What is the average duration of 1 full SAP life cycle or 1 end-to-end implementation. How long does it take to prepare DEV, QAS and PRD?

Question

What is the average duration of 1 full SAP life cycle or 1 end-to-end implementation. How long does it take to prepare DEV, QAS and PRD in any company?

Answer 1

Anand,
let me start with saying that the question you ask may not help you to determine the duration of your project. As Ryan and others stated the duration of the project is highly dependent on the scope of the solution you are implementing, geographical scope, amount of modifications/enhancements, number of languages, number of users that need to be trained, amount of standard processes customer is able to re-use in the implementation and many other factors (like quality of implementation contractor you will chose and availability of customer and implementors resources). I can probably go on for another couple lines, but I guess you get the idea.
With that out of the way let's talk about some example implementations that will give you an idea - Ryan did great job outlining what I would call traditional approach above. I have couple examples where customers leveraged innovative deployment strategies that are available today. In particular the project teams leveraged pre-packaged services like RDS, World Template or Best Practices as their baseline solution and they built from there. Second acceleration technique customers now leverage is the deployment in the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud to accelerate the time to initial setup of the system and thus move from traditional blueprinting to scope validation exercise that further shortens the time. There are other acceleration techniques we see applied in some cases like use of iterative implementation of the delta requirements on top of the baseline solution.
Let me offer few examples to illustrate what I explained above:
ERP implementation at Schaidt Innovations with 3 months long deployment of ERP solution using ERP RDS as a baseline (you can view their testimonial here - Schaidt Innovations: SAP ERP on HANA in the cloud - YouTube)
Customer in Asia with global template deployment that leveraged SAP ERP for Manufacturing with deployment to cloud and 9 countries rollout (Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, UK, Germany and US). The initial deployment took 4 months for first country and 2 months for rollout into the additional 8 countries - so total of 6 months. The original plan using traditional approach with full blueprint and heavy configuration was estimated to be more than double of the actual deployment time.
There are many other examples where customers follow the assemble-to-order delivery model for their project and gain significant benefits doing so. I suggest you to review some of the recordings we did in 2013 about this approach and if you are member of ASUG review the Agile ASAP sessions we did for ASUG PM SIG.
Link to webinars: SAP A2O Webinar Series Schedule
Let me know if you have any questions.
Jan