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CPM - Capacity Planning Management - ALM226

Opening session 8:00 AM - Mary Anne Smith

Mary Anne Smith is one of the newest Americas SAP Users Group (ASUG) volunteers, with the team I work with - Business Integration Technology and Infrastructure (BITI), and as it turns out, has a very similar role at her work.  Mary Anne presented on the methods she uses to keep her company's infrastructure ahead of the business demands.  From QuickSizer to spreadsheets and slides delivered to her management, her tasks are to regularly analyze the uncertain future plans, the existing landscape state, and the trends of the past to more accurately decide on system investments.

Several of her QuickSizer "gotchas" were familiar to me from the projects I have tried to manage through QS.  My favorite quote of hers was "Garbage In, Nuclear Waste Out," denoting the havoc that can be raised if one makes innocent assumptions and mistakes with a modeling tools like QuickSizer.  Instead of estimating system requirements of several thousand SAPs (capacity units), it's quite easy to obtain results of millions of SAPs.

In Early Watch monitoring for system usage, Mary Anne also noted things to look out for, such as timeframes for peak period reporting.  The defaults seem to be several hours of the business day, which may not correspond to your specific business practices.  Mary Anne's reaction was to realize that her users are active around the clock, thus more accurately determining when resources are being squeezed.

Mary Anne demonstrated the communication style she uses to aggregate and summarize a wealth of capacity metrics in order to deliver executive summaries on a regular basis, with the detailed justifications and specific project related root causes for the recommendations.  As I've gone through several iterations of the same workflow, we promised to exchange notes on ways to make this quicker and easier.

During breaks between sessions, I took a quick look at Google wave, to try to see what new features have crept in during the past week of TechEd prep.  A cute application someone developed (not sure who) is a wiki shortcut.  For example, typing:

<wikify phoenix light rail>
waved to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRO_Light_Rail_(Phoenix)

Sustainability

At 11:00, I joined a blogger roundtable chat with SAP's Ranga Boola on sustainability performance management initiatives.  While not part of my full time job, I'm interested in seeing how SAP manages its own operations, as well as the developing product line for environmental responsibility.  The critiques and roadmap that were shared were fascinating, delving into how SAP can anticipate customer requirements, government mandates, and competitive opportunities.  Jon Reed will no doubt have other insights in this area.

Solution Manager (1)

At Noon, I decided to pass on an ASUG volunteer lunch and get together to dive once again into Solution Manager content, as SAP's Evan Stoddard had reserved an expert networking lounge session.  I was surprised that the area was almost empty.  Great opportunity for me to learn more from Evan, but missed opportunities for others.  I'll need to look at the slides from sessions that I missed on the Solution Manager road map, and maybe get Evan to do a webcast on this; here are a few bullet points (OK, a lot) from our chat:

• need a "method and tools" person / ASAP
• blueprinting
• UDA - dependency analyzer (online now, will be in SolMgr later)
• Roadmap?
• End user experience and the BW cubes?
• "EHP5 can't be released without full Solution Manager content"
• Download template library
• E2E training
• "Maintenance strategy released yesterday"
• 2013 7.1 - Dec 2010 (hopefully) / CRM / NW / ITSM / ABAP stack only
• SLD...
• rampup H1 2011
• 3 years
• new CRM doesn't use transaction messages - need new infrastructure.
• SAP ERP for IT.
• For call escalation
• "CPH is toast"
• Monitoring alerts in CPH copied
• longterm merging BI and BO
• Use diagnostic agent
• agents will send to central system.
• "Alerting monitoring infrastructure"

I picked up a couple business cards from peers working with Solution Manager.

Business Warehouse Infrastructure

After lunch, I attended Procter & Gamble's session on their implementation of nearline storage for BW.  They have an astounding 30 TB instance, and while we've not passed 10TB, it won't be long.  Unfortunately by the time I was able to get to the vendor area to learn more about the solution they chose, it was closed for the day.  Hopefully Thursday I'll get time to return.

There is one followup question I need to understand, as the answer given during the Q&A session did not adequately describe the resource growth being mitigated by the nearline storage.

Technology and Operations

At 3:00 I spent a few minutes with IBM's Irene Hopf getting insight into results and analyses of a survey they did on IT intelligent operations.  Unfortunately I ran out of time before the next session started, and the conversation drifted away from answers I tried to get on who survey was targeted to, both from the original question set and from the result set.  If Irene reads this blog, perhaps she can tell the SAP community more.  The sample set was diverse, so the trends aren't simply from a narrow IBM-centric, large customer perspective.

Solution Manager (2)

At 3:15 I attended new SAP Mentor Tony de Thomasis's session on how they use Solution Manager at Australia Post.  While not standing room only, the session was packed; Tony did an awesome job switching from canned slides to live demos of his landscape, only occasionally forgetting to hit the monitor switch.  He made many of the same points we discovered as we've ramped up Solution Manager, including having a sand box for patch practice, making sure agents are running (Mary Anne Smith said the same thing about Early Watch Analyses), and that executive buy-in is the only way to have support for the time required to leverage Solution Manager.

Tony's Solution Manager tips that are my prime takeaways:

• Group by function as well as logically
• DB02, ST06 central views
• Inventory to spreadsheet or HTML

Mobile Technologies

At 4:30, I assisted the Hands On Session on Mobilizing SAP business processes to any device. Stefan Wawrzinek let me practice this earlier in the day, as I don't code within SAP myself (just read other's code, and debug it, and tune it).  The session was completely full, including every observer chair in the back.  I had expected audience questions to be "I'm stuck on the exercise", which happened a bit, though many other topics were brought up to discuss how this application is used in business processes, how devices can be serialized (phone numbers were used as an example, though that doesn't apply to every widget out there).

Some people asked about the data model, and the distribution model.  Stefan's presentation mentioned these, saying they were "assumed" in order to be able to get through a working demo in about an hour of actual hands-on after the presentation and overview.  Valid points, so there is a lot of thinking going on for mobile devices.  I just wish I could get more webcasts and discussions in our ASUG special interest group on Mobile Technologies!

Business cards

(not many Wednesday...)

Balaram Modukuri (business process expert)
Michael Liebeskind (business intelligence infrastructure)
Luis Angulo (solution manager)
Ulrich Scholl (SAP VP)


SCNotties awards

See wiki pages, You Tube, photos below


BPX Slam

See wiki pages, You Tube, tweets

• Process Design Slam TechEd Phoenix Agenda
• Phoenix Collaborative Modeling Google Wave Gravity
• UI and Dashboards
• Design Slam - Implementation Subgroup
• Desert City Utility Plant
• Process Innovation Project Methodology

@rukso

Great to get a shout out from your peers:

http://twitter.com/mepmarcelo/status/4882587414

> RT @jspath55: #bpxslam09 gravity google wave docs - http://bit.ly/jUlkA -> Great work, tnks for sharing !

Appendix

VPN, network lossage (will expand later)

https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/Community/30+seconds+of+recognition

Another Blag and Jim Production!