SAP Templates Consolidation – It’s Well Worth the Project

Template Protection across System Landscapes

In large SAP system landscapes, there will always be inconsistency between the systems through local changes in the course of the lifecycle of SAP applications. This may stir up a lot of trouble for SAP users. SAP Solution Manager, applied professionally, can avoid this. It reduces costs and time expended on interventions – and the responsible people can put their minds at ease. The approach to a protection of SAP Templates by the use of SAP Solution Manager all across a system landscape is described in the blog “SAP Template Distribution – A One Way Street”.

But before company templates on systems in use can be protected, it will be necessary to free them from inconsistency across the different system landscapes. A really company-wide template will have to be created, one that in fact deserves this name. Without an effective template protection, it is often the very first cross-system roll-out which is accountable for inconsistency, caused by local system changes. So before giving some thoughts to the protection of templates, a general template worth being protected needs to be created – a consistent company-wide SAP template consolidated across systems.

How to proceed

With the help of the IntelliCorp and SAP Solution Manager tools, the procedure is as follows:

First, with the help of IntelliCorp IntelliCorp LiveCompare, all systems of the SAP landscapes are examined for inconstistency in the rolled-out templates. The aim is to identify and document all duplications caused by changes and all occurrences of inconsistency across the systems. This allows measures to be developed for the creation and management of an integrative company template, and all change management and roll-out processes involved, including template protection, to be defined and planned.

The next step is to use Solution Manager for realization of these measures. The “real” company template is now defined and implemented as Corporate Template. Subsequently, there will be no possibility to locally change templates that are implemented on the systems.

Summary

In large SAP environments, the roll-out of changes across the system landscape is continuously causing inconsistency between the system templates currently in use. This result is large-scale additional expenses for elimination of faults and quality deficiencies created by the rolling-out of changes. Instead of accepting these problems as inevitable facts, suitable measures and tools can ensure that they cease to exist. This effort is worthwhile and affects areas far beyond IT.

The results from the introduction of protected SAP company templates are very encouraging. They usually allow templates to be beneficially refined and extended later on.

By evaluating the insights gained from the template system analysis, also company-wide customizing tasks can be consolidated. For all SAP objects it can be defined, if and in which way they are – centrally or locally – changed. This is a further step in the direction of a consistent SAP Change and Transport Management all across the system landscape.