Even with all their ready-to-be-released power, SAP application solutions require planning. Specifications for SAP implementations must still document business needs and act as a vehicle to gain consensus before deployment. Unfortunately, the specification tools that ship with SAP are difficult to use and understand for business people, leading to only partial understanding on the final result.

Historically, defining gaps in SAP has been a time consuming and risky proposition. These gaps are often the root of project delays and failures; most often caused by the fact that business people don’t know that they want until they see and interact with SAP. Text requirements, screen shots, use cases and flow diagrams just don’t cut it.

The resulting blueprint phase of these projects can take months to complete, but that’s just the beginning. The remainder of the project will take months or years to complete, and could be significantly delayed beyond this if the gaps (i.e. extensions) were not defined properly up front. All of these extensions have to be incorporated into the overall SAP application by the developers and a poor design can be disastrous to the entire solution (not just the extensions).

To make matters worse, it’s difficult for developers to interpret these documents, which lead to further delays and difficulty in leveraging outsourcing partners.

For the first time there’s a solution. iRise has developed iRise for SAP, a comprehensive visualization platform for visualizing extensions to SAP before coding. Using pre-packaged simulation templates of SAP Netweaver-based applications included in iRise for SAP combined with the powerful iRise visualization platform, SAP business analysts are able to quickly iterate proposed SAP extensions directly with business stakeholders that exactly mimic the look, feel and full behavior of the system.

Business people can then verify their needs by interacting with the visualization directly. Developers leverage the visualization as a clear and unambiguous visual specification for what to build; there’s simply no confusion. And they are able to deliver a system that meets the needs of the business, the first time.

Benefits:

• Dramatically reduces blueprint phases by accelerating time to understanding
• Engages the business with full function simulations that mimic the final system
• Takes the risk out of global sourcing by delivering an exact replica of proposed extensions that everyone can understand
• Empowers the SAP business analyst with a modern requirements approach
• Eliminates costly rework
• Enables training, documentation and enablement to get a jump start on their deliverables