SAP Planning: Best Practices in Implementation

Evaluating Enterprise Systems Management Applications

With the short list of SAP enterprise systems management candidates in front of you, I suggest creating a comparison matrix to facilitate comparing and contrasting the different solutions. I have successfully used a simple Excel spreadsheet approach in the past—the details related to costing can be clearly deciphered in this way, and arbitrary scoring for the categories described in the previous section (plus any others you create) can easily be tallied up to provide a final “score” for each potential solution.

In revisiting the broad category of cost, for example, I like to break down the following line items:

• Software— Basic management console

• Software— Basic agents for each server to be ...