3 Sensible Alternatives to Custom SAP EAM Development
Published April 16, 2012
As part of the focus on EAM-related topics this month, Bob Pennington, a long-time ASUG Community Facilitator for the ASUG EAM team, writes about the business benefits of being apart of the EAM community.
You're the maintenance systems analyst, and it's a Wednesday afternoon. You just finished a meeting with your business unit sponsors who are pushing you for new functionality to help track costs and progress for some new maintenance initiatives. You go back to your office to look at the SAP core configuration and quickly find yourself writing a spec for some custom development that you will soon have to maintain in perpetuity. Ugh.
Does that scenario sound familiar?
In many instances, of course, it's easy to look to custom development for your solutions: It can be a quick fallback for many IT shops, and those custom development projects can be highly effective. But you and your company are now strapped with the burden of ongoing maintenance and integration testing that rolls out with each new functionality improvement, SAP note and upgrade.
There are alternatives—and they can be less costly. Here are three.
First, there is the Switch Framework Business Functions. This is standard SAP functionality that SAP created to deploy new features. The new functionality usually comes to customers during routine upgrades in the form of enhancement packages. These enhancement packages roll out SAP notes that resolve software bugs and, in some cases, even include minor enhancements to the core software. In addition to these minor enhancements, other major functionality changes are included that originate from the SAP Idea Place and Influence Councils. This Switch Framework concept helps to isolate these new developments from your legacy implementation until which time your company wishes to implement them.
The EAM community should be happy to know that there is a vast amount of EAM functionality locked away in this Switch Framework. The functionality ranges from minor enhancements to list edits through major initiatives such as operation account assignment.
Second, you can leverage SAP to assist in the development of your company's specific ideas and needs. This takes place through interaction with SAP's Idea Place. Here you can send your improvement ideas to SAP for their review, collaborate on and vote for ideas, and connect with the teams that build SAP products, solutions or services. This is a relatively new but powerful tool that the members of our EAM and greater ASUG community can utilize to help influence SAP.
Last, and maybe most important, are the ASUG influence councils. These councils represent a formalized approach for bringing together members of the ASUG EAM community and SAP in a collaborative effort to tackle large value added initiatives. The councils typically include multiple members of an ASUG community at large along with their companies (which are willing to commit resources to the effort) and SAP-assigned members.
All this stuff really works: Examples of recent influence efforts that impact EAM are the Compatible Units, Linear Assets and Operation Account Assignment Influence Council. These efforts are, in fact, directly related to the EAM namespace and came about through the efforts of an influence council associated with the utilities community.
Your EAM ASUG team and community are here to support you in your efforts to learn more about the systems that support our community and to facilitate a dialogue between the members of our community and SAP. How to get started? Log on to the Enterprise Asset Management discussion forums to start a discussion relating to questions you may have. The members of the community are usually more than happy to respond with a sharing of their experiences relating to your questions.
You're the maintenance systems analyst, and it's a Wednesday afternoon. You just finished a meeting with your business unit sponsors who are pushing you for new functionality to help track costs and progress for some new maintenance initiatives. You go back to your office to look at the SAP core configuration and quickly find yourself writing a spec for some custom development that you will soon have to maintain in perpetuity. Ugh.
Does that scenario sound familiar?
In many instances, of course, it's easy to look to custom development for your solutions: It can be a quick fallback for many IT shops, and those custom development projects can be highly effective. But you and your company are now strapped with the burden of ongoing maintenance and integration testing that rolls out with each new functionality improvement, SAP note and upgrade.
There are alternatives—and they can be less costly. Here are three.
First, there is the Switch Framework Business Functions. This is standard SAP functionality that SAP created to deploy new features. The new functionality usually comes to customers during routine upgrades in the form of enhancement packages. These enhancement packages roll out SAP notes that resolve software bugs and, in some cases, even include minor enhancements to the core software. In addition to these minor enhancements, other major functionality changes are included that originate from the SAP Idea Place and Influence Councils. This Switch Framework concept helps to isolate these new developments from your legacy implementation until which time your company wishes to implement them.
The EAM community should be happy to know that there is a vast amount of EAM functionality locked away in this Switch Framework. The functionality ranges from minor enhancements to list edits through major initiatives such as operation account assignment.
Second, you can leverage SAP to assist in the development of your company's specific ideas and needs. This takes place through interaction with SAP's Idea Place. Here you can send your improvement ideas to SAP for their review, collaborate on and vote for ideas, and connect with the teams that build SAP products, solutions or services. This is a relatively new but powerful tool that the members of our EAM and greater ASUG community can utilize to help influence SAP.
Last, and maybe most important, are the ASUG influence councils. These councils represent a formalized approach for bringing together members of the ASUG EAM community and SAP in a collaborative effort to tackle large value added initiatives. The councils typically include multiple members of an ASUG community at large along with their companies (which are willing to commit resources to the effort) and SAP-assigned members.
All this stuff really works: Examples of recent influence efforts that impact EAM are the Compatible Units, Linear Assets and Operation Account Assignment Influence Council. These efforts are, in fact, directly related to the EAM namespace and came about through the efforts of an influence council associated with the utilities community.
Your EAM ASUG team and community are here to support you in your efforts to learn more about the systems that support our community and to facilitate a dialogue between the members of our community and SAP. How to get started? Log on to the Enterprise Asset Management discussion forums to start a discussion relating to questions you may have. The members of the community are usually more than happy to respond with a sharing of their experiences relating to your questions.