SAP PI Status 2011 FINAL - Figaffigaf.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/SAP-PI-Status-2011_FINAL1.pdf · The use of ccBPM is also related to the readiness of the business. The main focus

SAPProcessIntegrationStatus

2011

Daniel Graversen

Figaf ApS

SAP PI Status 2011 survey Page 2

Content Speed of Development ...................................................................................................................................... 3

Where Do You Spend Your Time? ................................................................................................................. 5

Methodology ..................................................................................................................................................... 5

Adapter Useage ............................................................................................................................................. 6

Supporting SAP PI .............................................................................................................................................. 7

Skills on SAP PI ................................................................................................................................................... 9

Future .............................................................................................................................................................. 10

Background ...................................................................................................................................................... 13

About the survey In February 2011, Figaf created an online survey to figure out the current status of SAP (Systems,

Applications and Products) Process Integration (PI). The goal was to learn as much about what PI

developers thought about the solution to SAP.

There were 58 people who responded to the survey from around the globe. The respondents were SAP

customers, consultants, or both. We considered 58 respondents to be a good survey group size.

Daniel Graversen

Senior SAP PI consultant

SAP Mentor


Conclusion There are a lot of interesting facts in the report.

• Most of the SAP PI users want to improve their development speed. They have a lot of ideas to

make the process better.

• Planning and development are the biggest time consumers of the development process. Forty-five

percent of time spent in the development process is spent before any code is written

• There are a lot of developers who are not following any methodology for developing SAP PI

interfaces/scenarios. However, most developers want to become more structured.

• 62 percent of SAP PI users are directly involved with support. A smaller group of respondents, 26

percent, are only involved with second level support. It is interesting to find that it is possible to

work with second level support because it frees up time to work on new development tasks.

• Only about half of the respondents have a PI certification. Two thirds have had PI courses outside

of SAP, which is quite interesting compared to the number of respondents.

• For the future, people gave many ideas on how to address the coming challenges.

Speed of Development The speed of development is important to 91 percent of the developers. Therefore, it makes sense to find

ways to improve the speed.


There were a lot of ideas on how to improve the integration cycle. Two thirds of respondents had ideas on

how it is possible to improve the development process.

50 percent of the responses addressed ideas for improvement. Following are the main ideas for

improvement:

• A place to have the improvements is in the area of the Enterprise Service Builder and Directory.

There should only be one environment, and it should focus on development speed. For instance,

Web-method should include a faster development environment.

• Integrate with Eclipse to make a more integrated development environment for XSLT and Java.

• Improve support for third party adapters like SFTP.

• Improve ways to perform message mappings, especially when the structure is complex.

• There should be APIs to the Enterprise Service Builder to allow for scripting tools for faster

development.

Suggestions that do not involve change in the development environment include:

• Improve specifications and procedures for testing.

• Provide developers with more examples and access to blogs to ask for advice.

• Make sure there is proper estimation and management of the design.

Changes in the development environment are probably difficult to change, but some will improve with PI

7.3. Other changes will have to be made later. It will be easier to focus on changing the procedures to help

make the developers faster.

One area to improve the process could be the naming conventions. 60 percent of respondents said that

naming conventions should help the development. Only 10 percent said naming conventions could possibly

slow down development. It is interesting to think that a more stringent way for naming conventions will

improve the process. This is probably because the developers do not have to make that many changes to a

module.


The same is true for architectural guidelines. Here, 75 percent agree that architectural guidelines will

improve the process; therefore, it makes sense to add some more structure to the developers’

methodology. It would have been interesting to know how many respondents had these architectural

guidelines.

Where Do You Spend Your Time?

To find the place where most development time is spent, we asked users in which area they spend most of

their time. The results were quite interesting. 25 percent of time is spent in the development and 19

percent is spent on planning. For the rest of the time, the values are almost identical.

It is interesting that most time is spent in planning and development. We had imagined that testing/re-

work was taking up more time. It is definitely the place where most changes happen, but testing/re-work

also depends on how well the application is specified and how many exceptions need to be tested.

Another interesting figure is that 42 percent of time is spent before a line is coded in the planning, in

particular at business understanding and specification. It would be interesting to reduce this number. There

needs to be something before the development is started. But, it is important not to “waste” 40 percent of

the time figuring out if the interface works. Some guidelines and development procedures will probably

improve this figure.

Methodology The model people uses for development is mostly ASAP or a waterfall approach. Some still use an agile and

Six Sigma approach to software development.

Also, quite a few respondents said they were not using any model. There are probably two different areas

users can work in:

• If you a working in a SAP implementation project, you will probably follow the ASAP methodology.

19%

10%

13%

25%

14%

9%

10%

Time spend in the development

process in %

Planning

Business understanding

Specification

Development

Testing

Rework/refactoring

Documentation


• If you are just working on a small project only relating to a PI scenario, you will probably not follow

any process. In this case, most will probably use their best judgment as how to create the solution.

In most cases, it is probably better to work this way.

In the development of the interface/scenarios model, there are few not working on any particular model.

The most common model is the use of Waterfall/ASAP, but there are only four responses for this. This

could mean there is a need to create a model for the development of PI. One respondent uses the Kanban

for the smaller projects. It could be interesting to see how this model works out.

This brings us to the next question. 68 percent of respondents want to become more structured in their

development effort. These responses contrast with the above two questions about using a development

model for SAP PI development.

Adapters Usage

It would be interesting to know how users select an adapter. The selected adapter is often chosen by the

sender and receiver system, since they provide the bottleneck. You could select between a JDBC or a file

adapter in some cases. It is up to you to choose where to put the development effort. If you do not want to

change the sender/receiver system, then you are stuck with the current protocol supported by it. You do

not have a choice.

The only area for an adapter usage change is in the SAP system. Here, IDOC/RFC is used for standard

interfaces while proxies are used for custom development.

The user of Enterprise Services also relates to adapter usage. Ever since I started with SAP XI six years ago, I

heard that we should start to use Enterprise Services, but I have found that they cannot be used in all cases.

It is interesting to find that one third of respondents are already using Enterprise Services, while another

one third will use Enterprise Services within the next six months. So, there is a need for experience with

Enterprise Services. Both PI and business consultants should keep this in mind. Everybody needs to know

how the business works in this aspect.


I think there is a large push from developers to start using the Enterprise Services, even though businesses

have defined the use of this service. It is hard to convince business consultants that Enterprise Services

should be used instead of the IDOC, which has been used for a very long time.

The use of ccBPM can be eliminated in some cases because of development taking place other places.

Several respondents say they will try to avoid using ccBPM if at all possible. Many respondents also say they

have never used ccBPM.

It is not often that you can use ccBPM. The IDOC packing is another reason people stopped using ccBPM.

The ccBPM will mainly be used to help in business workflow orchestration. It makes sense that effort is

spent here.

The use of ccBPM is also related to the readiness of the business. The main focus is on the point-to-point

connection, which was banned with the introduction of XI 3.0. People still focus on connecting two systems

though the use of SAP PI; if this is the case, then there is no need for ccBPM because the ERP controls the

orchestration. If the focus is on the process, we may move to more ERP ccBPMs in the integration.

Supporting SAP PI Support is a large part of using a SAP PI solution. It is important for consultants and customer developers

because it is the way to validate that your solution is running.

The survey found that most respondents were involved with support of SAP PI. It is probably expected that

that many people are working with supporting the PI solution. It is nice to see that 25 percent of

respondents only work with second level support. This indicates that users cannot get away from having

SAP PI support.


One of the questions asked was, “What is the biggest problem with monitoring your PI solution?” This

question was asked to find what respondents consider the pain point when working with support and

monitoring the PI solution.

It is interesting to see that respondents had problems in all different areas. It may be that most of the

problems fall into the same group. For example, “Get one overview of what is going on” is closely related

to “There are too many places the message can fail.”

This is an indication that there needs to be a better monitoring solution that gives all of the information in

one place. Some of this confusion may be solved with PI 7.3, but we still have to see what this can do. One

helpful solution is Advantco’s PI Monitor, which provides an easy way to monitor the full process through

the PI system. If you contact Advantco, please mention that you read about the product in this report and

you will receive a discount of 20% until the end of april 2011.


Disclosure: If you buy from Advantco, I do earn a commission.

In the text responses, we found there is a need to find messages with a certain payload, like invoice

numbers. It is possible to find the messages in an easy way. If the messages are connected to the IDOCs,

see this blog: http://figaf.com/the-easy-way-to-find-idocs-in-the-pi-monitor.html/. If it is not true, then you

hope that few messages have been sent in that time period.

Some respondents need a better introduction about how to monitor a SAP PI system. There needs to be a

guide that will talk you through the process of monitoring your solution. This should target the new PI

users.

Skills on SAP PI I had expected that most respondents were certified SAP PI developers. It turns out that only 42 percent

were certified. It is interesting to me that, coming from a consultant background where consultants have

to be certified to work on projects, when working internally, one does not have to be a certified PI

developer.

The follow up should have been have you been certified. A XI/PI certification is only valid for a few years. So

it could be that some just did not want to renew their certification.

There are many who still take courses that are not standard SAP courses. Perhaps these are internal

courses in some way. Two thirds of respondents have taken non-SAP courses. It is interesting that so many

people continue to learn SAP PI outside SAP’s courses.


60 percent of respondents answered the question about what areas people need to improve the most. It

appears that Java and XSLT mappings are the places requiring the most improvement. The message

mapping users are pretty confident with these programs, but Java and XSLT is not taught in any SAP course.

Java and XSLT mapping also require a bit more programming skills.

Future To learn what problems users saw in the future for SAP PI integration, I asked “What do you see as the

challenge with SAP Integration in the future?” There were several responses to this.

The main points mentioned in the responses include:

• How is integration going to be performed when the On-demand, SAP CE, and NetWeaver BPM is

created? Will SAP PI still be a central hub, or will the integration happen multiple places?

• There are some issues with the stability, and it is difficult to have a stable PI system.

• The double-stack is a performance issue.


• How to transform the business to use Enterprise SOA and make use of the features coming with it.

• For small teams, it is difficult to manage a SAP PI installation with all the other services.

• Monitoring is a problem because of all the different areas to monitor PI messages.

• There is a lack of performance compared to other vendors of Enterprise Service Buses.

• To see PI as a platform for non-SAP environments.

• The learning curve is too steep for users to start becoming efficient developers.

There were some interesting points made in this perspective. It seems like there is hope that some of the

problems mentioned above will get fixed in the next releases of PI.

There were a number of people who did not believe they had the knowledge they needed to succeed. 49

percent of respondents did not think they had all of the necessary information. This definitely calls for a

way to create some more information to help guide users on the knowledge they need.

In regards to the future, the new SAP PI 7.3, is right around the corner. 77 percent of respondents are

looking forward to using SAP PI 7.3. This is probably a sign that most SAP PI developers like the newest,

coolest technology, and because of all the major new functionalities that can be used with it.


What version of SAP PI is used? It appears that all versions of PI are used even though version 7.11 is most

commonly used. It is interesting to see that a large number of users are still using XI 3.0 and PI 7.0. Perhaps

that it is a big problem with upgrades. Everything needs to be re-tested and takes a long time.


Background The majority of respondents are either Senior Developers or Architects. They are the group that has most

experience with what is going on in the SAP PI area. It is nice that there were responses from all groups.

The size of the respondents’ companies was also even-spread. Overall, there were more responses from

larger companies. Perhaps this is because mostly big companies are running SAP.


Most of the respondents came from consulting companies, but a large percentage came from SAP

customers. There are probably different opinions between the two groups.

Which country do the responses come from? There is a nice distribution of responses from around the

globe. Most responses were from India. This figure may say more about my network than about the

distribution of SAP PI.

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14

Australia

Brazil

India

Israel

Russia

Singapore

United States

Europe

Countries

Total

Documents

SAP PI Status 2011 FINAL - Figaffigaf.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/SAP-PI-Status-2011_FINAL1.pdf · The use of ccBPM is also related to the readiness of the business. The main focus