A Smooth and Steady Go Live

We all know the feeling… you have been working for weeks, months or sometimes even for years on a project and finally the go live is just a few weeks away. The pressure starts rising, everyone is getting ready and also getting anxious.
What will happen during the go live week? Will everything go smoothly as per the cutover plan? What will it be like in the first week after go live, when all the users start using the system?

To make yourself a bit more comfortable during the go live week and the week after, you need (of course) to prepare yourself for a steady and – hopefully – smooth go live. In this blog, I will give you just a few guidelines for a (more) steady go live.

In recent months, presumably test runs have been carried out to set up the runbook and to get the steps to be performed in the correct order. So, that should be okay.

What else can be done you might be asking yourself?

1. Production Tenant

Make sure that you request your production tenant on time, it can be requested already 2 months upfront. A production tenant can be requested via the service control center in your C4C system. The system will be delivered as either an empty box or with a copy of the solution profile. When requested on time, you will have sufficient time to already execute steps that can be done upfront. Some examples of those steps are setting up your organisation structure, sales territory, SLA rules and your categorisation scheme.

2. Copy to production tenant

As soon as you know that there will be no changes on your quality system anymore, you can start with copying your setup from quality to production environment. This can be done via the transport management of C4C. Please be aware that not everything can be copied from one environment to another. For instance

• Organisation structure – This needs to be done via download/upload in the data workbench.
• Sales territory – This can be done using the data workbench or manually. This really depends on how many territories you need to set up. If there are less than 10, it might be worthwhile to consider to just do it manually. Be aware that also with an upload via the data workbench there is no guarantee that the IDs of the territories are the same as on your quality environment. And do not forget to setup the territory rules (via the realignment rules).
• Service categorisation scheme – This needs to be downloaded from the latest scheme itself and can be imported the same way.
• Service Levels – Unfortunately these need to be created manually in each environment.
• The service level determination and the ticket routing rules – These can be downloaded from the screen where you also have created them, and this is also how it should be uploaded. Make sure that you set up the columns first before you executed the upload.
• The setup of the home screens for each role – This is something that needs to be done in each environment manually.

Once you have your production tenant setup with all your settings, you can refresh your test systems with a copy of production. In this case, all of the above-mentioned steps do not need to be executed as they are transferred with the copy. If you have any mashups or tiles on the home screen that refer to another environment – then these should be adjusted as the settings of production are taken over. Same implies for the communication systems & arrangements.

3. Performance

When you know your data loads (from ERP to C4C) will decrease the performance of the C4C system, then you can log an incident with SAP for performance optimisation (disable change documents) and monitoring by SAP. They will need to know the objects and the amount of data, the time frame, the tenant and the type of data load. This incident is best to be created 2 weeks in advance.

4. Restore point

Make sure you request a restore point of your current production environment before you will enter the go live week / weekend. The restore point will only be saved for 2 weeks (default by SAP), so keep that in mind when requesting it. Restore points can be requested via the service control center.

5. SAP schedule

And, last but not least, check the schedule of SAP. Is anything planned during the go live weekend by SAP, a hotfix or a quarterly release? If your client does not have a private cloud, then you need to work around this time frame or re-schedule your go live date. If you are on a private cloud, then it might be worthwhile to log an incident with SAP to postpone the release.
The saver and easier option would be of course to avoid going live when SAP also has activities planned.