The client is a leading worldwide distributor of scientific equipment, supplies, chemicals, and furniture. Through a combination of strategic alliances with the world’s most respected manufacturers and continuous improvement of systems and services, they supply hundreds of thousands of products to the scientific community on time, every time.

The current Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) application was extended to Europe to enable implementation of Access Risk Analysis (ARA) and Emergency Access Management (EAM) with accurate reporting despite original System Integrator (SI) missteps.

Key Challenges

The goal was to take the current GRC application and extend it to Europe to allow the company to implement ARA and EAM for that region. This would enable the company to produce regular, accurate reports to monitor and manage user access to its SAP ECC environment. The client initially engaged an SI, but the SI provided incorrect advice, therefore small changes that should take less than one hour to fix were taking the SI days, sometimes weeks to complete. The configuration for Europe was not set up correctly and, as a result, the system was not being populated with the necessary data, making it unable to produce reports. Even if the tables were populated, they continued to produce blank or inaccurate reports because the batch jobs were either not scheduled, not scheduled in the right order, or executed incorrectly. The system was also running an older support pack that did not address the
system functionality or enhancements ranging from SP12 – SP21. Segregation of Duties (SOD’s) rulesets were not customized to fit the business, and the customization that had been done disabled the required rulesets, which forced the system to create reports stating inaccurate results.

Solution

Planet Technology’s contractors helped the client build and configure a replica working system based on the old version. They then researched all available support packs to find the most current and appropriate that would address and fix all the bugs in the system. By building the replica working system based on the old version, Planet Technology produced the evidence that demonstrated to the client that the system was not configured correctly. This justified why they needed to upgrade to a more recent service pack. After the service pack upgrade, Planet Technology’s contractors configured GRC so that it could be tested to produce an enhanced operational system and produce accurate reports.

Results

• Effective Upgrade, Accurate Reports: Upgraded system that worked correctly and produced accurate reports.
• SAP-Tuned Performance: Minimally customized system that performs based on SAP best practices
• 9X Data Capture Improvement: Improvement in data capture from less than 10% to more than 90%. The remaining 10% was fixed in later edition Service Packs.
• Improved ECC User Access Control: Better management of ECC user access control for Europe.

Photo Credit: Canva