Global operating companies with subsidiaries in many different countries over the world all facing problems implementing SAP solutions. The system need to support different languages, units of measure, interfaces to local non-SAP systems etc. The company need to decide to use a central server supporting worldwide the company’s operation or to use a decentralized SAP software landscape, to use 1 or more clients or to implement Unicode. The support strategy for the head quarter and their subsidiaries needs to be decided. Besides these technical aspects the company need to decide about their business process implementation strategy. During the last 10 years the so-called “Template Rollout approach” has been widely accepted by companies implementing SAP software solutions in their different country systems. ACSU informed the SAP community with this seminar about the SAP Rollout strategy of one of it’s member companies and gave an introduction to the SAP Solution Manager, a tool which can support the template implementation of SAP solutions, monitor the whole SAP solution landscape of a company as well as support the enduser/keyuser with a service & help desk for the after Go-Live support strategy.

Mr. Schoenberner (Rittal Electro-Mechanical Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.) presented a case study of the company’s global SAP template implementation in Rittal China. Mr. Hadobas (XIT-cross information technologies; Austria) introduced the features of the SAP Solution Manager, followed by a Live demonstration of Solution Manager by Mr. Heil (Hartung Informational Systems). The new SAP SM workplaces and their customization and daily usage had been demonstrated to give the participants a better understanding of the possible implementation in your own SAP system landscape. It included the technical system monitoring, business process monitoring the help desk and other functionalities.

After the demonstration of the SAP Solution Manager a lively discussion was held about it’s features, their usage in distributed SAP systems landscape and for the support strategy. One benefit of its implementation– but not the only one – is the generation of the “Early watch Alerts report”, which otherwise need to be purchased as a service from SAP. In summary it seemed that at present the Solution Manager is more applicable for the technical and service desk support than for the business process control.