Understanding the Significance of SAP Activate Roadmaps for the System Administrator

Adam knows that GloManCorp will use SAP Activate to implement its SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution. He initially thought SAP Activate was mainly important for the business but not for the SAP system administrator. However, in his previous talk with Carl, Carl also mentioned SAP Activate.

This is why Adam scheduled another meeting with Carl, in which Carl explained the basic ideas of SAP Activate. In particular, Adam wants to know how SAP Activate can support him in his job as a SAP system administrator.

Carl starts with a general explanation of the ideas of SAP Activate:

In addition, Carl points out that SAP Activate:

• supports faster, less service-intensive deployments.
• aims to promote continuous adoption of innovations throughout the entire project lifecycle.
• supports different starting points for customers to adopt SAP S/4HANA with a new implementation.

SAP Activate consists of 6 phases:

• Discover: Discover the solution capabilities and understand the business value and benefits of the solution to the customer’s business.
• Prepare: Perform the project's initial planning and preparation, onboarding and enablement of the project team, provisioning of the initial landscape, and the tools for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).
• Explore: Run a fit-to-standard analysis, validate the solution fit, and identify delta requirements for configuration, data integration, and extensibility.
• Realize: Perform a series of agile iterations to configure, extend, and test an integrated business environment. In addition, perform data loads, adoption activities, and plan production operations.
• Deploy: Finalize the setup of the production landscape, perform data loads, confirm readiness, and go live with the solution.
• Run: Continue adopting the solution across the business, performing regression tests for system upgrades and activating additional functionality as needed.

Carl then continues that a good starting point for SAP Activate is the SAP Activate Road Map Viewer , which is available in SAP for Me (requires authentication with the help of an S-User) at Road Map Viewer. This tool is designed to help customers such as GloManCorp guide their SAP S/4HANA implementation projects. The SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer provides them an easy-to-navigate way to access SAP Activate methodology guidance for their specific solution. It contains time-phased instructions to help execute tasks throughout the implementation journey. In addition, it offers a large number of accelerators to help customers run the project as efficiently as possible and to guide them through the whole SAP S/4HANA lifecycle.

As GloManCorp wants to implement SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition with a 3-system landscape, Carl now opens the corresponding roadmap. He explains that this roadmap also contains activities relevant to the system administrator, such as the transport configuration or the setup of output management (in the Realize phase, deliverable Solution Configuration, which belongs to Application Design and Configuration).

Adam is now excited that SAP Activate will help him find the relevant information for his work during the implementation process.

But Carl even goes one better and continues by introducing SAP Cloud ALM, which plays together with SAP Activate:

SAP Cloud ALM is a tool that is designed to help customers such as GloManCorp in their SAP product adoption journey, focusing on cloud products initially, and with a seamless implementation experience. A big advantage of using this tool is that it comes preloaded with SAP Activate methodology and business process content, so the customer gets a jumpstart.

SAP Cloud ALM for implementation key capabilities:

Project Management

allows you to set up and manage implementation projects using SAP Activate roadmaps, onboard your team, define project phases, sprints, and milestones, assign team members, maintain deliverables, and manage subscriptions to external applications and workflows.

Project Landscape Setup

Enables you to define and manage the technical landscape of your cloud products, assign tenants to roles (such as starter, test, and production), access assigned tenants, and unassign tenants as needed.

Project Overview

Provides a holistic overview of key aspects of your project, including scopes, processes, tasks, and test cases, helping you track project status and progress.

Task Management

Supports creating and managing project tasks and user stories, assigning roles and team members, and tracking task statuses.

Process Management

Helps you scope and manage solution processes, capture requirements, create and maintain custom processes, conduct fit-to-standard workshops, and define process hierarchies based on SAP Best Practices.

Documentation Management

Enables you to create, edit, and manage project documents, set document status, priority, owner, and type, use document templates, link external resources, and upload, replace, or delete files.

Requirement Management

Provides tools to view, create, and edit requirements, approve requirements through status changes, create related project tasks and features, track changes and involvement, and assign test cases to requirements.

Change and Deployment Management

Allows you to view, create, and manage features for deployment, create and release transports for various SAP environments, approve features, assign transports, track changes, and set deployment schedules.

Analytics and Reporting

Offers multi-project overview capabilities, monitors project readiness, and provides analytical details such as progress reports, historical charts, and traceability matrices.

Landscapes – Design and Visualization

Gives you an overview of your cloud, on-premise, and private cloud systems, their clients, logical systems, and business service groupings, including system relationships.

SAP Readiness Check Integration

Integrates with SAP Readiness Check to evaluate your existing system, identify preparative activities, understand required effort, scope, and plan projects more accurately, and link findings to SAP Cloud ALM projects for transformation initiatives.

To summarize, SAP Activate provides methodology and end-to-end guidance for implementing SAP solutions. SAP Cloud ALM provides functionality to extend the same SAP Activate methodology through project management and execution support.

For more information, see the SAP Help Portal – SAP Cloud ALM for implementation, or see the blog SAP Activate is Even Better When Using SAP Cloud ALM.