How can I support my change requests and projects by using the Performer Suite?

This document provides an overview of how to use the Performer Suite to support your SAP BW change requests and project delivery.
The product of the Performer Suite supports you in the preparations and execution of projects. It reduces the workload and also accelerates the entire process.

Summary

Do you have another change request or project to participate in or to deliver?
Several of those challenges are ahead of you:

• You have to estimate the change request and project accurately to have robust planning.
• Understand all the dependencies within the system and all the follow-up details going from one object to the next.
• Parts of the requirements are Query definitions. You have a strange feeling that something similar had already been implemented some time ago, but you are unsure what and where?
• You work together with external suppliers and:
  • Not all developers from the supplier keep the naming convention, but you usually realize it in the end, as it is too much of an effort to always check everything.
  • It is not easy or challenging or seems maybe even impossible to preserve the knowledge of your supplier. Once they are gone again, you don't dare to touch the implementation, or you are very careful, and it takes you a long time to understand the implementation?
  • Do you have to search for a long time within the implementations or maybe even reverse engineer the information to prepare the change?
• Bugfixing is sometimes very difficult and complex as there are many components involved? From where, how, and what data is loaded within the BW?
• You are occupied with searching for the root cause of a problem (data-wise) rather than fixing it?
• The handover to the maintenance colleagues or from the external suppliers sometimes leaves a "strange feeling" in your guts, that there must be more, but you cannot pinpoint what is missing?
• When colleagues leave or change the team, there is mostly an outcry, how difficult it will be without them, as they had all the relevant knowledge for area X?

Challenges

You have to do many of those tasks above manually! Who likes to walk through 10ths or 100ths of BW Entities, Queries, Transformations, DTPs, etc. to understand something or search for specific information? How to show and represent all investigations so that you don't have to do them over again for the next problem, evaluation, estimation, etc.? Of course, errors can creep in here by making mistakes in the manual steps. As this is too much effort, you decide to go for the "supposedly" simple and easy way, or you have the feeling this is the only possible way and follow your feelings and rough manual investigations rather than more facts to estimate and evaluate how something should have been done.

There is no proper support for those activities above from SAP standard tools.

Solution

Use the Performer Suite for example to: