Summary: Are you in the midst of an SAP R/3 upgrade or implementing SAP R/3 from scratch? Are you prepared to perform all the activities and tasks that are concomitant with the various SAP testing phases? The author identifies testing risks and shares lessons learned from testing SAP R/3. The author provides insights and recommendations for avoiding these testing risks that could halt SAP testing efforts and consequently delay the expected deployment of SAP into a live production environment. The insights range from documenting test cases to working with testing artifacts from the ASAP methodology.

Title: Lessons Learned from Testing SAP R/3

SAP R/3 is the market leader in ERP installations and ERP sales. SAP has thousands of tables, multiple industry specific solutions, thousands of transactions, and connectivity to an unlimited number of legacy systems. Furthermore SAP can be configured differently from one company to another which creates a myriad of permutations for executing an SAP transaction. Installing and customizing SAP is a daunting challenge. Testing SAP R/3 is in and of itself another intractable challenge.

Many projects fail to test SAP correctly and consequently suffer staggering financial loses after deploying SAP into a live environment. The key to maximizing the value and ROI of SAP is to install and customize SAP correctly based on the documented requirements and to test it extensively based on the documented test cases and end-to-end business scenarios. Below some lessons learned are offered and identified to help organizations test SAP.

1. Not following methodology or No methodology at all
   
Some companies implementing SAP adhere to the ASAP methodology. Other companies have ad-hoc or ASAP-like methodologies for implementing SAP.

Even companies that are supposedly implementing SAP based on the ASAP methodology are not very strict and stringent in adhering to all the activities, deliverables, and tasks associated with ASAP. Consequently, but not surprisingly these companies have much confusion, obfuscation, befuddlement when they attempt to implement SAP. Compounding this problem is the fact that many large companies implementing SAP hire two or more implementation partners and multiple subcontractors that have incompatible approaches, methodologies, and lessons learned for implementing SAP.

The project manager and the steering committee should specify within the project charter how SAP will be implemented and what deliverables will be produced based on either ASAP or some other proprietary methodology. The objective is to have defined, proven, and repeatable processes for implementing SAP and that the project members have the knowledge or know-how for adhering to the methodology. The creation of an audit team or standards team would be helpful in enforcing compliance with the chosen methodology.