Best Maintenance Practices When You Need to Run SAP on Continuous Basis

Keeping the SAP system up and running around the clock is a challenge that demands great maintenance practices.

An ideal SAP service provider helps you keep your SAP system available 24x7 to meet all business requirements. Following are the best SAP maintenance practices that ensure your SAP systems stay running for a long time without any hitches.

• Break into Sub-applications
  To keep the SAP systems up and running around the clock, a potential solution is to break the entire SAP application into sub-applications. These separate SAP sub-applications, such as Financial Accounting and Production Planning, can run separately in distinct modules. While upgrading or applying a patch to the SAP process, a failure will affect only that sub-application the upgrade or patch was applied to. Running several servers in parallel can help in easier switching back to the unpatched server in case a fix becomes unstable.


• Testing
  Following a test procedure after every update or patchwork is essential for making SAP systems up and running all the time. Failing to test any appendage applied to the SAP systems might result in a long undesired downtime. An ideal SAP service provider like JK Tech, lets you identify the exact modules that require testing after you apply an upgrade or patch.


• Track Changes
  Having good change management is essential for providing better maintenance to SAP systems. Detailed documentation is the first step for achieving good change management. The basic thing to do for this purpose is to review the change management process while considering SAP architecture. For ideal results, an organization running SAP systems needs to make use of a standardized change management process, such as ITIL. Interrogation, which calls for the associated change management personnel to assess the scope of the change and applications the change potentially affects, is vital for keeping an efficient track of changes.


• Use a shadow database
  Running a shadow database is the simplest and effective solution to deal with unplanned SAP failures. A shadow database comes into play as soon as the main database system fails. Until the original database returns to its state, a shadow database buffers all the activities. Data management tools can be used for helping with buffering during the main database failure. Using data management tools ensure all the transactions are captured and updated when the main database comes online.


• Use DR Site
  Using the disaster recovery alias DR site is a great way to keep SAP systems up and running around the clock. For doing so, you will have to update the SAP systems to the latest version. Upgrading SAP systems must be done in as many small parts as possible. This paves way for efficient testing of the newest SAP upgrade.


• Virtualize
  Virtualization enables SAP running companies to create several instances of the organization environment. While one of these several imitations needs to be in production, others are free for experimentation. The availability of having multiple virtual SAP environments is useful in a case when the primary SAP instance suffers a failure.

Summary

Maintenance is essential for ensuring a SAP system stays up for a long period. Apply latest patches and updates to make SAP system maintenance easier.