Top 20 SAP transactions and quick wins using SharePoint

Over the last few years one of my colleagues, Jim O’Farrell, has done some excellent work in terms of working with Winshuttle customers and calculating the ROI of business process acceleration. Part of this work includes looking at customers’ logs in the SAP Workload Monitor (ST03N). These logs keep a tally of all transactions handled in the system and provide valuable insights into usage patterns in SAP. Usage logs from individual customers are highly confidential, but analysing the data in aggregate is quite interesting. For example, the table below lists the top 20 transactions based on actual usage data aggregated from more than 250 SAP customers worldwide.

Rank	Tcode	Description
1	VA02	Change Sales Order
2	IQ02	Change Material Serial Number
3	CAT2	Time Sheet: Maintain Times
4	VA01	Create Sales Order
5	FBL5N	Display Customer Line Items
6	ME23N	Display Purchase Order
7	IQ01	Create Material Serial Number
8	VL02N	Change Outbound Delivery
9	FBL1N	Display Vendor Line Items
10	MD04	Display Stock/Requirements Situation
11	LM13	Put Away Clustered
12	MIGO	Goods Movement
13	ME21N	Create Purchase Order
14	FBL3N	Display G/L Account Line Items
15	VA03	Display Sales Order
16	MIRO	Enter Incoming Invoice
17	QE51N	Results Recording Work List
18	IW32	Change Order
19	VL03N	Display Outbound Delivery
20	FB03	Display Document

A really interesting aspect of this list is that it includes eight display transactions. In other words, some of the most frequent use of the SAP GUI is simply to retrieve information and not perform any updates on the system. We are all familiar with the well-known usability issues of the SAP GUI. Having to navigate and master this generic interface for quick lookups and retrieval of business data, often while performing work in other tools, is an unnecessary burden on productivity.

I am often asked about how to qualify business scenarios for SAP/SharePoint solutions, which is primarily focused on extending the reach of SAP and serving casual users in their tools of choice. Building such solutions involves various degrees of complexity and effort, but the table above helps you identify the quick wins. There is obviously a lot less complexity and effort involved in creating an interface in SharePoint that is merely reading information from SAP. These eight frequently used display transactions is a good place to start when considering how to realise productivity gains by surfacing SAP through SharePoint.