Experience with APO World Wide System

[Former Member]

Dear Experts,

Please let me know if you any one of you has an experience in having the APO as a world wide system in the your organization. If so please share your experience.

Thanks,

Siva.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Siva,

There is not much to say. SAP is designed to be expandable. If you have ever set up SAP to run in more than one physical location, you already know what the issues are. Multiply that effort by 'X'.

There is a culture shock for IT if they have never run a 24X7X365 operation before. The business has to reevaluate the so-called 'night jobs', and decide when (or if) they should be run. Since it is typically difficult to exclude users for any length of time in a true worldwide environment, hardware requirements may need to be reevaluated - do you have enough horsepower to run all the interactive sessions (which never cease) as well as the background jobs - simultaneously. Basis has to step up here, trying to allocate active processes amongst the various servers (oh yeah, you will probably need to use a multiserver environment under SAP load balancing)

Rgds,

DB49

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Siva,

Apart from the above reply, I want to add as below:

Application Maintenance & Support when APO has gone live:

Biggest challanage we faced was organizing the background jobs/process chains for processing in APO DP, SNP, PPDS, GATP , back up processes in different time zones, so as to make the system and data availble to the users in different time zones when they arrive at workplace.

During implementation and roll outs:

Business Process standardizion was also an important activity through out the implementation project.

Regards

Datta

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Both,

Thanks for ur replies.

I have one more question abt the Batch jobs.

If we execute the batch night jobs in India how the users in USA will use the system.

I hope it will create lot of locking problems..... Pls let me know how can we handle this????

Thanks,

Siva.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Siva,

You are a bit vague. There are many batch jobs in SCM that do not lock anything. They do, however, consume server resources, so the timing of these jobs has to be carefully analyzed and scheduled so that the users do not experience large degradation in response time.

For those jobs that do lock (such as many 'periodic' DP updates), there is no single answer. Sometimes you have to lock users out for specific time periods. Sometimes you can re-design the jobs to minimize periods where updates are being performed. Some jobs you may have to move to weekend processing in lieu of daily processing. Depends on what you have, and what the business requirements are.

In short, there is no single answer. You have to use your imagination.

Rgds,

DB49