Archive for October, 2009

Long SAP CRM Customer Record Load Times

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Have you experience of load large customer data volumes into SAP CRM? We are experiencing extremely long load times for the data load and subsequent delta data loads. How many customer records per hour could / should we be expecting? What are the areas where we should look to further fine tune our processes. We are currently looking at our infrastructure requirements to help speed things up however it would be useful to have a guide as to what else we should be looking at.

ERP loads can sometimes be too slow to process the entire set in a single big bang event. Unpalatable though it may sound the answer is often to split the customer base along some logical line. The key to this technique is to ensure you get entire customers fully on legacy or fully on the target. The last thing you want is a split customer record.

This does mean that you have to analyse the business carefully for problem customers. I was involved in a Telco migration where there was a complexity around people changing their price plans or moving house. The solution is to build some means of spotting these states and push the records concerned back to a later load. Eventually, when you have to “bite the bullet” on any remaining records there may be few enough to manage manually with the assistance of customer service staff. It is rarely written in stone, even as a matter of migration team pride, that every record in a migration must transfer via automated procedures.

Finally there is another solution called “trickle across” using products such as Celona http://www.celona.com. In this you set up a synchronisation between the two systems that allows the customer to exist on both, eventually turning legacy off at an appropriate moment.

I also have an associate who managed to avoid any of these solutions by renting a massive hardware architecture from Hewlett Packard that compressed the load times by brute force! However the client had both deep pockets and significant need, which is far from always the case. This solution is not always open. (Genuine commercial enquiries welcome if anyone is interested in this unusual approach)

So no, it’s not that rare an occurrence. And no, you can’t generally solve it by doing something right that you previously missed. It really can take that long per customer.

I hope this helps.

Don’t hesitate to call if you are in UK or near Europe and would like direct consultancy assistance!