SAP ECC : SAP Instance Consolidation

SAP Instance consolidation is merging of two or more SAP data bases into one i.e. a merger of SAP clients that reside on the various databases. It impacts related environments –development, test, and training environments.  we present the high level overview of the motivation and benefits for SAP instance consolidation.

Consolidation is an ongoing process that addresses our entire IT solution environment people, processes and application technology to make your solution more effective, more reliable, efficient and agile.

SAP Instance Consolidation Framework is a solution set that evaluates all aspects of how multiple SAP instances may be consolidated, both from a functional and a technical standpoint. It provides methodologies and tools to enable you to consolidate our SAP environments.

Nowadays, instance consolidation is considered as part of an upgrade itself by SAP users.

• Why is SAP Instance Consolidation needed ?

Instance consolidation is very useful in following business scenarios:

• New acquisitions: Small firms are being taken over by large companies.
• Divestiture: Companies sell off their subsidiary interests or investments.
• Gradual functional SAP rollout: Plants in different cities/countries become SAP operational.

• Benefits of SAP Instance Consolidation

Following are some of the important goals achieved thru instance consolidation:

1. Reduced hardware cost
2. Reduced man-power required for maintenance and support
3. New developments for one country immediately available to another
4. Reduced upgrade and SAP patch application effort
5. Ease of implementation of common processes, with benefit of common documentation and related materials
6. Enables further consolidation and simplification of the SAP infrastructure and related reduction in infrastructure related costs

7. SAP ECC : SAP Instance Consolidation - Implementation Approach

   SAP Instance consolidation is merging of two or more SAP data bases into one i.e. a merger of SAP clients that reside on the various databases. It impacts related environments –development, test, and training environments. In this the high level approach and implementation phases for SAP Instance consolidation.

   Approach

   SAP Instance Consolidation is normally comprised of three phases:

   1. Opportunity Assessment- The SAP Instance Consolidation Opportunity Assessment phase provides a high-level sizing of the cost savings and cost avoidance potential and identifies key operational changes that must be considered for a SAP Instance Consolidation project.
   2. Blueprint phase – The SAP Instance Consolidation Blueprint phase provides a project plan of how to move from an existing multiple instance environment to a consolidated fewer instance environment. This includes consolidation strategy development, tasks and milestones, and implementation project plan such as resource requirements, milestones and cost estimates.
   3. Implementation Phase – The SAP Instance Consolidation Implementation phase comprises a significant number of tasks and activities. Within this phase, activities are performed to design, test and implement the core server and storage infrastructure and migrate SAP data with functionality to the new consolidated instance.

   The implementation phase is the most critical one as it is when actual transfer/migration of entities is carried out and we come across errors related to transport of objects.

   Following are some of the challenges faced from SAP ABAP point of view.

   • It may happen that different clients have some objects with exactly the same name but different functionality. In this case, in one client we can rename those objects and assign a transport request and transport them to avoid conflict.
   • If structures of some standard tables are enhanced, system will give error during client copy. Hence, we need to identify those tables/structures and enhance them the same way in other clients.
   • Another problem is for the client independent tables; the customizing data cannot be moved by creating a transport request. We need to do the configuration and customization manually in the system.
   • User-exits and other enhancements: Coding is to be done manually in the user-exits.