Project Preparation - During Project Preparation eCentron's team professionals will help your team decide on the upgrade approach, define the scope of the project, assess the organizational change impact and review key project attributes. The deliverables of this collaboration will determine the resources needed for the project, the schedule and tasks that will accomplish the project goals, and how the completed system will perform.

System Design - This phase of the methodology is executed only when following the functional upgrade approach. This will identify new system functionality and define the business procedures around that functionality. During the system design phase eCentron's business professionals will help develop detailed requirements and specifications.

System Modification - During system modification eCentron's team will perform the initial upgrade and then iterate subsequent upgrades with business process and end to end testing. They will set up and review environments, make configuration and customization changes to implement the new functionality. Perform unit testing and rework configuration, interfaces, and reports as problems are identified during testing.

Test and Training - During testing and training our team of professionals will cycle through the business processes to assess system functionality, find problems and propose solutions if necessary. This process is continued until all the bugs are identified and resolved and all processes run cleanly. Once a clean test is executed, we can then move to implementation and support.

System performance testing is also conducted to determine if tuning is required. Upgrade tuning occurs at two levels. First, tuning can be performed to optimize the speed at which the actual upgrade is executed. Second, the entire system can be tuned to improve performance after the upgrade. This usually relates to new or changed functionality.

Implementation and Support - During implementation and support, eCentron's team of professionals will work to cut the client over to the new version of SAP. Many clients have requirements to support processing for some time after the actual upgrade. As we better understand the areas affected by the upgrade and their individual requirements, we can better plan the detailed cut over approach and time needed for post-implementation support. Note that although the cut-over is executed here, it is planned some time before the actual event. The cut-over is the most important part of the upgrade. Failure at this point is not an option.

There are many tasks and deliverables associated with each of the steps mentioned above. Let eCentron's team of IT business professionals help you through your next upgrade and deliver a smooth problem free installation. eCentron looks forward to the opportunity to serve you.