At Mirata, we understand that User Experience is the key to adoption by your end users and the business value and process visibility AND that equally important is the total cost of ownership. This blog breaks down how we actually cut your implementation costs in half. (If you’d like to learn more about the user experience, learn more here)
A Typical SSAM Implementation
Here is a typical project plan to implement SSAM broken out by percent of time dedicated to each portion of implementation:
- Requirements and Design: 25%
- Development and Configuration: 40%
- Integration Testing and UAT Support: 25%
- Knowledge Transfer and Go-Live Support: 10%
While this breakdown is reasonable, there are problems with this approach:
- It is difficult to be agile because there is a lot of coding involved to make SSAM meet your needs, so you don’t get to iterate on the UX.
- Hidden requirements don’t come to light until late in the project, usually during UAT. These are the most expensive issues to resolve because they come so late in the game.
- Due to 1 and 2 above, companies descope and try to implement SSAM as out of the box as possible which leads to a challenging user experience and unmet business requirements.
Implementing SSAM with Mirata – A Better Approach
At Mirata, we believe that the sooner in the project you can see your app in action, the better it will be so that hidden requirements will come to light sooner. With this in mind, our projects use the following 4 phases, each of which are described in detail below.
- Requirements & UX Design
- Data Integration & Process Configuration
- Integration Testing & UAT support
- Knowledge Transfer & Go-live support
Requirements & UX design
During this phase, we do more than produce a document, because Mirata is a zero code environment, we rapidly create your screens so you get to see it and test drive it before we proceed to the integration phase. We provide a series of list screens and work order detail screen templates to use as a starting point in this step. By doing screen design interactively and early, we uncover hidden requirements that normally aren’t discovered until you put the application in the hands of some users during UAT.
Data Integration & Process Configuration
While we are configuring the data interface between SSAM and SAP, we are adding the business logic and process flow to the Mirata UX screens defined in the first phase.
You will first get the screens populated with SAP data but with no data going back to SAP. This allows you to experience the app in action and socialize it with your end users to get their feedback early in the process. Any modifications are easy and quick to make at this time.
After that, we map the transactional data from the Mirata UX screens into the SSAM transactions and test the data updates.
Integration Testing & UAT support
Both Integration and UAT are faster to complete for two reasons:
- The Requirements & UX Design phase and Data Integration & Process Configuration phases result in a product that has already been exercised by you, so many of the hidden requirements have already been discovered.
- Because the screens, business rules and workflows are configured in the Mirata Designer with zero code, any bugs or issues are easily and quickly resolved – no time spent combing through code!
Knowledge Transfer & Go-live support
During this phase, we train you on how to use the Mirata Designer to modify existing screens and forms or to create new ones. We also train you on System Administration and data integration. Similar to the ease and speed with which Issues are resolved in UAT, any issues that are found post go-live are quickly resolved.
Calculated savings
Not only does this approach yield a better app for your business, it reduces the time and cost of the project by almost 50%:
| Phase | SSAM Implementation | Reduction |
| Requirements and interactive UX/Screen Design | 25% | Takes away 40% of the time spent in this category, leading to 10% savings overall |
| Data Integration and Process Configuration | 40% | Takes away 50% of time spent in this category, leading to 20% savings overall |
| Integration testing and UAT Support | 25% | Takes away 50% of time spent in this category, leading to 12.5% savings overall |
| Knowledge Transfer and Go-live Support | 10% | Takes away 30% of time spent in this category, leading to 3% savings overall |
| Total project reduction vs typical SSAM project | 100% | -45.5% time spent |
What can you do with all this savings?
It’s not just a pretty face: Mirata is capable of digitizing all processes whether work order or non-work order related (Safety, Permitting, Lock Out/Tag Out, Rounds and Readings, etc). We can eliminate paper and automate processes across your entire operation.
One More Important Topic: The Upgrade Process
Not only do we cut the initial implementation cost in half, when you upgrade to a new version of SSAM+Mirata, all you need to do is test as everything is forward compatible. How? Well the hard work is to make the Core Mirata UX Extension work with the new version of SSAM. We do this once and then it is available for all of our customers. Once that is done, we distribute the artifacts that you compile into your SSAM client (just like in the initial deployment). All you do is sync the app and start testing.
