If you have not read part one of this blog, read it here!

1. Landscape Design

I have been working with the BPC product since its inception in 2000. I am always surprised when clients have skipped or are not interested in what we refer to as a System Landscape Design. We take the functional design and/or what you are currently doing in the product to properly size the servers and client machines for the future use of BPC. If you skip this step, I believe there is no way you will get good performance!

This month marks Column5’s 10^th anniversary, and we are excited to be celebrating so many years of providing top-notch consulting services to our customers.  In the end, there are two groups who enable Column5 to have such a rich history of success.

What exactly is SAP EPM? It’s much more than a few random letters to be sure. Let’s first understand what the second set of letters is before we understand all of them as a whole.

OutlookSoft Corporation was founded in 1999 and developed products for the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) arena. The company’s first software release was called “Everest”, and was developed on the Microsoft platform.  Everest provided new planning, forecasting, reporting and dashboarding solutions for clients, and was the stepping stone for the current SAP product called BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation). 

Winston Churchill’s friend once said of him, “Winston is a man of simple tastes, he is always prepared to put up with the best of everything.” The desire for the best is something everyone covets, but this aspiration becomes problematic when “best” cannot readily be defined. So how would you know if you received the best?

Performance of a system is crucial to every implementation. System monitoring and administration help towards efficiently running a SAP system. Performing some proactive monitoring and configuration can help in avoiding SAP system issues. Let’s talk about a few approaches to troubleshoot performance issues while working on SAP BPC 10.0 for NetWeaver system.

As an IT professional, I was very interested in HANA when the product first came out to the market two plus years ago.  Initially getting started on HAHA involved buying all physical hardware, which put smaller companies on the sidelines due to high start-up cost.  Over time, HANA has truly transformed by getting more and more features added with the new service packs.  It was not just the features, but also the support expansion that enables you to run HANA on the various vendor’s hardware and the ability to run it on virtualized hardware such as VMWare and AWS (Amazon Web Service).  The best part from an IT perspective, is that while it used to take weeks or even months to setup HANA, now you can be up and running in matter of hours if you utilize providers such as AWS. 

I have worked with HANA on physical, virtualized, and cloud platforms, and they all offer a wide range of performance and memory levels.  HANA can currently be installed as standalone or scale-out (aka multi-server configuration).  When it comes to HANA memory size capacity, you can scale up to 6TB of the memory for a single system, and the scale-out cluster can have up to 112TB+.  When it comes to cloud offerings, they are not currently available with such a large memory capacity, but their offerings change for the better all the time.  In my opinion, the fastest way to test HANA in your own environment would be to utilize virtualized hardware that most organizations already have in place.  I know that some shops are mostly Microsoft, and since HANA runs on Linux they are hesitant about having to support a different operating system; but, to put this in perspective, more than 70% of all websites in the world run on some Unix operating system, and that is due to their flexibility and high reliability.  Having to support multiple operating systems is inevitable.  HANA was initially only offered on SUSE aka SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), and due to demand it is now also offered on Red Hat Linux.  In my opinion, unlike Windows, Linux requires a lot less maintenance. 

The nature of projects and project management is change.  Often times, the change brought about by commissioning a project is overlooked, as the focus is placed on the technology.  Just as frequently, the need to assess and address the people-side of the project is initiated separately and often too late in the project lifecycle.  Most projects are managed using a methodology based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), which focuses on management of scope change and the potential impact to budget, timeline, or resource allocation. However, PMBOK does not address the human aspects delivered through the project, or how to successfully identify, plan for, and mitigate resistance to the change. 

“What is your BPC upgrade strategy?” or “what is the best plan to migrate BPC?” are the most common questions I am asked by clients looking to upgrade to the latest version of SAP BPC.  Even though clients' landscapes come in all shapes and sizes, the overall strategy for a BPC upgrade is not very different from one client to the next.