It was one of those things that must have sounded like a good idea at the time. But facing a major upgrade of its core SAP environment, Victorian electricity distributor Powercor last year found itself facing a mountain of issues -- and riding a steep learning curve to testing management -- after an abortive go-live effort stalled its major systems upgrade.
The company had been using SAP R/3 since 1997, and it "was extremely stable", according to Stephen Comer, Powercor's manager for SAP development. Comer told recent attendees at Eventful Management's Mastering SAP Technologies conference that Powercor had "no unplanned outages for three to four years" and it was "only getting around 70 helpdesk calls per month".
To ensure the system remained new enough to stay covered by SAP support, however, Powercor realised by 2003 that they needed to upgrade their environment. Three years of lobbying finally paid off last year, when the IT team got management go-ahead for a far-reaching project to update the company's core systems from R/3 version 4.6b to SAP ECC6, which combines mySAP ERP 2005 and the mySAP NetWeaver framework.
... to try and pull out a big lot of money for something that seems to be working OK is a bit difficult at times.
James Rennick, manager of SAP Corporate Business Services
To complicate the project further, the decision to simultaneously upgrade the company's Oracle database; SAP Business Warehouse; and introduce an SAP based employee self-service (ESS) portal that would improve delivery of information to Powercor employees, and the more than 3000 contractors that regularly work for the company.
"As well as wanting to upgrade, we had strategic ideas around the portal," said James Rennick, manager of SAP Corporate Business Services with Powercor. "We had a real push within the organisation to expand our footprint beyond the firewall, and make it available to customers and employees. We've also been looking at document management aspects and other projects going on at the moment. Coupled with that, the landscape was significantly more complex than in the past."
Where the Sun doesn't shine
Powercor was also facing the looming consolidation of two geographic information systems (GIS), which was expected to consume considerable staff resources for the best part of two years. The SAP upgrade was moved forward to ensure it could be finished in time.
"We are a capital intensive organisation, and to try and pull out a big lot of money for something that seems to be working OK is a bit difficult at times," Rennick said. "Last year we managed to convince [management] we needed it."
Little did the IT team know, however, just what it was getting into. The reason: upon hearing that the SAP upgrade was finally set to go ahead, the company's infrastructure team pushed hard -- and won approval for -- a simultaneous upgrade from Sun Microsystems Solaris 8 operating system to the newer version 10. Powercor runs SAP on Sun's high-end SunFire F15K server, with development and testing handled on Sun Fire V480 Servers.
Changing operating systems is never easy. However, the team went forward with it, introducing Solaris 10 into the SAP test and development environment.
The SAP modules rolled out quite smoothly, in large part thanks to a project management mentality that was strictly focused on keeping the implementation plain-vanilla. "It's not far from correct to say you needed authorisation from the current head of state of the country before you got approval for modifications," Comer laughed.
However, it wasn't long before the project hit the wall.
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