The Business Driven Configuration Questionnaires (BDCQ) are used by the partner line of business (LoB) configuration experts to gather configuration values that will ultimately be entered in SAP Central Business Configuration to configure the customer's SAP S/4HANA Cloud development system tenants.
To identify which business processes you need to look up configuration values for, partner LoB configuration experts check the processes that were selected for their LoB on the Digital Discovery Assessment (DDA) and filter the BDCQ relevant for their LoB by those processes.
In the BDCQ, there are two levels of information - Level 2 (L2) values that should be gathered in the Prepare phase prior to Fit-to-Standard workshop delivery, and Level 3 (L3) values that should be gathered in the Explore phase during Fit-to-Standard workshops.
The L2 values in the BDCQ are meant as a secondary check to absolutely make sure there are no customer requirements for functionality that aren't available in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system. The DDA completed by the customer executive sponsor(s) in the Discover phase is designed to ask very detailed questions for business processes that have different functionality/capabilities between the public and private cloud deployments of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Based on the responses to these questions, the DDA will recommend only the solution that fits the customer's needs.
For example, the DDA could have initially proposed public cloud after the quick qualification, but when the detailed discovery is completed, the DDA may change it's recommendation to private cloud. This is likely because of responses to the detailed qualification scope-relevant questions. Even though the DDA is designed to catch these small details, we use the L2 questions on the BDCQ to double-check that public cloud is still the right fit for the customer. Instead of asking the L2 questions to the executive sponsor(s) who completed the DDA, we ask customer LoB experts who work closely with the data and/or functionality to get a different perspective.
Accessing the Business Driven Configuration Questionnaires
You can access the Business Driven Configuration Questionnaires (BDCQs) through two methods:
- SAP Signavio Process Navigator → SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition solution scenario → Accelerators tab → General Documents tab → Business Driven Configuration Questionnaires → this sends you to the Business Driven Configuration Assessment task in the SAP Roadmap Viewer.
- SAP Roadmap Viewer → SAP Activate for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition (3-system landscape) methodology → Prepare Phase → Business Driven Configuration Assessment task → Perform Initial Business Process Assessment for SAP S/4HANA Cloud → download relevant Excel spreadsheet for your line of business area.
Note
Some BDCQs don't fit into a typical line of business. The implementation team should meet together and verify all business processes selected on the Digital Discovery Assessment are being covered across the different BDCQs, and if there are outstanding processes (e.g. in Human Resources or Two Tier ERP), divvy up the work amongst themselves based on who has transferable expertise and/or availability.
Preparing the Business Driven Configuration Questionnaires
Steps to prepare the Business Driven Configuration Assessment (BDCQ) and identify customer LoB experts:
- Partner LoB configuration experts download the relevant BDCQ Excel spreadsheet for their LoB.
- Filter the Scope Ref. column to only include the business processes that have been selected on the DDA.
- Filter the Level column to only include L2 questions.
- Look up each in-scope business process in SAP Signavio Process Navigator to determine which business roles are most involved in the tasks completed for each process.
- Make a list of the business roles most involved in the tasks for each business process.
- Contact the customer project manager and ask for support in identifying 2-4 customer experts who can "represent" the business roles you've identified.
- Set up meetings (virtual or on-site) with these experts and explain what's in the Topic Definition column of the BDCQ, then ask what's in the Question column.
- Enter the customer responses in the Customer's Response column.
Another benefit of the BDCQ is to help the partner LoB configuration experts build relationships with customer LoB experts and to introduce these customer experts to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Ideally, the same customer LoB experts who provide the L2 BDCQ information about specific business processes would participate in the Fit-to-Standard workshop(s) covering those same processes, and finally complete the user acceptance testing of the configured and customized processes before go-live.
If you imagine this happening across all lines of business being implemented, you end up with a group of customers who already know how to use SAP S/4HANA Cloud to complete the business processes relevant for their job tasks before go-live. They can then help communicate information across their teams about which business processes are relevant for their job responsibilities, and where to access the documentation/tutorials for a process (Process Navigator and the in-app support). This is a subtle, but important part of overall change management communication - the communication between employees about how to use the new software.