Functional or Technical Upgrade in SAP

Functional or Technical upgrade in SAP is required to renew the SAP system, offer rich functionality to its users and meet the requirements of marketplace. Since the requirements of the customers are dynamic, it sometimes becomes essential for the firms to enhance their quality of service, offer inventive solutions and make a new business replica.

Role played by SAP AG

When the business globe changes, SAP builds up fresh releases of its ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning software to lodge the organization's developing business requirements and helps it to remain competitive.

Steps to be followed for SAP upgrades

1. Preliminary Planning - For early plans, set up a copy of representative prolific software to attain information for further planning, effort estimations, cost & impact analysis. For each and every software system, carry out another exam upgrade by forming a project system from the replica of software. Working with these project systems will dish up as a test drive for most of the tasks, like unit testing & application adjustments, before the actual project gets upgraded.

2. Preparation of system and patch upgrade at stack level - In this step, SAP support pack is required to be installed up to a specific minimum level. To promote it to SAP ERP version 6.0, one may be required to alter operating system, hardware & database platform and carry out a Unicode conversion.

3. Preparation and planning - Business or functional process individuals are required to assess the alteration adjustments and make these alterations to reapply changes in objects. They must carry out a functional SAP test of the latest upgrade to validate whether all the business processes are able to run properly or not.

4. System up-gradation - SAP supplies all altered objects which are re-transported (in support pack or upgrade) in change of transactions SPDD and SPAU. These transactions aid the clients to find out which objects were altered. Objects altered according to an old system should be manually maintained when upgrades have been run. Use SPAU and SPDD transactions to select the objects and alter them manually.

5. Upgrade adaptations for current business procedures - Many a times, there is no requirement to alter customization settings for current business procedures. However, sometimes, it is required to ensure that standard functions of SAP and existing business procedures run properly.

6. Testing - This phase is the most important in SAP upgrades. There are many tools available to plan and execute tests in a cost effective and streamlined way. They assist in organizing various test cases and offer transparency on automated and manual test cases by documenting them according to the existing business processes. Such test cases can be utilized for unit tests or for integration and regression testing in the whole project of SAP upgrade.