Day in the Life of an SAP Consultant using IntelliCorp s LiveCompare Software

Day in the Life of an SAP Consultant using IntelliCorp s LiveCompare Software

Introduction Consultants use LiveCompare on a daily basis to help them deliver results to their clients more effectively and efficiently. From upgrades to new implementations, LiveCompare supports the whole SAP lifecycle. From upgrades to new implementations, LiveCompare is used to support the whole SAP lifecycle. We conducted an interview with a large SAP systems integrator who has been using LiveCompare for several years supporting a large number of clients on a wide range of projects. What follows is a day-to-day account of how they use LiveCompare. For the purpose of this document, all names and company names have been anonymised. Key Facts LiveCompare helps individual contributors and teams more efficiently and effectively deliver results. LiveCompare enables consultants with minimal SAP experience to work effectively on even complex SAP projects. LiveCompare helps solutions providers generate more revenue from each client by securing projects that would otherwise be cost/time prohibitive. LiveCompare answers key SAP questions faster, cheaper and with less risk. LiveCompare enables consultants to meet and exceed client expectations.

Tell me about your role at the systems integration company, GSI My background is not at all in SAP. I just started working on SAP the day I started work on this project. I ve been working with GSI for over 4 years now and I'm essentially a software applications developer - a.net programmer. I have been working a lot with development and different kinds of developments. This engagement that I ve been working on for nearly a year is different for me. This is an SAP engagement at ACME Inc. The group I work with at GSI is totally IT based. We are a centrally based group, specializing in data analytics. We provide end results in the form of different reports to all our service offerings. Have you always worked in the SAP space? My background is not at all in SAP. I just started working on SAP the day I started work on this project. I don t have any hands on experience with SAP. So you re working on an SAP implementation at ACME Inc? Yes, we are helping the ACME Inc teams with their SAP implementation - getting materials information from a legacy system into an SAP environment. Our role is to help them get rid of obsolete data, clean and cleanse the system. They have various work streams - product costing teams, ICT teams, security folk and inventory. We work with all of these teams. We work on anything SAP based.

How do you use LiveCompare with your client, ACME Inc? The client said they could do the analysis but it would take a month or more. With LiveCompare I deliver the results in two days. Technically, my job is to help them do data analysis. So SAP data analysis based on their requirements. According to the client, they can do the analysis themselves but would take them a month or more. With LiveCompare I can deliver the results in two days. LiveCompare is a massive productivity tool for me. What type of analysis are you helping ACME Inc. with? There are many different analyses that we run. For example, I ll explain one of the most critical analysis that I did for the security team. The challenge that ACME Inc. have is that there are product costs and local cost fields out there which need to be hidden from the end users. ACME Inc. have been doing this with a legacy system but now they want to implement the same feature in SAP. For this, they wanted to know which programs have these cost fields so we can secure those transactions and programs and make sure they won t be visible or available to the end user. This was one of the very challenging projects I worked on. It s not at all easy to figure out where these particular fields are being used and how they are being used. We need to make sure we secure anything that s tied up to those programs and T codes. So we run the field table analysis in LiveCompare.

How does this particular analysis in LiveCompare help? [LiveCompare reduced] one year s manual analysis reduced to 2 and a half months. Well, first we spoke with the product costing team to work out which fields were important. They helped us find the fields and field names that include cost information that we need to hide from end users. Based on that, we looked for each table that contains that field. Once we had a list of the table structures, dynamic structures, we looked for all programs and T-codes related to those tables. From this, we then looked at executable programs. We looked into all of this using the LiveCompare tool. We looked at the source code to make sure and identify where exactly that field has been referenced to. We were then able to secure any programs indirectly using those fields. All of this is done automatically in LiveCompare. How long did this take? It took me about two and a half months to get that work done. It was a very big process. A colleague introduced me to LiveCompare. She explained that if you do the exact analysis manually, it might take a year, with 15 resources. I was the only one doing this analysis and it took 2 and half months to get the work done.

How did your colleague introduce you to LiveCompare? I am known as the LiveCompare Specialist. My colleague had been using LiveCompare for three years or so. She d had a lot of hands on experience with LiveCompare and what it can do. When she came to GSI and started work on this project, she realized that LiveCompare could be very helpful in getting most of the analysis done with most of the standard workflows. There were some tweaks here and there depending on the clients requirements, but ultimately, she knew this would be a good tool for our clients. She knew it would give them a good idea of which programs and T codes are used, what programs and T codes are in the system, but have never been used and ones we could get rid of. Is your client aware that you use LiveCompare? They actually know that this is a third party tool from IntelliCorp and it is called LiveCompare. In fact I am known at ACME Inc, not as being from GSI but as the LiveCompare Specialist. So you went from LiveCompare Zero to Hero overnight! Yes. When I first started with LiveCompare, I had no clue. And I m not from an SAP background. But I had to start learning SAP. Initially I had a day of training to get a look and feel for LiveCompare. Michael Hugen (IntelliCorp Senior Product Specialist) came onsite to help me out. He showed me how to work with LiveCompare and that was it and we got started.

What are your future plans for LiveCompare? LiveCompare helps us meet and achieve high client expectations. Our goal is to use LiveCompare to work on different SAP engagements going forward. I ve been working on providing training to our team so they have a good knowledge of LiveCompare. That s what our main goal is. We really like the tool and we want to explore it and use it for other SAP engagements as well. Are you able to use LiveCompare when bidding for new projects? In fact we are already working on that. We have, I believe, two more projects coming up which we are trying to secure. We already told them that LiveCompare will give them complete visibility as to what their system looks like and what improvements need to be done. They can look at their programs and usage information, security roles and all that type of information. Will LiveCompare help you sell more services? Moving forward we definitely want to work with LiveCompare and prove to our clients that LiveCompare can do most of the work very easily. Some clients can be very demanding. We could never have met their requirements without this tool. We wouldn t have been able to do the analysis we ve done so far.

What about ACME Inc, how do they feel about you using LiveCompare? Our client is very happy with how LiveCompare reduces time and effort. They are very, very happy with the way LiveCompare spits out the results. They are really happy with the reduction in time that LiveCompare takes to get the work done. And LiveCompare s ability to go into more depth. LiveCompare can validate any system where transports are applied. It can do anything we ask it to do. Tell me about any other projects you have worked on. Currently I am working on an SLO (System Landscape Optimization) conversion process. We started work on an SLO implementation back in November time. My task was to validate the work carried out by a specialist systems integrator (SSI) who were responsible for getting the SLO implementation onto ACME Inc. s systems. My job was to validate the SLO conversions that SSI did. I had to make sure the conversion was done correctly and identify any errors that took place while they did the conversion process. We wanted to add one field called LC3 to the SAP system. If we turned on the LC3 field, it would affect a whole lot of calculations already out there. To ensure this didn t happen, they (ACME Inc.) had to go under some kind of conversion process. SSI took care of this activation and told ACME Inc. they would do some configuration, so as to get the same results and not impact other fields and calculations.

How did you use LiveCompare to help out? There were two configuration tables that SSI had forgotten to reapply correct configuration settings to. We pointed this out using LiveCompare. So our (GSI ) role was to take a snapshot of the system before the conversion process, then once SSI had performed the conversion process, we took a snapshot after and then to compared the differences in each of the tables that LC3 touches. And in fact we figured out that there was a problem. SSI told us that the conversion process was finished and everything was fine. but we disagreed. There were some differences we could see in the before and after snapshots that looked like either the configuration or table data had been affected. There were actually two configuration tables that SSI had forgotten to reapply correct configuration settings to. They had just forgotten to do that. And we pointed this out using LiveCompare reports. When we sent this to the SSI team, and they are people who don t like anyone to validate their results, they agreed that it was their fault. There were two instances where we picked them up on this type of thing.

What about other things LiveCompare was able to flag? My colleagues now know the ins and outs of what LiveCompare can do; the magic it can do! After the demo, I got 3 or 4 requests the same day asking me to run analysis! There were some tables where the time stamps were changed. And if the time stamp changes, the BW extractor works differently to how it should work. So yes there were some problems. The only way we could have figured them out was using this tool. Otherwise it is very difficult for people to actually understand what is going on in the SAP system. The ACME Inc. folks were very happy with the results. In fact we are doing another SLO process. Again I am responsible for validating the results. I m running some of the analysis, impact analysis and comparisons to just validate SSI s results. How are your colleagues responding to LiveCompare? During a lunch and learn, I gave a demo to our group. We talk about what tools are out there, what projects we are working on, what we are doing. Recently I gave a demo on LiveCompare and LiveModel. I had an hour session with them and explained what my role is and what I m working on. Everyone was very interested in how efficient this particular tool is and how easily we can get the results out. There are so many standard templates we can use, where we just need to click a button to start it. They now know the ins and outs of what LiveCompare can do; the magic it can do! After the demo, I got 3 or 4 requests the same day asking me to run analysis!

So even though you are getting things done quicker with LiveCompare, your work load has actually gone up?! Now my colleagues and clients see how easily I can do things with LiveCompare, I m getting even more requests from everywhere! My job is already very challenging with clients on my back, asking me to get work done. And now my colleagues and clients see how easily I can do things with LiveCompare, I m getting even more requests from everywhere! It s a good sign though because they realize how efficient LiveCompare is and how accurate it is. I think clients are very happy with this tool, very, very happy. What about support from IntelliCorp? I ve been working closely with the IntelliCorp team. Whenever I am stuck, I reach out to the team. I ve met Chris (CTO) and Jerry (CEO), I know them, and they know me. We have a good relationship. Whenever I have any questions, I email them and get a response in a day. They take any feedback positively and are happy to get my input.

Tell me about your experience of working with LiveCompare. I m very independent with customizing my own workflows. For me, building the workflows and customizing them is easy as I understand the tool very well. The best part I really like is creating a customized workflow because I understand what the tool does. I m very independent with customizing my own workflows. When I have requests from clients or colleagues, I ask them further questions on what they are really looking for, what kind of reports they want. Then based on their input, I can customize, then run LiveCompare and spit out the reports for them. Have you used any other IntelliCorp products? I also like to use LiveModel to give my clients an overall business picture of how their processes are working and which processes are not being used. This enables them to decide if they want to do anything different from what they are doing already. It enables them to make business decisions based on what the models look like. Going forward, we are also going to work with LiveModel, to give clients a look and feel as to what their business processes look like.

About IntelliCorp "We see customers spending 20-30% of a new enterprise software implementation on testing and validation. The testing portion goes up to 70% for upgrades of these systems." Constellation Research Principal Analyst & VP, Holger Mueller IntelliCorp provides smart lifecycle management software for customers and partners using SAP applications. Our software tools act as catalysts for change, enabling SAP customers to dramatically reduce the cost of quality assurance, and speed the delivery of highquality SAP production environments for SAP HANA upgrades, governance, testing, and DevOps. For more information, email: sales-info@intellicorp.com or call 408-454-3500 in the US and +44 (0) 1454 629 605 in EMEA. www.intellicorp.com