I'm pleased to announce a refresh of the LiveCompare 2.2 GA release.  This new release incorporates our latest work on SAP Enhancement Pack impact analysis.  Existing customers will be getting shipment notices shortly and all new POCs, evaluations and orders are being sent the latest release.

There are two new templates in this release designed to work specifically with SAP Enhancement Packs:

• Business Function Expansion
• Business Function Impact Analysis

You'll find both of them in the 'Support Pack Analysis' folder.  I'm thinking about re-organizing the templates in the 2.3 release.

The first template is designed to identify all the low-level SAP implementation objects that would be activated if a selected business function is switched on.

The second template takes all those low-level objects and does a full-system impact analysis to find all the standard and custom programs/transactions that would be impacted.  LiveCompare's built-in "risk analysis" algorithm works here too just like it does for Support Packs and your own Custom transports.  The result is the minimum set of most-at-risk standard and custom programs and transactions that should be validated once the business function has been switched on.

As with the Support Pack and Custom transport impact analysis, you can use these templates before you make a real change to the system. 

Business Functions form the top of a large pyramid that ends with what we call the SAP "DNA" - the real objects (programs, functions, screens, tables, etc.) that make up our SAP implementation.  The first template implements this expansion from Business Function through Switch Object through Packs to SAP DNA.

Having explored several business functions from Enhancement Pack 4 my rule of thumb is that 1 business function leads to 10 switch objects that lead to 100 packages that lead to 10000 SAP DNA objects.

Once we have the DNA objects we can flip the direction of analysis and instead go back up through the system to find the programs, transactions and ultimately business processes that will be impacted.  The second template implements this picture:

Note: LiveCompare reports the impact as far up as transactions and programs.  You need LiveModel in order to visualize the impact of SAP DNA changes on your business processes.

I wrote here when introducing the plan for LiveCompare 2.3 that Enhancement Packs would be one of the central themes.  The feedback we got from the first customers to see these templates was such that we wanted to get it out there sooner than the 2.3 release, hence this refresh of the 2.2 GA version.