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Ten Key Considerations for Your First SAP HANA Project

Alison Bessho
Director, HANA Solutions

Contents
Optimal Solutions At-a-Glance Ten Key Considerations for Your First SAP HANA Project Contact Information

At-A-Glance

Founded in 1995 based in Dallas, TX

Award-winning SAP consulting firm, focused 100% on SAP planning, implementation and support Premier SAP Consulting Partner; Gold-Level SAP All-in-One/Business Objects Partner; RunSAP certified Exclusive sponsor of the ASUG Executive Exchange 900+ highly-skilled SAP consultants/architects worldwide

Dallas Chicago Austin Washington Atlanta

San Francisco Philadelphia Bangalore Toronto Munich

Practice Statistics
Global Headcount 2012 Revenue SAP Clients in 2012 900+ $150M 250

SAP Certified Architects & Consultants


Average SAP Experience/Consultant Average SAP Solution Architects Experience

100+
9 Years 16 years

Were the largest pure-play SAP firm in the world.

Ten Key Considerations for Your First SAP HANA Project

Find the Right Business Use Case


Wow your customer! Deliver significant improvement to a business challenge and provide new insights and knowledge Introduce new capability that the business was unable to achieve previously

Start with a small initiative that will:

Introduce SAP HANA to the IT team and develop their skills and expertise
Build the foundation for SAP HANA expansion and further value

Cases that Can Benefit Significantly


Business Analytics - Financial and operational data - Customer and marketing data - SKU and inventory levels BW on HANA for faster reporting, analytics, transactions New SAP solutions + HANA: CRM, BPC, Predictive Analytics Custom applications + HANA built by SAP or third-parties Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS) created to address a specific performance challenge or complexity

Develop High-Level Architecture

Consider and determine:


Data sources ETL tools New applications (if applicable) Analytics tools (if applicable) Frequency and timing of: Data updates Data access

Finalize the Environment Plan


Consider a POC with a reliable integration partner Partner with your preferred hardware vendor to deploy HANA in-house Evaluate in-cloud solutions with Amazon or SAP Think about the number of environments you need:

Several SAP HANA environment options:

Develop, test, produce

Remember disaster recovery or HA needs

Determine Hardware Appliance Needs

Consider size of:


Production SAP HANA appliance

Development and test environments


HA and backup/recovery needs

Determine Hardware Appliance Needs

Where do you begin?


Work with your SI and SAP to estimate the amount of data to be stored in HANA Remember: aggregation tables not needed Only store data critical to business challenge Archive/purge non-critical data

Work with your HW partner to finalize the appliance architecture

Contract for SAP HANA Software

Work with your System Integrator or SAP account representative to determine software licensing needs.

Identify Your Project Team


Project manager

Key positions may include:

HANA architect /data modeler


ETL team Data source extract developers

New application developers


Report/analytics developers HANA administrator Test team SAP members & SI partner members Business users for requirements, design & UAT

Coordinate HANA Training for IT Team

Obtain training from SAP or your integration partner. Training is available in many formats:
Online tutorials Classroom training

Customized training

Coordinate HANA Training for IT Team

Critical areas covered:


Introduction to SAP HANA Data services: replication (SLT) and integration SQL on HANA

Data modeling
BW on HANA Application training

Identify Performance Metrics

Important to measure speed and capability of the HANA solution:

Create queries or reports in legacy databases to serve as a benchmark for HANA queries/reports
Monitor and record the processing time of similar IT services for comparison Collaborate with the business to understand their expectations

Identify Testing Methodology

Think about test approach related to:


Quality and accuracy of data loaded into HANA Speed time of data load processes HANA processing speed determine if any fine-tuning is needed for the data model Application functionality (if applicable) Data volume testing requirements

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Gather Business Requirements

Meet with your business partners to gather organizational requirements:


Challenge business to think outside the box and focus on just whats done today Remember: the power of SAP HANA lies in its ability to process data very quickly and introduce new, unexpected insights to the business!

Thank you!
Alison Bessho
Director, HANA Solutions Alison.Bessho@optimalsol.com Cell: 303-475-0649

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