional functionality

Explore value of ALM deployment

Initial set-up steps required to reap the value of the various ALM features

Each subsequent ALM process will contributes to the overall ROI.

The more extensively ALM processes are adopted, the shorter the payback period is.

AusPost Top 10 ALM initiatives to reduce costs

Fast PaybackAutomatic Maintenance Certificate renewalsAutomated alerts and connection to Remedy trouble ticket systemPoint and click daily system checksPrinter Assistant for Landscapes

Medium PaybackService Level Reports for the entire Production SolutionCentral Performance History with e-mail distributionPortal Activity Reporting

Slow PaybackConfiguration ValidationCA Wily IntroscopeRedwood Central Process Scheduler

Automatic Maintenance Certificate Renewal

Saves us ~ 300 hours per year

www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/17491

The manual process takes around 60 minutes per system every 90 days

Assuming you have 80 instances, you will save over 300 hours per year

Automated alerts

Monitoring and alerting (CCMS alerts and Open Tasks)

Central system alerting (application and technical)

Central Auto – reactions (email, SNMP traps link to Unicentre)

Reduced manual checking

Daily System checks

Simple navigation of transaction checks between systems

Proactive checks for the system

Technical checks

Functional checks

Audit trail of what has been checked

Good for new staff

Good advertisement of how busy Basis staff are

Custom checks for non NetWeaver systems (LEA, BOBJ etc)

Reduction of Basis support FTE to perform checks

Production systems grew from 3 to 10 systems without additional headcount.

Central Landscape Reporting

Professional up to date reportingwww.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/17589 Save ~ 60 hours per year maintaining Landscape Spreadsheet

Earlywatch Reports

Save yourself an outage

Find your top 10 everythingwww.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/17717

We found SE16 was used heavily in ERP Production

Prevented out of space in BI production (200gb per month growth)

Service Level ReportsReport against SLR

Measure everything to manage

Can group systems according to solutions

Redwood CPS

Manage the batch stream for ERP centrally

Cross system, real-time, scheduled and event driven jobs

Solution Manager integration via Processing Scheduling Adapter

Manage job chains, sequential and parallel jobs across SAP and non-SAP

Import of CCMS, BI process chains, factory calendar and batch input jobs

Alerting and monitoring capabilities

Processing Servers = SAP and non SAP platforms

Printing Assistant for Landscapes

Centralize the management of SAP printer devices

Over 1,300 printers defined across several AusPost Production instances

New printer definitions are 10 times faster using PAL

Savings ~30 minutes per printer when performing printer changes

Set yourself up for success Get an official ALM project (and a budget) approved Install 2 SolMan systems (Production and non-Production) Scalable hardware (SolMan Prod - 2 vCPU and 16gb RAM) Disk space to store EWA, SLR, CPH etc (SolMan Prod - 300gb) Best NetWeaver technicians deploy SolMan functionality fastest Utilise AGS services (SolMan preparation services, BPM, RCA) Backup often and test your restore capability Keep the SolMan maintenance levels aggressively current Establish a recommended SLD strategy Max Attention is a key differentiator Transition to support plan to ensure people use functionality Get official training and certification Share knowledge with the industry – SDN is key. www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/17413 Advertise your ALM achievements to Senior Management

Challenges faced Large organizations adore the status quo, so expect rsistance if your new

process challenges the very thing they adore. Our constant challenge is getting the support organisation to adopt the

new SolMan tools and ALM processes Rolling out functionality across the whole landscape – we often forget

about non-production systems Keeping Agents up and properly patched Seek out apostles who benefit from spreading your idea – Capacity

Planning, Unix support, Oracle Support, Operations Staff, Testers, ABAPers…

It is essential to get management approval. We were lucky, Gleadhill and Walker have more than 30 years SAP experience.

Distribute meaningful reports showing savings and good housekeeping. CPH, PAR and SLR reports say quite a lot.

Funding – it costs money to drive innovation. Some of this can be offest by staff saving and reduced outages.

Next Steps SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization (TAO) for improved testing efforts Integrating non SAP instances into SolMan – LEA, BOBJ, Oracle DB KNOA User Experience Management (UEM) looks attractive Rolling out to non production instances Business Process Monitoring High availability for SolMan Security Optimization Service (SOS) Data Volume Management (DVM)

Links

Maximum Attention resource Kai Hirsch (working closely with Basis)

SD1 – AusPost SolMan Sandpit (used to socialise new functionality)

PS1 – AusPost SolMan Production (used to monitor entire SAP landscape)

www.service.sap.com/rkt-solman (over 100 hours free tuition)

http://service.sap.com/solutionmanager (broadcasting series)

wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SM (Solution Manager wiki)

www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/forums (Solution Manager Forum)

www.service.sap.com/diagnostics (Wily Information) help.sap.com/saphelp_smehp1/helpdata/en/b3/64c33af662c514e10000000a114084/

frameset.htm

www.wilytech.net/solutions/products/IntroscopeForNetWeaver.html (Wily website)

Questions?