How does SAP Activate ensure agile implementation of SAP
S/4HANA?
http://searchsap.techtarget.com/answer/How-does-SAP-Activate-ensure-agile-implementation-of-SAP-S-4HANA
SAP Activate reduces the SAP
S/4HANA implementation timeline and saves costs. Here's a look at the four
stages of the framework and how they can help.
For some time, CIOs
and SAP project managers implementing SAP systems have had to use Accelerated
SAP implementation methodology. ASAP includes five phases -- project
preparation, business blueprint, realization, final preparation, and go-live
and support -- and using this process is not as fast as its name would suggest.
Indeed, mapping a company's existing business processes, known as the business
blueprint phase in ASAP, to assess a fit-gap analysis takes anywhere from a few
weeks to months.
Implementing SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management, however, can be a faster, more agile process thanks
to the SAP Activate adoption framework, which replaces ASAP. SAP Activate
leverages the SAP best practices to explore a company's specific business
scenarios and propose the most relevant solutions. Instead of preparing a
business blueprint document to cover every business scenario, SAP Activate gets
straight to conducting a fit-gap analysis and leverages SAP best practices as
well as a rapid deployment framework to see how best the system addresses the
features and functionality gaps. SAP Activate also reduces the S/4HANA
implementation timeline and costs by eliminating the ASAP-driven five phases to
the following four phases:
Prepare. In this
phase, the business users explore the SAP
best practices and standard
business processes such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay or hire-to-retire that
are mapped for S/4HANA enterprise management. Sample data of a fictitious
company is also available to enable business users to run the end-to-end processes
to evaluate how closely a standard system meets the company's business needs.
Explore. Here, the
business users and the SAP system integrator agree on the configurable objects
required for the company. Configurable objects can be a company code responsible
for all legal and financial reporting; a plant that can also be a manufacturing
unit or a head office; or a warehouse or sales organizations such as one
responsible for local sales while the other handles export sales. A complete
fit-gap exercise ensures greater visibility of the gaps that the standard SAP system is unable to offer. In such
cases, a fit-gap strategy decides if a system's enhancement, a customized
application or activating business add-in will address the gaps.
Realize. Through the
guided configuration tool, the system integrator not only arranges the
configurable objects agreed on in the explore phase, but also creates a
company-specific data for testing and validating business processes. All
custom-developed objects are also tested in the realize phase. SAP provides its
partners with additional assets methodology to equip them on new features of
SAP S/4HANA enterprise management.
Deploy. In this
phase, the business users and SAP consultants of system integrators delve deep
into end-to-end integration testing pertaining to different SAP components and users involved in processing
relevant business transactions to see if the data and information flow is complete
and correct. This stage also includes conducting training followed by cutoveractivities in which the company transitions from legacy system to SAP S/4HANA
enterprise management.
As part of your
migration, be sure to create change management initiatives to help transition from the five-phase ASAP to the four-phase SAP Activate
implementation approach.