RBE Plus for SAP Solution Manager 

IBIS: Mister Hulsebosch what is the goal of your customers with applying SAP Solution Manager in combination with RBE Plus?            
Hulsebosch: The main reason to advice our customers to use the Solution Manager in their projects is continuity by guarantying knowledge - example follows - and realize important cost savings by working more efficiently and effectively. In our market we frequently meet experienced SAP customers, which have not started yet a Solution Manager program. Most of the time these customers are not very fond of the substantial investments of such a Solution Manager project. At that moment we bring in the RBE Plus suite to analyze the actual usage of their SAP system and on the other hand we show the customer immediately the possibilities of the Business Process Repository in Solution Manager via the RBE upload.                 

IBIS: Mister Hulsebosch, how is the starting position in your projects? Can you rely on available documentation? 
Hulsebosch: There are good examples, but most of the time there is a lack of documentation or the descriptions have been too fragmented, outdated and distributed in several systems. So it's always a challenge to discover the real truth, whereby we rarely find an actual Blueprint description. A reliable Blueprint recording in Solution Manager is the by Uphantis advised foundation for further usage of new or improved functionality. In the meant upgrade project the customer was persuaded by the RBE ó Solution Manager combination to start recording their Blueprint on regular semi-automated basis.

IBIS: Mister Hulsebosch you meanwhile order on regular basis more IBIS consultancy support in your projects. What is the reason for that approach?
Hulsebosch: We discovered in the discussions during assigning of the used transactions to the right place in the Business Process Repository (BPR), that this process accelerated dramatically with the help of RBE Plus and the IBIS-experts. The IBIS-experts play with the BPR and they can explain the (also hidden) consequences of good or bad assignments. Combined with the Uphantis knowledge of our customer processes and the support of the customer process owners we decreased the proposed effort enormously. The time we saved in this way was very welcome for extra knowledge transfer. Especially the interaction between the process steps and processes within the Business Process Repository had our interest. With allocations of some more IBIS consultancy days we wanted to know how the connections are between the new functionality in the higher SAP version in relation to the existed basis Blueprint structure, according as former Solution Manager functionality.

IBIS: Mister Hulsebosch can we formulate it as follows, that you want to take care that your consultancy team will getting acquainted with the methodology and techniques of the Solution Manager, besides the explained build-up of the Blueprint structure with the support of RBE Plus?
Hulsebosch: Yes, nowadays Solution Manager is a must in a SAP landscape. The challenge is to create new differences comparing with our competitors. The IBIS-suite will help us hereby to investigate what the real status is of a new SAP environment. After we checked such a landscape with concrete RBE Plus figures, we have reliable insights to make an attractive proposal for our customers. With this method we are able to decrease the initial IT implementation costs. Investment space remains for the customer to really optimize his processes by supporting their employees with change management projects.

IBIS: What's your impression of the project after a year? Do you obtain the goals for your customer?
Hulsebosch: After the workshops with the IBIS colleagues in October 2008 we had a perfect starting point for the real upgrade. Based on the RBE Plus facts we were able to decrease the impact-research effort to an absolute minimum. In that way the functional consultants could continue their other development work for the customer parallel to the upgrade project. We also limited the needed freeze period drastically. The RBE Plus business-case was persuading money saving. The build-up of the Blueprint with RBE Plus was a very positive strike in our project and the Steering Committee was very satisfied with this approach and the result of their upgrade project.