How To Estimate Your SAP BW Project Durations
Most customers want and need a way to estimate how long a SAP BW project will take. SAP BW is implemented following a highly modified version of the SAP ASAP methodology. The biggest difference being the recommendation to have a go-live based on standard business content within 4-8 weeks of the project start.
The SAP ASAP phases and their percent of total project duration break out like this:
- Project Preparation 10%
- Blueprint 30%
- Realization 40%
- Final Preparation 10%
- Going Live 10%
The 4-8 week ‘mini-implementation’ is based on a project which is all SAP R/3 and which has not been highly modified. However, if you are lucky enough to have the possibility of doing a short, mini-implementation based on standard SAP BW Business Content, then you will want to do it. It accomplishes several critical goals:
- Ensures that you have a complete, working SAP Netweaver Environment (which includes the SAP BW and SAP R/3 systems).
- Gets a working deliverable into your business user’s hands within the recommended time-frame of 90 days.
- Allows the BW Consultant to work with the functional consultants to understand what their business process will look like and prevent everything from being pushed to SAP BW.
If you cannot use standard SAP Business Content, there are at least 2 SAP BW estimation rules of thumb I use:
- Business Requirements Analyis including Business Content Check Per Business Area=10 Days
(including meetings, note consolidation, research, validation, possibly activation). Multi-Location, Multi-Entity projects tend to be much longer.
- Modeling and Development of an InfoCube=5-7 Days
- Query Development=3-4 Days
- Web Application Development=3-7 Days and up
- User Acceptance Testing=3-10 Days
- End-User Training and Delivery=3-10 Days (Logistics, i.e., locations, drive this)
Why does it take this long? Because the system is very complicated, from the stand-point of sheer breadth of scope of the system as you can see in our BW Mindmap.
These estimates do not really work in those cases where SAP BW will be an open hub source system or part of an integration scenario in the case of SAP CRM, APO, SCM, SEM, MDM or external system scenarios.
Need help estimating your SAP BW project? Just click on the link. Need to explore SAP BW more to learn more of what it has to offer. Download our BW mindmap.
Thanks
Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP
President, SAP BW Consulting, Inc.
E-Mail: Lonnie.Ayers@SAPBWConsulting.com
