SAP develops new releases of its ERP software to continuously enhance the business processes based on the ever changing requirements of enterprises. Every few years SAP packages all the enhancements and offers a new release.

The new release requires adjustments to the existing processes and adaptation to the new functionalities. For an Enterprise, it’s brings a lot of organizational and logistic challenges to upgrade to new releases.

WHY: Upgrade?

An upgrade should be treated as an opportunity to maximize the value from the investments made in SAP since it brings in the latest and most optimized business processes in practice. There are number of reason an enterprise might want to upgrade: -

Compliance

Operational Excellence

Reduced TCO

Scalable Architectureg

Improved Usability

IT Consolidation

Even though Enterprises understand the benefits of an upgrade yet there are several challenges which discourage them to implement it in practice.

SAP has made the upgrade process significantly easy in past few years yet SAP is complex software and requires a lot of understanding and careful analysis of the system before undertaking an upgrade. Typically, Enterprises following challenges for a successful upgrade:

Continuity of business is a key challenge while upgrading the system

Estimation of time and efforts required for upgrade varies

Upgrades bring in a lot of changes and add-on functionalities which impacts the existing standard and custom built solution. Impact of upgrade on these processes has to be clearly understood before upgrade

Re-alignment of the roles and authorizations with the adjusted processes

Management of the impacted objects and the scope of the upgrade

Hardware resizing of the upgraded landscape

Accurate and efficient testing of the processes before going-live

Vikalp offers upgrade services utilizing 'EasyUpgrade' tool which define a road map for an easy and smooth upgrade. EasyUpgrade is a tool developed to address all the challenges to make an upgrade successful in time and budget. The tool does a comprehensive analysis on Enterprise's SAP system and provides detailed reports of objects impacted and time required to rectify them.

Some of the key features of In-house developed EasyUpgrade tool are –

Provides project plan
Allows a thorough Technical Assessment
Enables complete tracking