Positive Experience with Change Request Management Enterprise Support Academy

[TammyPowlas]

I participated in this Expert Guided Implementation last week but I made several mistakes I thought I would share.  First the Enterprise Support Academy helps you with your prototypes and is available to Enterprise Support Customer.  I used it to help set up Change Request Management 7.1 SP11 in a demo-like landscape, but the course covered SP08.

Day 1 is making sure your system is set up correctly and the OSS connections work - no issues here.

Day 2 is about making sure SOLMAN_SETUP is working, and the LMDB SM59 connections.  This was my first mistake; our landscape previously had the RFC connections set up with SMSY; I thought these would work fine with 7.1 but I didn't bother checking them.

Day 3 is the key day, making sure your configuration is setup for your Change Request Management workflow.  Because I didn't check the RFC's from Day 2, I was struggling getting the connections to work.  I managed to get the connections to work with Dev>QA but not to production:

These errors continued to haunt me into Thursday:

I managed to get the urgent workflow working from Day 3 on Day 4 (just from DEV to QA) but I couldn't get the normal change workflow to work.  Fortunately the EGI instructor was very patient and explained I really need to get all the RFC connections to work.  She offered to help, but I managed to get them to work.

Then to get the normal workflow change to work, the EGI instructor spent time with me using Adobe Connect.  I could share my screen.  She helped determine I was missing some authorizations and then we got the normal change workflow to work.

Day 4 was optional configuration, and Day 5 was reporting.  I haven't managed to get to the exercises for those two days yet.

Some tips for EGI:

1) Complete the daily exercises - it sounds obvious, but clearly my assumption that I had finished Day 2 haunted me into Day 3 and the rest of the week

2) If you complete the daily exercises, accept help

3) Use the ramp-up knowledge transfer materials to supplement the EGI - the recordings at service.sap.com/rkt-solman helped me get through some of the experiences.

This is a great offering from SAP Support and I thank my EGI instructor last week, Maria Kraynova.