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SAP Upgrade Planned for November

Janet Snover

As you may have heard, MIT plans to upgrade our financial management software, SAP, to a new release in November 1999. The primary reason is to take advantage of technical improvements in the software. In addition, the new release will position MIT to ultimately move more functions onto the Web.

One reason for MIT’s original decision to purchase a commercial package rather than doing our own development was the advantage of having access to improvements in the software, such as additional functions and increased operating speed, as they become available. MIT is currently on release 3.0 of SAP, and over the Veterans’ Day weekend (November 11-14) we will upgrade the servers to SAP release 4.5. Please note that the SAP environment, including SAPweb, will not be available during the switchover. The Procurement Department will issue suggestions about ways to purchase emergency supplies during that weekend.

People who use the SAP GUI (graphical user interface) have been downloading it onto their desktops since it became available earlier in the fall. (The 4.5 GUI is backward compatible, so it will work with the 3.0 server version of SAP that MIT is currently running.)

The upgrade will provide both performance improvements, such as speeding the operation of the system, and maintenance utilities that will allow operations staff to do their work more quickly and accurately. The upgrade also will allow MIT to consider using new SAP functions, such as its travel process. Currently, our travel system uses customized code that was written at MIT. By taking advantage of SAP standard software in place of custom code, MIT can save maintenance costs, provide a more stable system, and reap the benefits of enhancements that SAP makes over time.

GUI users will see some minor differences between our current release and the new one, but there will be no changes for SAPweb users at MIT. Although fewer than 10 faculty members are regular users of the GUI, many of you supervise employees who use it in their work. Since the changes in the new release are minor, training is optional. Financial Systems Services (FSS) has recommended, however, that GUI users attend a one-hour demonstration to see the differences. Then they can decide if they need to sign up for training. (Users have received information about the dates and times for the demonstrations, as well as which computer platform – PC or Mac – will be shown.)

About 800 people at MIT use SAPweb exclusively and about 1,300 people use the GUI. (SAPweb also is used by 550 of the GUI users for purchasing transactions.) Approximately three-quarters of the 1,300 GUI users work in the departments, labs, and centers of MIT, and the other one-quarter work in central areas, such as the Controller’s Accounting Office, Procurement, Facilities, etc.

There have been a number of SAP releases since 3.0, and the more releases that we skip, the more changes we will have to absorb in order to do an upgrade. In the future, we expect that periodic upgrades will be part of the normal course of events at MIT. However, the timing of upgrades and the communication about them will be carefully considered by the Administrative Systems and Policies Coordinating Council (ASPCC).

ASPCC was formed by Executive Vice President John R. Curry to review proposed administrative changes and to ensure that they are introduced in a coordinated and appropriately paced manner. I believe that one of the many lessons learned from MIT’s Reengineering project was the importance of pacing changes so that members of the community don’t feel overwhelmed. We didn’t do a very good job of that during reengineering, but we’re trying hard to get it right as we go forward.

I’m a member of ASPCC and recently told the rest of the group that my alternative name for it is: the Administrative Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Community. They laughed, but there’s some truth in that name.

And even though we don’t expect that end users will have difficulty with the new SAP release, ASPCC also has been involved in reviewing the support services for the upgrade. For example, staff members in Financial Systems Services (FSS) and Information Systems (IS) are playing key roles in helping SAP users during the upgrade. The School Coordinators in FSS, who are assigned to specific areas, visit them regularly and also meet with the assistant dean and the administrative officers. The Business Liaison Team in IS assists SAP users who are downloading the GUI onto their desktops and also helps with questions about the new software.

In addition, there has been a lot of communication about the SAP upgrade – perhaps even more than was necessary, given the minimal changes to end users. There have been presentations, e-mail announcements, articles, and information on the Web. If you have suggestions about how we can improve an upgrade process even more in the future, I’d love to hear them.

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