SAP enhancement packages were designed to give companies the flexibility to add only needed functionality to their SAP systems. However, assessing what functionality to implement or activate can be more challenging than many companies expect.

To help companies streamline this process, SAP has introduced a free service that delivers a custom report with specific recommendations based on your company’s existing system usage (Figure 1). The service, called Business Function Prediction, has so far helped more than 250 companies plan their enhancement package implementations.

“Customers don’t want to have to browse through more than 300 single business functions in order to find out exactly what they need,” says Christian Oehler, solution expert at SAP. “Business Function Prediction gives our customers a chance, based on current system usage, to get an overview of relevant functionality from SAP specifically for them.”

Figure 1

Overview of the Business Function Prediction service

How Business Function Prediction Works

The process for taking advantage of the Business Function Prediction is straightforward. You can extract data on existing transaction usage, email the data to SAP, and receive a report on relevant functionality in return. SAP estimates the process should take three to five days.

To extract the usage data, follow these steps:

1.  Log on to your SAP production system and open transaction ST03N.

2.  Select Expert Mode > Total > Month from the navigation panel (Figure 2) and select the most recent full month. You may also consider a different time period in order to get a more accurate picture of your system usage.

3.  Select Transaction Profile from the bottom of the navigation panel (Figure 2) and click on Standard.

Figure 2

The ST03N transaction screen

4.  Click on the arrow next to the export button and select Spreadsheet (Figure 3). You will see a pop-up window (not shown) alerting you that filter criteria, sorting, totals, and subtotals have not been taken into account. Click the check box button to acknowledge this pop-up.

Figure 3

Exporting the data to a spreadsheet

5.  Select Table from the next pop-up window (not shown) and click on the check box button.

6.  Choose Microsoft Excel. If you do not use Excel, save the list in a format that can be opened with Excel (such as comma separated values).

7.  Save the spreadsheet.

8.  Request the Business Function Prediction service via email here: https://service.sap.com/BFP. Questions can be sent to ehp-tech@sap.com.

In a few days, SAP will email you a report of relevant functionality (Figure 4).

Figure 4

An example Business Function Prediction report

The report will include not only functionality directly tied to your current system usage, but will use that usage to recommend functionality you may need in the future, says Robert Pinzke, upgrade business expert at SAP.

“For example, if we identify that a customer is using sales order management, we can list a number of business functions that are relevant to sales order management. In that way we tackle both what the customer is using today and what might be interesting to the customer tomorrow,” he says.

Not Just for the Leading Edge

While the Business Function Prediction was designed to help companies plan for enhancement package projects, Pinzke says the tool can be valuable to other companies as well.

“Our target audience is customers on SAP ERP 6.0 who plan to implement enhancement packages, or that have an enhancement package in their system and are not sure what functionality to activate. But we can provide the service to customers on older releases such as SAP ERP 4.6c or SAP R/3 Enterprise because the system usage is basically the same.”

Companies on older versions of SAP ERP can use the Business Function Prediction report to highlight the business value of an upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0 and enhancement packages, says Pinzke. “It would be very interesting for them to see what is available to them and how it could motivate an upgrade.”

More Coming Soon

As SAP prepares to release enhancement package 5, Pinzke and Oehler say their team is busy updating the Business Function Prediction service to include those enhancements. In the future, they say, Business Function Prediction might be used to assess enhancement packages for other applications, as well.

Davin Wilfrid

Davin Wilfrid was a writer and editor for SAPinsider and SAP Experts. He contributed case studies and research projects aimed at helping the SAP ecosystem get the most out of their existing technology investments.

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