Scalability and performance of a virtualized SAP system

Enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), like SAP systems, build the backbone of the business processes in today’s large enterprises. This is why a weak performance of a SAP system tremendously decreases the performance of the user and thus of the enterprise. Today many SAP hosting providers make use of virtualization techniques, but disregard the impact of such solutions. In this paper we focus on the impact of virtualization solutions on the performance of SAP systems and follow a quantitative approach to ascertain several benchmark results. We make four contributions: 1) On the basis of a quantitative investigation we give a recommendation how to configure a SAP system for heavy workload. The recommendation helps to avoid hardware resource shortage. 2) We show that the average performance of a SAP system increases up to +2% if a container-based virtualization solution is used. 3) We show that the performance of a SAP system is decreased up to -33% if a Xen-based virtualization solution is used. 4) On the basis of the quantitative results we give recommendations for a new sizing process in order to meet the requirements for virtualized SAP systems

Similarity Determination in Activity Sequences – A Supportive Framework

An increasing number of information systems support their users by helping them in reusing existing knowledge and experience. Often this is done by retrieving similar instances like similar documents, similar process executions or similar persons. While the recommendations use similarity as central concept, the selection of a suitable measure is often done by intuition. This paper introduces a framework that supports the application engineer in selecting and configuring a suitable similarity measure. The requirements of the intended framework are gathered before the architectural implications are detailed. The resulting framework is applied in a case study in which project performance prediction is to be supported by the similarity of the projects’ activity sequences. The results show the framework’s utility by allowing a comparably simple configuration to yield a considerable support in selecting and configuring a suitable similarity measure

Improving Support Ticket Systems Using Machine Learning: A Literature Review

Processing customer support requests via a support ticket system is a key-element for companies to provide support to their customers in an organized and professional way. However, distributing and processing such tickets is much work, increasing the cost for the support providing company and stretching the resolution time. The advancing potential of Machine Learning has led to the goal of automating those support ticket systems. Against this background, we conducted a Literature Review aiming at determining the present state-of-the-art technology in the field of automated support ticket systems. We provide an overview about present trends and topics discussed in this field. During the Literature Review, we found creating an automated incident management tool being the majority topic in the field followed by request escalation and customer sentiment prediction and identified Random Forrest and Support Vector Machine as best performing algorithms for classification in the field

Towards an Approach to Identify and Assess the Mobile Eligibility of Business Processes

So far, the discussion about the usage of mobile devices in companies was strongly technology driven. However, current mobiledevices and related mobile networks have reached a high level of maturity. For this reason, technological issues are nolonger obstacles for using mobile devices within companies’ business processes. From our perspective, identifying businessprocess activities, which can be improved by mobile device support, is currently rather important. The degree of suitability ofbusiness processes for mobile device support is called the mobile eligibility of a business process. Aim of this paper is topresent an approach that supports the systematic analysis and assessment of the mobile eligibility of business processes, takinginto account a set of structured, adaptable criteria to deliberate between potential business values added by mobile devicesand the typical mobile device characteristics

IT CAPABILITIES IN ERP MAINTENANCE – A REVIEW OF THE ERP POST-IMPLEMENTATION LITERATURE

With the maturing use of ERP systems, the management of their post-implementation phase is receiving increased attention. There is a need to understand how to manage post-implementation activities like ERP maintenance. ERP maintenance is a critical IT service provided by IT organizations in the ERP post-implementation phase, including activities to support and extend existing ERP systems. The extant research has focused on tasks related to ERP maintenance, but it lacks studies that provide insights into capabilities required to perform ERP maintenance successfully. This paper aims to reduce this gap, reviewing IT-related tasks, success and risk factors in the ERP post-implementation literature. Based on this review, eight IT capabilities on the functional level of ERP maintenance are proposed. Integrating these findings with previous IT capability research, the link between the identified ERP maintenance capabilities and firm-wide IT capabilities is examined

Why Do Organizations Change? A Literature Review on Drivers and Measures of Success for Digital Transformation

Conducting digital transformation projects is a challenging task for companies. Overcoming this challenge is key for staying competitive on a rapidly changing market. While a huge number of publications that present a case-based success story exists, drivers and success measures for such changes often remain undisclosed. Our paper addresses at completing this research gap by performing a literature review and deriving the main reasons that triggered the digital transformation and aggregating them into four categories: improvement of business models, business processes, customer experience, and enabling technologies. Simultaneously we analyze discovered articles for the success measures of transformation projects and assign them to the drivers. This contribution has high practical importance since it lays the foundation for the development of models for the prediction of the digital transformation project outcomes. This will allow companies that attempt digital transformation to simulate their changes and to potentially avoid errors during the transformation phase