Simplify ERP landscape to provide business with agility and better architecture asset reuse.

As this lesson states “For decades, complex distributed enterprise applications have been implemented and integrated. Some of these applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications have attempted to integrate many of the major business functions into one application suite. This has been a dominant application architectural model for many years. Even with ERP systems, we still have the problem of “application stovepipes" or "islands of information" that cause major architectural reuse issues.”

Our organization owns the one of the largest and complicated SAP ERP system. Our ERP system has a long history, starting with several functional systems integrated by ALE (finance & controlling, logistics, maintenance) merged to one ERP system for EU and then merging US and APA ERP systems together. The result of the merge creates a very complex ERP system with a lot of customer specific objects, modifications of programs and data dictionary objects. Additionally there are a lot of unused code lingering in the system, unused customer specific objects, modifications and data dictionary objects.

There are many projects waiting to be implemented in the landscape and many of them being implemented and focusing on the same application, the result is the process complexity and process differentiators (like PID) are increasing.

The consequence of this complexity makes it very difficult to adopt new technology as there is no approach to remove old processes of functions or reengineer processes or functions to come to a global standard or to a core SAP standard without using modifications.

Simplifying and standardizing the SAP ERP landscape has become priority in order to provide business with agility and better architecture asset reuse. Simplifying and standardizing existing SAP landscape will allow system to be migrated to the new SAP HANA platform and adopt new SAP ERP modules. SAP ERP landscape simplification and standardization may require huge effort but benefits will be obvious in a long run.