The concept of Enhancement Packages (Enhancement Package Framework, abbreviated EhPs) is simply brilliant. However, considering how long SAP — the standard software provider for business software par excellence — took to establish this software logistics discipline, we can no longer speak of brilliance. What the absence of this framework has cost customers up to now is something every customer should calculate for themselves.
From a software logistics perspective, SAP has finally done its homework — but again only with a focus on standard software. The EhPs unfortunately still do not apply to customer implementations. Impact analyses, such as those provided by Intellicorp and Panaya for the largest investments in an SAP implementation, are nonexistent.
What does this mean for SAP customers who have already made the move to EhPs (prerequisite: SAP NetWeaver 7.0)? For those not yet on SAP NW 7.0, the conventional SAP upgrade remains a prerequisite.
Technical basis: The corresponding EhPs can be deployed time-neutrally, meaning the physical effort remains, but the direct temporal dependency on business-technical follow-up work is decoupled.
Business technical: In a first step (preparation), all additional requirements for new functionality delivered by SAP in the EhP must be collected. Based on these, a competing analysis of the configured baseline (ALM — investment protection) must be carried out, along with an evaluation of new functionality. Only through this analysis can the impact of a business-technical EhP deployment be determined. Activating individual business switches makes the impact analysis even more demanding — it is now necessary to evaluate which transaction areas are actually used in the organization.
Conclusion: The time-consuming determination, implementation and testing of new business functionality remains the same, if not increased by additional complexity. The temporal decoupling of the technical EhP deployment may save time — but this time savings should at minimum be reinvested in impact analysis to avoid the risk of production outages.
Leave a Reply