ASAP Methodology

What is ASAP Methodology?

ASAP: Accelerated Systems Application and Products in Data Processing

All implementation projects have the following phases:

Scoping - What is to be implemented i.e. which submodules are to be implemented some clients may not require credit management for example. Look at the project scope document carefully it will tell you what SAP sub-modules in SAP you should be prepared for. Usually the sales people along with project manager do it.

As is - Here you understand the existing business processes of the client . Your BPOcollect all the ISO-documentation (if client is ISO certified), reports and forms at this stage and you analyse how and when the reports/forms are generated, where the data is coming from. You also do a Level -2 training for your BPO so he is made aware of all the required transactions in SAP.

Once this is over BPO can start learning with the consultants help more about SAP. This is crucial because if you miss out any transactions the BPO may forget about some of his Business processes which may come up later. It is a good practice to ask the BPO to make flow charts to explain business processes.

To-Be - Parallely you map these processes to SAP. Processes that you are not sure of as to whether they are present in SAP or not you try to do a configuration of those processes, and along with the BPO(Business process owner he is the clients employee who knows about the clients business processes probably a middle management guy, ther can more than one), BPO involvement is required as he may be able to tell you his requirements better. Once you do the business modelling you

will also be made aware of the gaps between as-is and to-be , here decisons have to be made as to wether a ABAP development/system modification is required or not and so on. Involve the BPO as much as possible and document everything it is good practice do not be lazy about it.

Business blueprint: Here the as-is and to-be and gap analysis is explained. This is the document that you will be using to do your configuration in the realization phase.

Realization phase: Here you do the configuration in the development server (there are three clients -development,quality, production). You also decide on the master data format, so that BPO can go collect the master data. You also gove ABAP specifications for forms, reports etc, system modifications etc. Unit testing: Your BPOs and a few key users sit down and test your configuration in your module only. It is good to test the BDCs that you need for uploading data at this stage so you have more realistic data and your BDCs are tested.

Integration testing:

Once all modules unit testing is over then the configuration is trasported to the Quality server, where testing for all the modules is done by BPOs and end user, this is to check if any problems are there in integration between various modules. Once all is okay from the QA server config is transported to the production server.

Go live preparation

Data uploading: The collected master data is checked and the uploaded into production server(sever and client I have used interchangeably). Now you are ready for go live i.e. users can now use the production server.