Basic Concept of Global ASAP

The basic concept of Global ASAP is to map all activities not taking place at a local level onto a special structure called the Global Roadmap. This roadmap is then optimally linked to the roll-out roadmaps for the projects at the local level. The goal is to have a preconfigured central system – in the form of one or many templates – and to roll it out locally as often as necessary.

A preconfigured global system, in the sense of a "global template" is the sum of all common group-specific customizing settings, models, individual templates, etc. These are included in one R/3 System as the sole source of reference for productive systems on the global (that is, corporate headquarters) and local levels (individual companies and plants).

Fig. xx: Rollout in local units of various sizes

In contrast to the existing AcceleratedSAP Roadmap, which only supports one implementation strategy, Global ASAP must support various R/3 implementation strategies, which may contain different methods situated at a very high level, such as:

• Creation of a global reference system with group-wide standards and partial functionality being defined at this level.
• Extensive mapping of all group units in the reference system, for the subsequent complete rollout
• Creation of a global template from a template system in order to roll back the software to the local units
• Implementation of distributed R/3 systems at the same time as the creation and the rollout of a global template

Furthermore, Global ASAP must also support strategies for implementing R/3 in various local and distributed R/3 systems, as well as support the planning and execution of concurrent projects. Almost all global customers are having to deal with the topic of distributed systems. For this reason, the Global Roadmap contains accelerators for distributed processes as well as test and productive system topologies. The prerequisite for an implementation strategy with distributed processes and global templates is the standardization of organizational units, groupwide processes and data.

Managing changes is critical in global implementations. This refers not only to the correct communication of change procedures but also to the implementation of change management procedures.

The communication of changes in global implementations basically involves the same issues as in regular ASAP change management. For this reason, please refer to the section on Change Management in the Chapter AcceleratedSAP.