Understanding the Significance of SAP Activate Roadmaps for the System Administrator

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

This is why Adam schedules another meeting with Carl in which Carl explains the basic ideas of SAP Activate. In particular, Adam wants to know how SAP Activate can support him in his job as 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, understand the business value and benefits of the solution to customer’s business.
• Prepare: Perform the initial planning and preparation of the project, 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 the readiness and go-live with the solution.
• Run: Continue the adoption of the solution across the business, perform regression tests for system upgrades, and activate additional functionality as needed.

Carl then continues that a good starting point for SAP Activate is the SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer which is available in SAP for Me (requires authentication with the help of an S-User) at https://me.sap.com/roadmapviewer. This tool is designed to help customers such as GloManCorp guide their SAP S/4HANA implementation projects. The SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer provides them with 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 that are 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 now is 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.

Carl explains that SAP Cloud ALM

• allows a self-guided and content-driven implementation based on SAP Activate methodology and Best Practices content.
• allows the fast onboarding of project teams and progress monitoring of implementation activities.
• supports agile implementation approaches using user stories and sprints.
• manages implementation tasks – automatically generated and adapted to the customer scope.
• supports fit-to-standard workshops with convenient visualization of business models and process descriptions.
• can orchestrate tests with manual tests and the integration of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Test Automation Tool.
• contains integrated reporting and analytics capabilities as well as hundreds of accelerators to facilitate project tasks.

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 blog SAP Activate is Even Better When Using SAP Cloud ALM.