It is essential that companies be aware at all times of the current application situ-ation and system usage of their business software to enable them to discover per-formance potential and reveal possible shortcomings. This is where business ad-ministrative theories of situation analysis play an active role in helping businesses meet these needs and document their current situation.

What distinguishes the situation analysis from the traditional actual analysis is its circumspective character – with its inclusion of continual changes, planning, etc. – and its three analysis perspectives:

• Strategic situation analysis of surrounding factors (e. g. competitors, market, products, competence, planning and projects, technology, organization),
• Operative situation analysis from an organizational standpoint (data and facts about the company’s organization and business characteristics) and
• Tactical situation analysis of the productive software system (e. g. SAP system).

In our case we will elaborate on the operative and tactical situation analysis via Re-verse Business Engineering (RBE), which analyzes the usage of productive SAP sys-tems as well as the structural and process-oriented organization depicted in them.

To be able to conduct this type of a comparative situation analysis based on an ERP system both cost-effectively and regularly, it is imperative that a standardized and automated procedure be implemented. In addition to the temporal comparability of the results, the analysis offers you a concrete method of comparing various organ-izational units or systems with one another (see Chapter “Comparison Analyses“).

In general terms, the RBE Plus Situation Analysis pursues the objective of sys-tematically identifying and preparing the business processes actually used in a busi-ness (and implemented in an SAP system). Additionally, it generates a transparent and current fact base of the application situation in the SAP system.

To this end, specific customizing, master and transaction data is analyzed and eval-uated; the precise data varies according to the analysis scope (e. g. process over-view, organization analysis, summary and subject folders containing key figures, a list of check steps and individual results).

The RBE Plus Analysis not only provides data on current usage of the productive ERP system, but a host of additional information for other project scenarios as well, such as harmonization, clean-up, release updates, process improvements, etc.

For more in-depth information take a look in our factsheet...