Tight budgets and greater demands for efficiency means many companies need to do more with less. That reality is no different for Advanced Energy Industries (AEI), a global leader in power and control technologies for thin-film manufacturing and solar-power generation. For AEI, this means finding better and more expedient ways to deliver quality products to customers, and for the IT department it means speeding up rollouts of new functionality to address changing business conditions.

When AEI decided to add SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM) 7.0 and the manager portal in SAP ERP (formerly known as MSS) capabilities for SAP ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM) to its SAP ERP 6.0 system, the company turned to SAP enhancement packages to implement the new functionality.

SAP enhancement packages promise faster access to new functionality and simplified testing. This new streamlined approach has proven its worth, says Angela Marron, AEI's enterprise solutions manager, but is not without its own challenges.

"We quickly found that we had oversimplified the project," she says.

AEI struggled with evolving guidance about enhancement package installation practices and tools and proper testing procedures. Eventually the company developed its own set of best practices. Marron says her staff is now positioned to realize the full benefits of enhancement packages, which she sees as a step forward over traditional upgrade procedures.

“With enhancement packages, we can pick and choose which new capabilities we want to work on, rather than having a ‘Big Bang’ approach to upgrades,” she says. “This gives us the ability to make smaller, incremental changes that will have a big impact on the business.”

Unforeseen Complications

By allowing end users and business analysts to choose the capabilities they want to activate, SAP’s enhancement packages confine changes only to those areas of your existing business systems.

“This means targeted testing and the ability to address specific business requirements,” Marron says.

Another advantage of enhancement packages, Marron says, is better documentation than what was typical for traditional upgrades. In the past, the AEI staff often found itself combing through an entire set of vendor release notes to understand what new features might be available for specific areas such as purchasing or Human Resources. Summary documentation for enhancement packages “make our job a lot easier” because they help AEI quickly decide what new capabilities are available and important for its needs.

AEI’s enhancement package project seemed straightforward when it began in early 2008. The objective was to install SAP enhancement package 2 for AEI’s SAP ERP system, which serves about 700 users in eight countries. This enhancement package would give AEI access to additional functionality for the manager portal in SAP ERP, which would offer department heads new tools for managing employees — including allowing managers to access employment histories and other personnel data directly versus asking for help from the HR department.

The manager portal in SAP ERP would also speed up the internal approval processes with electronic forms that automatically flow through an approval chain, an improvement over the old manual process. In addition, enhancements to SAP PLM promise an easy-to-use interface for engineers, thanks to the SAP NetWeaver Business Client, which would open up new tools for better managing engineering change orders, processes, and data.

However, shortly into the SAP enhancement package 2 project, AEI realized it would have to install the newly-released SAP enhancement package 4 to get all the features it wanted. Later, the company decided to add the implementation of new support stacks for SAP ERP and SAP Solution Manager to the project. This project grew more complicated as AEI realized that SAP enhancement package 4 included updated requirements for implementing and testing, says Marron.

With the reprioritization of IT resources during the recession, the complications AEI discovered were enough to push back the company’s implementation timeline. However, AEI has discovered six lessons for effective implementation of SAP enhancement packages that have helped get the project back on track:

Lesson One: Install the Latest SAP Support Stacks

Before attempting its initial implementation of SAP enhancement package 2, AEI had yet to load the most current SAP ERP support stack. The company was unaware that SAP recommended updating to the current support stack level before implementing enhancement packages.

“We implemented support stacks as we needed them, and because we were off by only one version we didn’t really think much of it,” Marron recalls. “So we went straight to installing the enhancement packages.”

This approach caused issues when AEI’s outsourced SAP Basis team tried to activate the technical modules to no avail.

Working with SAP Support, “the team spent about a week and a half trying to figure out what the issue was before realizing that we needed a support stack installed,” she says.

With the correct support stacks in place, the Basis team was able to run the updated modules correctly. 

Lesson Two: Prototype in a Sandbox

Running a sandbox testing environment outside its production system gave AEI a risk-free way to uncover unexpected enhancement package implementation issues. This approach proved valuable when error messages caused by the support stack issue arose.

The sandbox also alerted AEI’s Basis team to a separate issue: The test version of SAP ERP was not able to complete purchase orders after SAP enhancement package 4 had been implemented on the system.

“The enhancement packages had actually broken the purchasing system even though we hadn’t turned on any new functionality,” Marron says.

The team soon discovered it had hit another support stack problem, but this time for updates specifically related to the enhancement packages. Discovering these issues in the sandbox helped AEI avoid more serious issues in the production system. See Figure 1 for an overview of how AEI integrates its ‘sandbox’ environments into its SAP landscape.

Figure 1

The SAP landscape at AEI

Lesson Three: Perform Regression Testing

Its experience with the support stack issues convinced the AEI team that regular testing is required throughout the enhancement package installation process. While the team initially believed that an enhancement package installation needed only a single round of testing, it eventually settled on a more detailed process:

• Install the latest support stacks
• Install the enhancement package
• Install enhancement package support stacks
• Perform tests that cover critical business processes
• Activate new enhancement pack functionality
• Perform tests specific to the newly activated functionality    

“You have to use the same test scope as for support stacks and include all critical business processes,” says Marron.

Marron adds that test case templates available from SAP help to simplify and accelerate the process of testing new functionality.

“SAP has test scripts for all the new functionality,” she says. “While the templates obviously are not specific to our business scenarios, they do offer a great starting point for making testing easier.” 

Lesson Four: Do Your Homework

No matter how competent your team is, it is critical to read the documentation. That’s a lesson AEI discovered after its experienced Basis team began installing SAP enhancement package 4 without adapting to changes that were described in the documentation. The Basis team had assumed the implementation process was going to be similar to past upgrades and to enhancement package 2.

“It wasn’t, because the tools had changed significantly,” Marron says.

Before starting an enhancement package project, Marron says, the IT team should familiarize itself with a handful of SAP documents, all available at the SAP Service Marketplace. Marron advises reading the following in this order:

1. “Enhancement package 4 Master Guide”
2. “How to Install SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0: A Practical Guide”
3. “Enhancement package Installation Guide”

She also recommends the “Must Know Guide” for a quick overview of the enhancement package technology and installation essentials.

Lesson Five: Pick the Right Installation Strategy

Companies have two choices when it comes to enhancement package implementations —a selective implementation or a broad implementation. AEI found a number of reasons why it is best to take the broad approach.

Organizations that choose a selective implementation load only those enhancement package features that map to application modules they’re already running or plan to roll out in the near future. Because AEI was planning to boost its SAP HR capabilities, it could have chosen to just install the manager portal in SAP ERP component of SAP enhancement package 4. The selective approach has advantages, including the opportunity for fewer conflicts with existing systems thanks to a minimum number of new software components.

Nevertheless, AEI chose a broader approach that loaded all of the technical components of SAP enhancement package 4, including ones the company isn’t planning to use anytime soon. The reason? AEI now has all of the latest SAP functionality ready for activation, which keeps it prepared for any new business requirements. In the long run, this could save testing time compared to piece-by-piece evaluations as new capabilities are added.

Marron believes these benefits justified AEI’s decision to install the entire enhancement package. She does acknowledge one disadvantage of this approach — each of the new components will have to be updated with any future enhancement package implementation regardless of whether the company chooses to use any of the individual components.

“We chose the broad installation so that we would have any new functionality available for when we need it,” she says. “So, even though we are not doing a project for finance, there’s a lot of new functionality in that area. Now, if we have a project for finance, the functionality is all there and ready to go when we need it.”

In the future, AEI’s chosen approach will add additional time to the implementation process, but Marron says the trade-off is worth it.

“It will add time when we make adjustments in the future, and, obviously, we had more installation files, but it wasn’t that big of a deal,” she says.

Lesson Six: Use the Tools Effectively

Marron says AEI has experienced minimal downtime — only about six hours thus far for a system that includes more than a terabyte of data. By comparison, downtime for the upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0 was almost 18 hours. She credits not only SAP enhancement package 4’s reduced testing requirements, but also the help of two tools now available from SAP.

The Maintenance Optimizer (MOPZ), a component of SAP Solution Manager, scans your SAP environment and identifies all the files that need to be installed to bring a core application like SAP ERP 6.0 and the enhancement package upgrade current. This includes any necessary support stacks. Prerequisites include SAP Solution Manager 7.0, SP15 or higher, as well as accurate data maintained with Solution Manager System Landscape (transaction SMSY), according to Marron. See Figure 2 for an example of SMSY in action.

Figure 2

Viewing component release levels in transaction SMSY

In addition, the SAP Enhancement Package Installer rounds up all the files identified in the MOPZ survey and installs them in the environment. Marron notes that the SAP Enhancement Package Installer performs a similar role to the SAP Add-On Installation Tool (SAINT), which only supports SAP enhancement packages 1 through 3.

A Plan for the Future

AEI’s new HR functionality will be available to all of the company’s managers and senior executives — nearly 200 people — when it’s fully online. An additional 200 users could potentially make use of the new PLM modules. But Marron sees even more benefits once SAP enhancement package 4 is in place.

“It’s definitely a springboard for future advancements,” she says.

The key is having a wide range of SAP ERP capabilities ready to be switched on as needed by the business. For example, Marron envisions a scenario in which AEI may decide to devote time to improving the purchasing process.

“We would then look into what’s available in the enhancement packs we have already installed for purchasing functionality and focus on that one area,” she explains. “That’s much more manageable than looking at a large-scale upgrade.”

This targeted approach to new features works well for AEI’s lean IT staff, which has only four US- and three China-based employees to support the SAP platform.

“There are approximately 300 business functions that can be turned on in SAP enhancement package 4,” Marron says. “Obviously, we are not going to turn them all on, but when our project is complete, it will give us access to everything new that SAP has to offer.”