ASAP methodology for SAP implementations

I have been asked by many of my colleagues about ASAP methodology of SAP implementation. I found it astonishingthat people use ASAP methodology often yet do not know that it’s called as ASAP. And yeah, it’s true for me as well. So let’s see what this methodology all about.

ASAP stands for Accelerated SAP and it is an implementation methodology. If you’ve worked on RFP (Request for Proposal) then you would certainly know that Requirement Gathering (Project preparation), Business blue printing, Realization, Final preparation & Go-live are the typical stages of project implementation. And that’s what ASAP all about.

ASAP divides implementation cycle into above mentioned process and defines a clear cut goal and deliver ables for every step. Major advantage of this is you can precisely track the progress of your implementation against pre-defined goals.

Requirement Gathering:

This phase is for gathering as much information as we can for smooth implementation. You should make it sure that dependencies have been taking into consideration before defining the goals for next stage i.e. blueprinting

Business blueprinting:

This is the stage where you’d based on deliver ables of requirement gathering stage define following documents.

• As-IS
• To-Be
• GAP Analysis

Questionnaire could be used for gathering the required information at this stage. SAP has a pre-defined Question and Answers Database also known as QADB created to facilitate the blueprinting. In addition to the QADB tool, we’ve something called as Issues Database which acts as a central repository for all the concerns and open issues related to the implementation. This way, you’d be in a better position to assign a resource to work on open issues.

Realization:

With functional experts ready with the results of stage 2, SAP system configuration could be started here. Initially you’d work on baseline configurations also called as minimal configuration. Once baseline system is ready, you should fine tune it to map into the business requirement.

Final Preparation:

This is the stage where system that you’ve developed undergoes rigorous testing cycles. Stress testing, capacity testing & performance testing are some of the tests that your team would perform. It is at this stage you would have SIT and BAT. Once you get satisfactory results from testing cycle, you’re ready to go live.

Go-Live:

This stage needs no explanation. We put the production system in place and perform the cut-over activities. There is hyper care as well but I would rather not go into explaining about it.

By now, you must have got enough idea about what ASAP methodology is all about. You might have worked on tens of implementations but still unaware of what this methodology is called as. Even I was unaware. It’s a good practice to know everything that we work on. Isn’t it?