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 gain several benefits:

• 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 for using these techniques to develop customized SAP and non-SAP 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
• Consumer products & wholesale industries
• Dealer business management
• Discrete manufacturing
• Electronic & components manufacturing
• Fabricated metals
• Home and personal care
• Industrial machinery & components
• Logistics service providers
• Media
• Mining
• Pharmaceuticals
• Primary steel
• Public sector
• Retail
• Semiconductor & photovoltaic companies
• Services industries
• Software providers
• Telecommunications
• Utilities
• Water utilities

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 warehousing
• Customer relationship management
• Data migration
• E-commerce with SAP ERP
• Enablement kit
• Governance, risk, and compliance
• Human capitial management
• 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. From the questionnaires and follow-up phone interviews, the researchers found that SAP Best Practices helped these companies in two ways:

• Decreased the effort needed to conduct mission-critical project tasks (i.e., configuration, documentation, testing, and training): By using SAP Best Practices, the surveyed companies reduced – on average – overall project risk by 71% when compared with other software implementations.
• Lowered total cost of ownership (TCO): By using SAP Best Practices, the surveyed companies lowered – on average – 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%.

This 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 organizations with the predefined, reusable scenarios that can help them outline step-by-step, adaptable procedures for managing and implementing their business intelligence (BI) initiatives – efficiently and cost-effectively, by quickly developing prototypes that help decision makers collect, integrate, organize, interpret, and analyze business-critical information