Putting It All Together in the Real World

I have touched on quite a few critical and otherwise important roles necessary to keep your SAP project moving forward. To give you a sense of how all of this fits together, though, including what an SAP Technical Support Organization might actually look like for different-sized customer environments at this stage of the project plan, I assembled the following real-world scenarios. Each is real in the sense that the organizations described in the next few sections are bona fide SAP installations. However, I have taken the liberty to augment specific areas to either make a point or to streamline very large organizations, and have also changed other entities or telltale bits of organizations to ensure that client confidentiality is preserved.

A Sample “Small Business” SAP Support Organization

The first organization I will discuss is a relatively small manufacturing company with about 2,000 employees, four major plants, two core product lines, and overall revenue measured in the tens of millions of dollars per quarter. The SAP team supports approximately 600 users, of which perhaps 33% are online concurrently during the day. Other SAP TSO-specific staffing data includes

• Basis/Technical Staff: Three.

• DBA and other Disk Subsystem Specialists: Two (two of the three folks previously identified as part of the Basis/Technical Staff).

• Other Infrastructure Specialists: Two, specifically network and Operating System specialists.

• Programming and Functional Support: Nine (six programmers and three functional experts, all of whom address day-to-day maintenance of the system as well as legacy integration points, reporting needs, and so on).

• Security/Access: two (one full-time equivalent, or FTE, plus the equivalent of one of the Basis/Technical staff).

• Change Management: Two (two of the same FTEs as the Basis/Technical staff).

• Enterprise SAP Operations: Four (two dedicated operators, and two of the SAP Basis/Technical staff), though a contract firm is used for staff supplementation on occasion.

• SAP Help Desk: Three during normal business hours (though this equates to one full-time equivalent, as they also support other enterprise applications hosted within the company). Note that Help Desk is covered by SAP Operations after hours.

It should be apparent from the preceding list that many of the SAP information technology staff wear multiple hats out of necessity—the company simply does not have the luxury of additional headcount to pull in as many “dedicated-to-SAP” individuals seen in a lot of larger SAP shops. Thus, specific technology areas like “Security,” “Database Administration,” and “Network Infrastructure” are covered, but not to the depth you might see in bigger organizations. As a result, the onsite team tends to be overworked simply by virtue of their day-to-day responsibilities. Special projects often require the assistance of third-party resources, too.

Despite the organizational challenges and “stressed” nature of this customer, I really like working with these folks. Their employee turnover is negligible, which indicates to me that they take care of their people and it’s a pretty good place to work. And they prove at many levels that SAP is not successful only in large organizations—even smaller firms can realize a decent return on investment when their implementations are focused on functional and data integration, and staffed appropriately.

A Sample “Medium Business” SAP Support Organization

Like my small business example, this “medium business” manufacturing company is also a long-time favorite customer of mine. Through acquisitions in the last five years, they have grown from 3,000 to over 10,000 employees and contractors, and from three primary plants to well over twenty. Annual revenue hit two billion dollars last year, and saw the SAP IT organization grow to nearly 100 people as they worked to pilot and/or implement a number of mySAP components in the last two years. Today, the core SAP team supports approximately 5,000 global users, nearly 1,700 of which are online concurrently during normal North American business hours. Other SAP TSO-specific staffing details include

• Basis/Technical Infrastructure Staff: Three employees and four contractors (with growth of plus or minus a contracted subject matter expert as new projects are piloted).

• DBA and other Disk Subsystem Specialists: Three (with some minimal overlap/additional coverage provided by a few members of the Basis/Technical Staff).

• Other Infrastructure Specialists: Six (including network and Operating System specialists and backup/part-time disk subsystem specialists).

• Programming, Reporting, and Functional Support: Forty-three.

• Security/Access: Three (overlap exists to some extent in terms of a “SAP Workplace roles administrator” that also addresses general IT security).

• Change Management and Documentation, as well as Enterprise Integration, all rolling up to a Security/Access group: Six.

• Enterprise SAP Operations: Six FTEs (does not include another two operators that are shared with traditional IT, and provide support for an offsite DR facility).

• SAP Help Desk: Two SAP full-time specialists support the system (in staggered shifts) during normal North American business hours. An additional three help desk folks backfill as required. Like my smaller example customer, the Help Desk role is covered by SAP Operations after hours. The complete team consists of seven folks.

As shown in Figure 12.10, this medium-size SAP customer requires quite a large investment in people, both from a technical support and a business-process perspective. It takes a large team to support so many end users.

A Typical Fortune 50 Global SAP TSO

Although the term “typical” is arguable for a large organization running an SAP enterprise, my example illustrated in Figure 12.11 clearly reveals the level of investment in IT staffing. At nearly 300 people, this organization is a long way from being just another cog in the IT wheel. This IT organization supports tens of thousands of named users accessing multiple mySAP components and instances (R/3, BW, and CRM represent the core of this activity). Some of the more interesting staffing details include the following:

• Executive/Senior Management: Eight, which seems reasonable to me given the size of the organization.

• Basis/Technical Infrastructure and DBA Staff: Forty employees/contractors, covering both SAP and DBA support for the entire mySAP.com enterprise. This includes technology architects, SAP component specialists, SAP stress-testing support folks, batch job specialists, and at least six folks acting in a coordination role with other organizations like security, change management, interface support, and more.

• ABAP Programming and Forms support: Fifty folks(does not include functional experts, detailed next).

• Data Conversion/Functional Support: Forty, consisting of traditional business-process experts, but also including specialty roles like “Conversion Lead” (for each primary functional area), “SAP Tool Advisor,” “Rollout Coordinator” (either functionally or geographically focused), and “Cutover/Production Support Lead.”

• Legacy/Interface support: Fifteen, including folks dedicated to EDI and workflow. Note that specific teams have been deployed to address specific functional areas (for example, financials, orders to cash, purchase to pay, plant maintenance, and so on).

• Security/Access: Fifteen folks, focused on security and controls across SAP CRM, R/3, Workplace, BW, and APO.

• Change Management: Fifteen people covering business change management, communications, impact analysis, and related business readiness analysis.

• Integration Testing: Ten folks spend their time ensuring that all functional changes “work” together before each change is discretely deployed to Production. This includes regression testing and flow/integration testing, requiring both integration/semi-functional specialists as well as technology specialists. Responsibility for executing transports also resides in this group.

• End-User Training: Forty people responsible for all facets of training, such as design/development of curriculum specifically tailored for each of the deployed SAP components, special train-the-trainer programs for power users, process/flow documentation, and training tool management and oversight.

• Data Warehousing/Reporting: Thirty, focused mainly on supporting SAP BW (though four of the thirty support APO, and eight support R/3).

• Enterprise SAP Operations: Twenty-five, though some of these folks are shared with other business IT organizations, and at least ten support SAP Infrastructure more so than performing traditional operations activities.

• SAP Help Desk: Ten SAP full-time specialists, primarily contractors, not including overflow and off-hours assistance provided by both on-call staff and SAP Operations.

Many other folks support SAP in the preceding example, but from more of a business perspective rather than a technology focus. In fact, although not detailed in the preceding list, or in Figure 12.11 (due to space constraints), over 100 additional people are tasked with supporting functional areas like General Ledger, Financial Reporting, Cost Accounting, Material Management, Inventory and Warehouse Management, Supply Chain, eCommerce, and more. These people keep the SAP TSO grounded and focused on providing a business solution to the company’s employee base, not simply a “really cool” SAP technology solution.

In the end, as you’ve seen in the three SAP organizational examples, supporting SAP is not an exact science. Organizations vary considerably in terms of responsibilities, and boundaries between different groups tasked with supporting the various SAP Solution Stack layers are easily blurred. But I believe that the actual customer examples shared here represent what it takes to keep SAP up and running in complex, real, business environments.