Requesting SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition Systems

From studying the SAP Activate roadmap and from his previous discussions with Carl, Adam has learned that it is his task as a system administrator to request the necessary systems for the business processes that are to be implemented.

Hint

For the provisioning and onboarding of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, it is important to understand the system landscape. Without understanding the overall landscape, you cannot get the full extent of how SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition systems work and at the same time how they are linked with SAP Activate (which – together with SAP Cloud ALM – is the fundamental tool for the implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition). It is highly recommended that you follow the SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer judiciously to have a streamlined and optimized result in your SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition.

To get an idea how this landscape is going to look like, he again contacts Carl. During their next meeting, together with Adam, Carl developed the following figure:

Note

For the sake of simplicity, this figure only contains the systems that are needed for the implementation of business processes running in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition. Other environments (such as SAP Ariba or SAP Business Technology Platform) are not shown.

From his experience with on-premise based SAP software, Adam recognizes the development system, the test system and the production system. But he has no idea what – for example – the SAP Central Business Configuration tenant is used for. Carl therefore needs to explain the roles of the different systems on a high level:

• SAP for Me is the central personalized access point and the go-to destination to cover all the customer’s SAP engagements.

• SAP Central Business Configuration (CBC) acts as a configuration hub for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. In SAP Central Business Configuration, you can centrally manage new implementations of cloud solutions from SAP via Project Experience.

  Note

  Project Experience guides you step-by-step through the whole implementation process.

• SAP Cloud ALM helps to manage your implementation and your system landscape.

• The starter system includes configuration and master data for your SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution for targeted enablement of the project team on SAP standard processes. It serves as the environment for the fit-to-standard workshops. It is decommissioned one month after the production system is delivered.

  Note

  In the starter system (as well as in the development system), there are two separate tenants for development and for Customizing.

• The systems that finally form the three-system landscape:

  • The development system is where the solution is scoped and activated and where configuration and enhancements are implemented. Changes are transported to the test system for testing and quality assurance.
  • The test system is your quality assurance environment during implementation. It will act as a test environment during the implementation.
  • The production system is the system in which your business will transact, plan, and run.

• SAP Cloud Identity Services are a group of services of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which enable you to integrate identity and access management (IAM) between systems. The goal is to provide a seamless single sign-on (SSO) experience across systems while ensuring that system and data access are secure. They consist of

  • SAP Cloud Identity Services – Identity Authentication for the secure authentication and single sign-on for users in the cloud (and to assign CBC user roles to CBC users).
  • SAP Cloud Identity Services – Identity Provisioning to read CBC users from the Identity Authentication tenant and provision them to the CBC client.

  Two tenants (to separate development / test and production) are typical. As there is no SAP CBC system in the production landscape, the production environment does not need to have the Identity Provisioning tenant.

Note

A Sandbox Tenant (optional, not shown in the figure above) is a subscription-based tenant isolated from the customer’s development, test, and productive systems. Its primary purpose is to help evaluate and test application configurations and extensions.

Now – as the system landscape has become clear to Adam – he asks Carl when to order which of the systems. For this, Carl comes back to SAP Activate and depicts the provisioning sequence of the various systems timeline mapped with the SAP Activate phases:

Note

The SAP Cloud Identity Services do not need to be requested and are provisioned automatically.

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems such as the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Development System are requested in SAP for Me via the SAP for Me - Dashboards → Systems and Provisioning → Provisioning accelerator (https://me.sap.com/systemsprovisioning/provisioning). Here, for the SAP S/4HANA Cloud development system, locate the SAP S/4HANA Cloud customizing tenant in the Provisioning section under Product Available for Provisioning and click on Start Provisioning. The development tenant will be triggered automatically after the customizing tenant is provisioned successfully. The request will trigger the system provisioning, and an email will be sent to the IT contact when the system is available.

Caution

The commercial contract of subscribing to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition includes the name and the email address of an IT contact person. Note that – when a system is provisioned – all systems related emails are sent to this IT contact and not these people who sign the contract or pay the bill (this may be different from what you know for on-premise based environments)! So, if there is a change of this IT contact person (such as taking a new job role within the company), the customer should contact SAP immediately to name a new IT contact by creating a ticket in the component XX-S4C-OPR-SRV.

Information on the single steps for requesting and setting up the landscape can be obtained from SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer. In case of GloManCorp who use the SAP Activate for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition (3-system landscape) roadmap, the Realize phase contains the activity Request the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Development System / Initial Setup with the tasks Request the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Development System, Set Up Customizing Tenant in SAP Central Business Configuration and Set Up Development Tenant in SAP Central Business Configuration. The two tasks for the SAP Central Business Configuration contain an accelerator to the online documentation that describes how Project Experience guides you step-by-step through the whole implementation process.

For more information on the provisioning and onboarding process, Carl recommends reading:

• the blog How’s and Who’s of Provisioning and Onboarding for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition and
• the document Starter System Provisioning Process & User Onboarding.

Note

In addition to these recommendations from Carl, you may find the following references helpful for a deeper understanding:

• Information on how to get initial access to SAP for Me is provided in the document SAP for Me Initial Access and User Setup.
• Information on how to set up a starter system is provided in the very detailed blog From A to Z: Setup a Starter System of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition that also covers the use of the initial admin user and provides a step-by-step description.
• The initial system access to SAP S/4HANA Cloud is described in detail in the online documentation for the Set Up of SAP S/4HANA Cloud (you may need to adapt the release of the solution).
• The blog SAP Cloud Identity Services Administration for first time implementers in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition project helps Adam to understand how SAP Cloud Identity Services help throughout the lifecycle of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition for user identity and authentication.
• The Operation Guide for the Identity Authentication explains how administrators can configure Identity Authentication so that users can have all enhanced features for each scenario.