on 07-09-2015 3:01 PM
SAP Solution Manager has such an extensive array of ALM capabilities customers want to leverage.
Can you share your how you developed a cost benefit justification?
What is the cost associated with creating a brand new SAP Solution Manager system?
What are the costs associated with maintaining it?
Hi Lois,
Have you used the SAP Solman Sizing Toolkit?
It is a good resource if you know your SAP landscape to give you an indication of the effort required to implement Solution Manager.
We started the Solman 7.1 Project concept 1 year ago, beggininng building in September 14 and are now in the final stages of getting ready to decommssion our old Solman 7.01 system by September 15.
I have built a Dev and a PRD environment and configured all of our systems in the new Solman and completed Technical monitoring/Job monitoring...
So to give you a very light breakdown of tasks *this is in no way extensive
Both DEV and PRD
Again, this is not by any means a full list but at a high level this is just some of the project tasks...
Looking at around 40-50 weeks ( pretty much a year to be honest to get to decomissioning ) for me to build a 2 tier Solution Manager 7.1 SP12 system from scratch, using pretty much just 1 FTE without any Training courses from SAP, apart from the EGI I attended.
Cost wise, it is totally dependant on your situation, but you would need to consider:
Server builds
FTE(s) to install and configure Solution Manager
FTE(s) to run the solution after implementation
Hope this helps in some way! 🙂
Good Luck
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Wow, I'm the sole FTE here and I've had a very hard time explaining to management why all these tasks that you have listed take so long. When 7.1 hit the streets I successfully upgraded my DEV and PRD Solman environments on Oracle / SUSE Linux, completed the managed system config. and had some useful monitoring in place. Within 6 months in a attempt to save money on Oracle licensing and a push to go to Rehat as the OS. I had to redo all that work on to new systems in a VM environment and I'm still trying to finish up those task along with my other Basis task.
Hi Tammy,
Thank you. Can you please send the link for SAPCAL?
Regards,
Lois
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Hi Lois - we implemented ITSM and Charm in-house using the great EGI's from SAP Support. We now have good metrics on our SAP Support and Charm handles a lot of things for us that our prior system did not.
That said, I look forward to do the day when the solutions are less complex. I agree with Tom that aren't using most of the capabilities. The CRM screens can be difficult to navigate. I watched the SolMan 7.2 webcast with high hopes of some simplification in the future.
I also like the idea of test driving Solution Manager on SAPCAL.
External costs for us are zero; I haven't considered the in-house costs as this is only part of my job. Unlike Matt and Tom, I am not on the Basis side of the house but I know we are currently happy with our Solman solutions.
Tammy
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Hi Lois,
As you say, there are so many different scenarios that can be enabled within Solution Manager, and I suspect most customers use only a fraction of the capabilities. In fact, I suspect more than a few are like my organization, in which we use only a minimum of functions around Maintenance Optimizer, and fantasize about someday implementing more. The justification is simple -- you can't apply support packs without it, so there's no option. You must install it. Defining a cost benefit justification beyond "you have to in order to maintain support" is more difficult, though.
I will, however, be interested to see what others who have implemented more features have to say.
Cheers,
Matt
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Hi Lois
In principal all Business Suite customers of SAP are running SAP Solution Manager or should be running SAP Solution Manager because it's "mandatory".
However, in reality, not everything has it running or not everyone is actively using it.Some customers might be in a hosting setup where the SAP partner in question is running SAP Solution Manager and doing the maintenance of the system for the customer. It's mainly this maintenance which makes it mandatory for the customer in order to update their managed SAP systems.
In terms of cost benefit justification, it thus depends: do they already have SAP Solution Manager? Then it's a matter of checking out potential cost saver scenario's or improvements.
This can be for example, normally the end-users create incidents on an external service desk (operated by a third party) by phoning the service desk or mailing them. This comes with a cost per request. If you can automate the incident creation from within SAP into that external service desk and automatically assign the respective teams etc, you can create a cost saving situation (a real world example by the way).
Another real world example is jobs that fail over night where a resource looks in the morning what failed and creates an incident per failed job ~ this can also be automated through monitoring + incident management for example.
Other examples could be cost saving by doing monitoring ~ for example business process monitoring where you would have an invoice results in you receiving money. If this gets delayed, it could potentially create a cost (you have less interest for example) so then you would have a use case again.
Other examples could be risk migitation ~ how often do issues arrive when doing X or Y and if you put scenario Z in place, how much less issues would you have
Customer testimonials and replays from SAPPHIRENOW might help you out to get a view on how customers created this added value but it's not super easy that I can tell you as well. Lots of customers nowadays see value in SAP Solution Manager and don't even start to calculate the benefits, they just decide it's a good idea and go for it is what I've seen a lot. The key there is to start small and expand over time.
If you have nothing in terms of SAP Solution Manager, given you've got an existing SAP customer, you need the necessary hardware to run the system on, you need a database but you can opt for a SAP database that comes with no additional license cost (if you would choose Oracle then you do have a DB license cost). SAP Solution Manager itself doesn't have a license cost for the regular scenario's for a SAP customer (Enterprise Support is recommended, as Standard Support customer you're restricted to using a more limited number of scenario's). A few specific scenario's exist with a separate license cost (IT Infrastructure Management).
Another cost would be one or more FTE's (not huge numbers but one FTE is recommended if you seriously go for utilizing Solution Manager) to provide support for the scenario(s) you put in place.
Finding the right resource(s) can be challenging as SAP Solution Manager skills are more rare compared to many other profiles.
Hope this helps.
Kind regards
Tom
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It's that FTE that is the real cost. In a shop like mine, where we have approximately 1.5 FTE for Basis for our entire organization, spending a lot of time on SolMan is difficult to justify compared to spending time directly on the business systems like ERP or ESS Portal, etc, since no one outside of the Basis team even sees SolMan. On the other hand, we know that if we did find the time to implement some of the scenarios that Tom mentions, that could end up saving Basis time by introducing more automation.
Hi Matt
Well if it's a small environment, what I've seen most at customer side is that one of those resources picks up Solution Manager as a hobby sort of speak . Which is good and bad at the same time. It's good because they start utilizing it to some extent but it's bad in the sense that if they do it wrong or they do not know exactly what they are doing (not enough in depth knowledge) they might run into problems later on and then blaim it on the product (sometimes valid to a certain extent though but often it can also be avoided).
A lack of Solution Manager skilled resources exists. It's really extensive in terms of functions, features and scenario's.
Best regards
Tom
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