key findings when upgrading your sap crm system

A collaboration of:

Key Findings when

Upgrading CRM within Utilities

Richard Uytdewilligen

Gwinnett County – Project Manager

A collaboration of:

Co-Presenting

Alisha Voutas

Gwinnett County – Business Owner

Michael Robinson

Gwinnett County – Build Team

• 30 miles NE of Atlanta – 800K Residents within 15 municipalities – regulated

• Implemented SAP CRM / R/3 in 2006 o Using SAP’s Move In / Move Out functionality

o Call center 50 users handling 25K calls per month – AVG 3.36 C.H.&T.T.

o OK Implementation but had left a bad taste in their mouths

o Highly customized solutions – minimal use of SAP Standard

• Since then we have rolled out o Online Bill Pay ($3M p/m– approx. 10%)

o Mobile Website (1K users p/m)

o HL of System Automation

o Days outstanding reduced from 44 to 27

o Integration to POS & Mobile Work Orders

o Went back to Standardization as much as possible

Background

Slide 3

• 3 Ways to Upgrade from CRM 5.0 to CRM 7.0 EHP2

• Vendor Selection – what we looked for & found

• Leveraging SAP Tools & Resources

• Automated Testing – Is it really worth it?

• Change Management – more than just training

• Findings from Build Team / Business Owner & Project

Management.

Key Aspects / Findings when Upgrading CRM

Impact to Key Utility Processes

Slide 5

Contract Management – Benefits + Risks

Slide 6

• Utilization of SAP Enhanced Account Overviews

• Contract Process Simplified (Move-In + Transferred)

• Process Framework + Check Repository

• Limited use of transaction launchers

Benefits

• Lack of expertise in the marketplace with contract management knowledge

• Impact to CRM data model

• Change to other ECC contract-related processes

• User-Acceptance of new processes

Risks

Our Decision

Slide 7

Business Needs

Training / User

Adoption

Resources – each option

Duration & Effort

Cost

Risk

SAP’s Roadmap

SAP offer of Ramp

Up

Contract

Management

• Deep dive (3 Weeks) on our existing AS_IS processes

• Development of RFP with reference to

o previous RFPs

o conference calls with similar sized counties - listened to their pain points/

experiences

• Informing SAP of our intentions via the Max Attention Channel –

looking for recommendations on how they could assist us.

• Attending forums & reaching out to ASUG and SDN

• SAP Questionnaire – most questions answered with business buy-in

Preparation

Slide 8

• Usual

o Price – Fixed – based on Milestones

o Balance between Contractors & Permanent Staff

o Had built in Quality Gates into their plan

o Interview Resources during Vendor Selection

• G.C. Specific

o Control BASIS & Security

o Able to clearly explain why or why not to implement contract

management and their methodology to implement that solution

o Understood our training (Uperform) & testing (Worksoft) solutions

o Thoroughness of thought process

Vendor Selection – What we looked for

Slide 9

• Resource constraint – multiple sites going live at same time;

particularly those with Contract management

• Lack of clarity in understanding our issues

o Reporting Needs

o Specific Utilities knowledge

Move in / Move Out

Contract Management /MDT

Work Orders

• Shared resources from many vendors

For the Price & Risk – we could attempt this ourselves

Vendor Selection – What we found Conclusion

Slide 10

• SAP Solution Manager

o Going Beyond BASIS

o Solution Documentation Assistant

• SAP Ramp Up Client –EhP2

o Manage expectations- late adopter

• SAP Development Team

o Develop custom filtering – due to separate implementations

• Custom Code Maintainability Check (C.C.M.C.)

o Reduced from 170 to 21

• Continuous Quality Check during Going Live Support (C.Q.C.)

Leveraging SAP Tools & Resources

Slide 11

• Looked at integrating into solution manager

• Was dependent on when the Build released the Functionality &

Quality in QnA

• Now being used for lights out testing every Wednesday

• High Cost upfront /Limited resources at our price point

• Can recover costs through

• Reuse in support /enhancement packs & Lights out

• Your Worksoft docs can be part of your testing documentation

• 65% Automated testing on 8 end to end processes (collection of

114 individual processes)

Testing Tools- Worksoft

Slide 12

Slide 13

Curve Balls

• DB Versioning of Oracle

• Need alignment in terms of Enhancement Packs between CRM &

ECC – upgrade @ same time versus Leader / Follower approach

• Nervousness of the user community – “war wounds” of previous

upgrade

• Number of enhancements within Contract Management to do basic

validation –

o SAP Note 1763180 - CRM-IU: no IS-U specific checks in contract

management

• Replication: Middleware vs. “Middle-scare”

o Detailed middleware testing (2 Mock Runs)

o Custom reconciliation reports (summary + details)

o Super User team involvement in resolving replication issues

(ECRMREPL)

Lessons Learned – Build Team

• Iterative Show & Tell Workshops

o Early User-adoption to CRM 7.0 Web Client environment

o Lower QA issues

o Knowledgeable user-community

• Change Management is critical!

o Negativity is contagious

• Establish a Super User program and engage them through

the entire process.

o They are your champions to the users

• Identify potential hazards and mitigate them.

• Training, training, training!!

• Learn from previous mistakes and listen to your users.

o Address their concerns

o Ask them how you did

Lessons Learned – Business Side

• Revisit the plan weekly – Cost /Time/Deliverables.

• Allow plenty of time for

• Replication testing

• Training particularly if not a green site

• Leverage your internal IT resources as much as possible

• When you goto the External market technically interview all candidates

• Perform as many detailed cut over runs as possible

• Clean up the data as much as possible

• Get rid of as much custom code as feasible

• Contract Management may need more validation to assist in replication.

Lessons Learned – Project Management Side

Project

WRICEF

Hours

Defects

Duration

36 plus individual Enhancements

Build 2020 , Training 1044, Testing 856

234

April 2012 till Sunday Feb 17th 2013 – approx. 11mths

Key Metrics

Replication

Business Agreement

Contracts

Contacts

Connection Objects

POD

539,606 (Fix 50 plus accounts manually)

867,895 (100 plus issues with contract)

1,211,574 (no issues)

245,677 (no issues)

425,646 (no issues)

Go-Live

Estimated Replication Time 22 Hours Completed in 19 Hours

Post Go-Live

300 – 500 Move-In/Transfer/Stop Service 2 to 5 errors ECRMREPL Daily

A collaboration of:

Questions?

Richard Uytdewilligen

Gwinnett County – Project Manager

Richard.Uytdewilligen@gwinnettcounty.com

Alisha Voutas

Gwinnett County – Business Owner

Alisha.Voutas@gwinnettcounty.com

Michael Robinson

Gwinnett County – Utilities consultant

Michael.Robinson@gwinnettcounty.com