As one of the first crop of South African organisations to achieve RunSAP certification - in December 2010 - Britehouse is now one of very few SAP consultancies in the country to combine SAP consulting and technical and enterprise architecture expertise with RunSAP capabilities, ensuring that customer organisations' technology is always fully aligned with their business objectives.
RunSAP enhances the ASAP methodology, and in some instances even replaces it, for the better, enhancing the earlier process by ensuring not only that each implementation is carried out in a standardised way and according to best practice, but that the enterprise has an organised, documented way in which to manage the system after implementers have taken it live.
While the implementation roadmap for these functional and technical projects would be the ASAP methodology, the corresponding roadmap for the end-to-end solution operations of the IT is the RunSAP methodology.
“Obviously, RunSAP certification itself is an assurance for organisations that their implementer will structure their technology in ways most appropriate for realising their strategic objectives - but it's only as good as the paper it's written on, unless it's embedded in cradle to grave SAP implementation capabilities,” says Britehouse NetWeaver Manager, Hilgardt Cloete.
“The whole purpose of the RunSAP methodology is to position an organisation to manage on its own the full life cycle of its SAP assets post go-live. And for an organisation to know what changes have been made to the existing system, so as to track and rectify day-to-day issues and then to know what impact changes would have on that system, is a huge step away from being left holding the baby once implementers have finished a project.
“What really sets the RunSAP implementation methodology apart, however, is that it enables an enterprise to better manage the increasing complexity of a world in which SAP virtually never runs in isolation from other applications or systems. It also sets an organisation up to ultimately migrate its SAP systems to a private or public cloud.
“To achieve these kinds of strategic benefits, RunSAP principles must be applied all the way through a project - from scoping and assessment to technical infrastructure design, technical operations, technical management, in-house skills training, and final handover of a functional roadmap for the system that is strategically aligned with the business.
“All of which takes technical and business skills as well as experience of SAP implementations across many industries and many SAP production environments.”
RunSAP consists of a number of standards - including testing, root cause analysis, and business process monitoring - for running an implementation. All the standards are logged in SAP Solution Manager.
“RunSAP cuts total cost of ownership and improves business performance,” says Britehouse director, Bani Kgosana.
“Anyone who needs to look at a system after go-live can easily understand what was configured and use the root cause analysis logged into Solution Manager to accurately and quickly track and fix an issue.
“They can use Solution Manager's automated processes to assess what the impact would be of changing configurations - or use its automated enhancement packages to ensure that whatever changes are made fully optimise operations.
“In other words, RunSAP ensures that once the implementers leave, the organisation has in place a system that has not only been put together in a well thought out way that is guaranteed to give them the right system for their needs, but also a systematic way of managing their system through its life cycle.
“The organisation will know when to upgrade, when to take patches, and when to make any other changes while minimising the risk of damaging operating systems, whether they are SAP systems or those affected by SAP.
“Crucially, the RunSAP methodology, coupled with Solution Manager, is also a means of testing whether any cloud-based service is capable of managing an organisation's SAP systems. So, whether it's savings or efficiency you want now, or equipping your SAP systems for the future, using RunSAP as your implementation methodology is the only sensible way to go.”
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