Tools, Technologies, and Methodologies

SAP Best Practices

For the past three decades, SAP has collaborated with our most successful partners and customers to develop what has become one of our key packages, SAP Best Practices, a source of knowledge informed by our proven expertise and values and provided to our customers without surcharge.

In applying our best practices, your organization can access the content and the methodologies you need to cost-effectively implement our technology. Our best practices can help you control costs, reduce risk, and drive more value from your SAP solutions.

With SAP Best Practices, you can benefit from:

• A proven methodology that leverages a reusable prototype approach to implementation.
• Thoroughly documented scenarios that detail both business and technical perspectives.
• Proven pre-configurations for SAP solutions.
• Guidelines for adapting SAP techniques to meet your organization’s specific requirements, and using those techniques to develop customized SAP or other hosted solutions.

To best accommodate your organization’s particular organizational and operational performance, we have developed distinct packages of SAP Best Practices for the a range of industries:

• Apparel and footwear
• Automotive
• Chemicals
• Consumer durables
• Consumer products – food and beverage
• Dealer business management
• Discrete manufacturing
• Engineering, construction & operations
• Fabricated metals
• High tech
• Home and personal care
• Industrial machinery & components
• Logistics service providers
• Media
• Medical devices
• Mining
• Pharmaceuticals
• Primary steel
• Public sector
• Retail
• Services industries
• Software providers
• Telecommunications
• Utilities
• Water utilities
• Wholesale distribution

We have also produced cross-industry packages of SAP Best Practices that address the demands of planning and implementing numerous business functions:

• Baseline package
• Business intelligence
• Business planning and consolidation
• Business process management
• Customer relationship management
• E-commerce with SAP ERP
• Enablement kit
• Governance, risk, and compliance
• Human capital management
• IAS/IFRS
• Lean baseline package
• Mobile asset management
• Portals
• Supply chain management
• Strategy management

In 2004, the Ludwigshafen University of Applied Sciences surveyed 192 companies – representing a wide range of industries, worldwide – that had recently implemented SAP software solutions with built-in industry best practices. Based on the combination of questionnaires and follow-up phone interviews, the study found that SAP Best Practices helped:

• Decrease the effort needed to conduct mission-critical project tasks, such as configuration, documentation, testing, and training. On average, the use of SAP Best Practices helped reduce overall project risk by 71% when compared with other software implementations.
• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO). On average, the use of SAP Best Practices helped lower TCO by 11%. One company reported that, compared to conventional implementations, it deployed its ERP system 40% faster and lowered TCO by more than 53%.

The study has been published by SAP Press in a book, "Enhanced Project Success Through SAP Best Practices – International Benchmarking Study," ISBN 1-59229-031-0.

SAP Best Practices packages can help organizations of all types achieve their potential. Learn more about the following:

• SAP Best Practices for Business Intelligence – Provides you with predefined scenarios to help you efficiently manage business intelligence (BI) initiatives.
• SAP Best Practices for Mobile Asset Management – This application will provide your field service technicians with the access they need to instantly update work orders and share equipment information via their mobile devices, access that enables them to load data from various back-end applications without the need for back-end systems. The result is faster service and reduced downtime.
• SAP Best Practices for Portals – Offers documentation, portal content, and a step-by-step approach to deployment of valuable business scenarios using SAP NetWeaver Portal.