The best practice for SAP Business One upgrade is to test the upgrade on an independent environment, isolate and resolve any potential issues then proceed with the production upgrade. Please be aware the worst scenario for a failed upgrade is when your SAP live database is corrupted caused by crashed installation.
The cause of failed application upgrade can be one or more of below below issues:
- Prior version of SAP and related application/services has not been uninstalled properly. Thus, applying new application on the on config that is specific to prior version may corrupt the installation.
- Installation setup and sequences was done incorrectly or incomplete, unexpected or unattended error that may result corruption in the installation.
- Unknown issues during installation or upgrade that has been ignored may or may not cause issue after the upgrade or later stage.
Some time we cannot know what is the exact issue but please be prepared,
- Worst scenario is to reinstall the SAP Server and related SAP services, meaning there will be business downtime if no Test Server is planned.
- Best scenario if it is just a minor tweak in the configuration or fix with recommendation from SAP.
In order to troubleshoot the issue, we will first need to reproduce or trace the root cause. Below will be the process:
- Identify whether is caused by the SAP application, 3rd party application or environment issue
- Find the symptom or trace windows services or application that are causing issue.
- Report the finding to SAP if can't be fixed. SAP will request copy of the log files or databases for further investigation. This can be a long process and repeatably providing an updated log files, communicating with SAP while troubleshooting.
- When fixes provided by SAP, perform the changes in test system to confirm is working, then apply to the production system.
Efforts varies from 0.5 - 8 hours or more depending on the findings.