3 Ways to Ensure SAP Performance Optimization

For an enterprise to be successful within any industry, it’s no secret that their SAP systems must be secure, efficient, and agile. From car manufacturers to pharmaceutical companies to retail businesses, and more, when SAP systems run smoothly, crucial daily operations and reporting also run smoothly.

SAP software touches virtually every aspect of business management. If performance management of SAP systems is NOT optimized, protected, and monitored, the effects can be disastrous – and costly.

Poor SAP systems optimization can lead to costly downtime. According to Gartner, unplanned IT system downtime can cost $5,600 per minute, or $300,000 per hour. IDC estimates system outages can cost an enterprise between $500,000 to $1 million or more per hour.

Furthermore, if SAP performance optimization isn’t taken seriously as a high priority, unplanned SAP issues will wreak havoc on productivity across the entire enterprise.

Poor system performance can lead to delayed business reporting, end-user frustration and disengagement, delayed manufacturing and delivery, and more.

How to Optimize SAP

Given the huge role that SAP systems play in the day-to-day functions of enterprises, employing automated tools to assist with SAP systems monitoring, testing, and optimization can have a powerful and positive effect on the stability of operations.

Utilizing an SAP performance management system puts your SAP systems in the best possible position to support business-critical operations.

So, how exactly can you use these tools to automatically ensure the highest level of SAP performance optimization? Let’s take a closer look.

1. Get the right information to the right people at the right time.

Your customers, your management, and your colleagues need to be able to easily access, view, and glean information from a powerful SAP performance dashboard.

Since each team member plays a different role and has different responsibilities, he or she may be interested in different parts of the SAP system landscape. In fact, each team member may require their own dashboard customized to their specific informational needs.

A dashboard allows each person to get a quick overview and then dive into what’s important to them at any given time.

While drilling down into different areas is essential, it’s also very important that components of your SAP systems aren’t siloed, giving you a partial and potentially uninformed view into performance. To properly assess the overall health of enterprise SAP systems, utilize a dashboard that empowers enterprises with a holistic, bird’s-eye view to see how different parts are functioning and interacting.

Dashboards allow for diligent, proactive monitoring instead of reactive firefighting, as each team member is plugged into their area of responsibility, ahead of time.

2. Gain granular insight into each system to quickly identify and prevent potential performance issues before they spiral.

In addition to utilizing a dashboard for real-time SAP system performance monitoring, automated tools also need to help you quickly identify potential problems within your SAP landscape for larger issue prevention, or at least early detection of issues while their damage is still minimal.

Early detection of issues is critical, as preparation and resulting action can effectively soften the blow – or in many cases – prevent the damage entirely by dramatically reducing service outages and downtime before they happen.

It’s crucial to utilize predictive analytics to anticipate and prevent potential failures. Predictive analysis uses historical data to predict future events. A predictive model is built using mathematical models that capture historical trends and patterns. That predictive model is then used on current data to predict future trends and to suggest timely actions to take for optimal outcomes

To ensure early detection and optimization of your SAP systems, employ a tool that pings the right people with smart notifications, alerting operators of serious issues, reducing the noise, and increasing the focus on the actual matters that affect your bottom line.

Smart notifications will replace the flood of ‘noise’ notifications that drown out the important ones and combine multiple conditions together. You’ll only be notified about real issues that affect multiple aspects of your SAP systems, including CPU, memory, and specific batch job performance. By grouping individual checks into a ‘scenario’, the monitoring solution intelligently identifies when true issues are occurring.

Finally, proper SAP systems optimization means being equipped with a tool to quickly identify the root causes of issues. Having granular insight via intelligent tools ensures minimal disruptions to the business when problems do arise, allowing for quicker recovery.

3. Remove bottlenecks and time-consuming processes.

In addition to being able to view the right data at the right time, while receiving proactive alerts of potential fires, proper SAP performance optimization involves automating time-consuming processes.

As SAP recommended best-practices involve running daily health and performance checks, and as organizations require their Basis teams to provide performance, SLA, compliance and audit report the amount of manual time-consuming tasks is instrumental, creating a bottleneck that prevents these team focusing on optimizing the system performance and fixing issues.

Another manual intensive aspect of managing SAP systems when running on the public cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) is scaling (out or down) it to fit the changing needs of the system. As the cloud providers don’t have visibility within SAP it creates yet another task for the basis team to monitor system utilization and shut down instances that are not in use so that the underlying cloud auto-scaling tools could work.

Wherever possible, make manual processes automatic. Invest in a solution that dynamically auto-scales SAP systems running on public clouds. Consider using tools that are able to detect the type of systems, application, processes, operating system and database so it can automatically deploys the correct checks and thresholds.

(Not to brag, but did you know that Syslink Xandria named the best vendor for SAP landscapes in a next-generation Application Performance Management (APM) market research? You can download it here)

SAP Performance Optimization Summarized

At the end of the day, the task of optimizing SAP systems is continuous, detailed, and absolutely crucial to the success of an enterprise, regardless of the industry. But that doesn’t mean it has to be done manually.

Automate your SAP performance monitoring to lighten the load so you can focus on preventing and combating the true issues that can lead to costly security breaches and downtime.

Interested in more content related to SAP systems performance optimization?

See SAP optimization in action: View demo