Industry Solutions and Switch Framework

[Former Member]

Hello.

I work for a company that is strongly considering implementing mySAP 2005. My company has several divisions including one that makes specialty chemicals and several others that make various textile products. Because of the complexity of textile manufacturing, the Mill Products Industry Solution looks like it would be a good fit for us (especially the enhanced rolled goods handling). The Chemical Industry Solution also looks like it would be a good fit for our chemical division.

My question is, without being a customer yet and without having access to the service marketplace, where can I look at the business function sets provided by the Chemical and Mill Productions Industry Solutions? From looking at the documentation, with mySAP 2005 only one business function set can be switched on at a time. We need to confirm whether or not it is practical to have a single instance of SAP that can service our chemical and textile divisions. Part of understanding that is to see what overlap, if any, is in the business functions provided by the Chemical and Mill Products business function sets.

Any assistance here would be much appreciated.

Brian

[Former Member]

Hello Brian,

the SAP help portal at help.sap.com is a good way to start looking for additional information. You should go to 'SAP for Industries' and then you see all industry modules and can pick the one you are interested in. E.g. Mill for ECC5.0 can be found at http://help.sap.com/saphelp_dimp50/helpdata/EN/4e/1796374b088e5ce10000009b38f8cf/frameset.htm

Usually the information is on a high level but it gives you some basic understanding about some processes.

As far as I know you can run one instance with different industries, but I guess you may need different clients.

It sounds to me like you already have a good idea of what you need. I recommend you to contact SAP or one of their partners. They will be able to answer your questions in more detail and make a FIT/GAP analysis.

Tim

[Former Member]

Thanks very much for your input. I have looked at the high-level documentation available on the help portal.

At one point we had representatives from SAP tell us that they used to have a problem with more than one industry solution co-existing in the same instance but that with the switch framework this problem was solved. As I have looked into the matter in more detail, it is true that all the industry solutions are in mySAP 2005 when it is installed (but not enabled). There is a matter of semantics that you can only enable one business function set at a time. I think that typically an industry solution is the same thing as a business function set.

What I really want to know is what are the specific functions in the Mill Products and Chemical industry solutions (to see if there is overlap). I am also wondering if it is possible to create our own business function set with functions from both industry solutions. In that case there may still be conflicts that need to be resolved when both solutions provide the same function but it is implemented differently.

Bottom line -- we're still in the SAP sales cycle so I don't know how much I can believe them when they say "it's not a problem anymore".

Brian