Maintenance and upgrades in Business ByDesign

01.09.2016

When wishing to use a reliable and modern system, we are often confronted with the issue of how to achieve it. Some ERP solutions need to be painstakingly updated, especially if they have been implemented as an individual solution and hence cannot benefit from a universal update. This circumstance entails an immense cost issue for the users of such systems.

Things also get tricky if system performance begins to fail. The programming knowledge of internal or external employees is called for here. However, if these individuals are absent or unable through vacation or illness, the troubleshooting will simply take too long. The ERP system then tends to be more of a burden than a support for business processes.

To avoid a preprogrammed nervous breakdown in these cases, maintenance, software corrections and upgrades are performed in Business ByDesign. The system administrators are notified by mail about the next pending date, so they can make appropriate planning arrangements. In addition, every company has its own maintenance schedule in the Service-Control-Center work center, in which these schedules are noted. The dates schedules for test systems can also be viewed here.

Upgrades are generally carried out at night, when as few users as possible are working productively in the system. Every system undergoes an upgrade once every three months, this involving improvements and new features in individual processes. These occur in all areas such as CRM, SCM, FIN and offer greater user comfort in regard to functions, reports, output settings and process logic. All changes are documented by SAP via an upgrade log and made available for each user. The user usually learns about the precise changes via a pop-up when logging in entitled “What’s new?”.

Maintenance and software corrections have a similar purpose, although they are executed on a smaller data level and with greater regularity. They serve to keep the system permanently accessible and consistent. It is also possible to perform a short-term software correction if the planned schedule for the software correction is too far ahead and minor inconsistencies in the process logic are to be remedied in advance.

Upgrades, maintenance and software corrections are generally carried out in a wave system. This means that all systems of a server are updated in the same timeframe. Users of a SAP private cloud can schedule upgrades according to their own time plan, as they are not affected by the existence of further systems.

The structured maintenance and upgrade measures in Business ByDesign clearly reveal its advantages:

• no more ad-hoc programming,
• proactive instead of reactive,
• the system undergoes remote maintenance and does not require any expensive personnel deployment on site,
• they are already included in the full scope of the licenses!

With that said, users of SAP Business ByDesign can count on an inexpensive, high-performance and reliable ERP solution.