Abstract: This blog post provides a comprehensive overview of important aspects of successful project management during the introduction of S/4HANA and offers practical tips for implementation.
Hello, here I am again with the continuation of my project management blog. That I didn’t hear from me for more than a year was due to the fact that I was then in charge of an interesting S/4HANA end-to-end implementation project. It was so exciting from the beginning that I decided to enrich this blog with my experiences in the S/4HANA environment and to show how an S/4HANA project should be set up so that your project would also be a success here. Now the time has come!
That’s what it’s all about from now on:
So far none of the stuff I blogged is wrong or not necessary for a S/4HANA project. We still need a Business Process Master List and the system should continue to be developed evolutionarily. But there are a number of exciting insights that I would like to share with you in the course of this blog, including the questions …
- Which important SAP tools are new and available free of charge since S/4HANA 1809, where do I find them and how do I use them sensibly?
- How is the procedure based on an SAP Model Company to be evaluated and what is a sensible alternative if necessary?
- How do I set up a consistent and step-by-step procedure that can be traced by the team from my Business Process Master List (BPML) to the SAP Best Practice processes and their mapping in test scripts to BPMN2-based process documentation in a B(usiness)P(process)M(anagement) system?
- What is the difference between the available operating options – Public Cloud, Single Tenant Cloud, On-Premise System?
- What basic licensing issues need to be addressed?
- How do we deal with the concept of the SAP standard in S/4HANA?
- What is my experience with agile processes (SCRUM & SAFe) during the introduction of S/4HANA in my project?
- How do you structure the documentation so that the team enjoys documenting and keeping it up to date?
- Which possibilities are there in the area of data migration and when do you use what most sensibly (keywords: Migration Cockpit & SAP ADM)?
- What does the overall concept of “Value Increasing Documentation” look like?
- How should the SAP procedure model for the S/4HANA introduction SAP activate be evaluated?
In addition, I will present some tools and explain how to best use them. It will also be about how the SAP ERP system based on S/4HANA is structured according to the SAP Best Practice processes. This should be highly relevant for those companies that are not yet using SAP and are thinking about introducing a new S/4HANA system.
I will also address myself to the community of those who do not want to transfer their previous, perhaps “bent” R3 system (with a lot of historically grown data and processes) into the new S/4 landscape, but want to convert to S/4HANA on the basis of S/4HANA best practices. This is achieved by using available tools, such as the SAP Best Practice Explorer – one of many free tools that you only have to know that they exist and how to use them. So there should be something for everyone!
I will also present aspects of the different uses of S/4HANA and refer you to further literature. And I will also try to win guest contributions from good colleagues who manage S/4 HANA projects in other – sometimes much more complex – environments and share their feedback on experiences with other approaches, e.g. the “Activate” approach and the “Focused Build on top of Solution Manager” with them.
So be curious to see many interesting examples and insights from the progress of my S/4HANA project so far and a good overview of S/4HANA, which I will share with you in this blog in the coming weeks and months!
Yours
Christian Schütte