Terminology
For the remainder of this course, "customer" refers to someone who has purchased SAP software for their organization, or someone within the organization working as part of the larger project team to support the implementation of that solution. "Partner" refers to someone working for an organization with which SAP has established a partner program to build, sell, service, or run SAP solutions. As an employee of a partner organization preparing to implement an SAP solution, you are a service partner.
SAP also implements our solutions for customers, but we rely on our partner ecosystem to meet the global demand and bring specialized industry expertise to customers with unique requirements.
Key Stakeholders
In the Discover phase of the SAP Activate Methodology, the customer executive sponsor(s) have already built a business case for their organization to purchase SAP S/4HANA Cloud, worked with a sales person from a partner or SAP to complete the Digital Discovery Assessment, and made the final purchase decision. They are often in the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Chief Information Officer (CIO), or other similar roles within their organization. For new implementations, a detailed discovery is completed to select the SAP Best Practices business processes across different lines of business the customer expects they will need in their system. For system conversions, only the quick qualification information is completed on the Digital Discovery Assessment. The customer executive sponsors will have a counterpart from the partner or SAP, depending on who is implementing the solution. Communication from the customer executive sponsors within their organization is an important part of the change management plan that will be defined later in the project.
The customer System Admin should be identified and communicated to SAP as early as possible, so we know who should be assigned the permission role of the IT Contact. This role grants administrator access to support applications and the ability to provision the systems purchased by the customer. If no one has been explicitly chosen when the SAP S/4HANA Cloud contract is signed, the signer (CTO, CIO, or similar) will be granted the IT Contact role by default. This can be changed at a later point in time.
The implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud begins in the Prepare phase when a partner/SAP implementation project team starts work on the project. In the Prepare phase, the priority is to get all systems necessary for the project provisioned, and provide access to these systems to the implementation project team members. A partner/SAP implementation team should be staffed with minimum one expert representing each line of business (LoB) to be implemented for the customer, and a project manager. For new implementations, there should be a lead configuration expert, who will complete the business process content activation and initial setup activities in the newly provisioned landscapes. For system conversions, there should be a lead conversion expert, who initiates the system conversion and works through the process steps to deploy the converted landscapes. Ideally, there would be two partner/SAP experts per LoB, with the number increasing proportionally based on the number of business processes that need to be implemented in each LoB. For example, Finance is one of the biggest LoBs and Professional Services is one of the smallest, so there would always be more experts in Finance than in Professional Services on projects where these two LoBs are in scope.
Additional members will be added to the customer project team, including a project manager who is the counterpart of the partner/SAP project manager, and a change management team should be established if the customer did not already purchase change management services from the partner organization. Regardless of who handles change management, someone (partner or customer) needs to be responsible for the communication and training and adoption tasks during the implementation project and after go-live. If the consumers have difficulty adopting the business processes in the new SAP S/4HANA Cloud system, it will have a very negative impact on the overall success of the project.
The most important task in the Explore phase are the Fit-to-Standard analysis and design workshops. For new implementations, the focus is on validating the predefined solution in the sandbox system against the customer's requirements, and gathering configuration data and customization requirements. For system conversions, the focus is on validating new functionality the customer wants for their system or business processes that fall into the compatibility scope in a preconfigured sandbox system and capturing configuration and customization requirements. After the workshops, partners should work with customer experts to validate the business processes that have successfully converted in their sandbox system to verify the converted processes are functioning as expected.
Experts representing various business roles in each LoB from the customer organization are added to the extended project team to participate in the Fit-to-Standard workshops. For new implementations, partner/SAP LoB experts demonstrate each business process chosen on the Digital Discovery Assessment from start to finish in a sandbox system. For system conversions, partner/SAP LoB experts demonstrate only the business processes that cover new functionality or are in the compatibility scope. The workshops serve several purposes:
- teaching the customer LoB experts how end-to-end processes are navigated in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.
- giving the customer LoB experts time to carefully review each process and provide feedback if certain changes are necessary to make the process fit their needs.
- partner/SAP experts leading the workshops gather configuration values and additional requirements from the customer LoB experts, which will be used later when setting up the customer's actual systems.
- building relationships with the customer LoB experts with the goal of inviting them to complete user acceptance testing (UAT) of the same processes after they have been configured in the Realize phase. UAT is mandatory and must be completed before the implementation project can move into the Deploy phase.
Note
It's important the customer LoB experts invited to the Fit-to-Standard workshops are responsible for the day-to-day activities that are being covered in the workshops, because they will be able to provide the most detailed and accurate feedback the closer they are to the process in real life.
Additional members will likely be added to the customer's extended project team as the tasks of integration, customization, and data migration are being completed by the partner/SAP implementation project team. For integration, this is because custom integrations will need the support of developers on the customer-side to both support building the integration and also so they know where the integrations lives (ideally in SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)) and can maintain it in the future. For customizations, partner/SAP consultants are responsible for completing extensions within SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition using the extensibility Fiori apps. For side-by-side extensions that live in the customer's BTP system, they have two options: 1) low/no-code extensions made with SAP Build, which is included in the RISE with SAP enablement package, and 2) classical code-based extensions hosted through a different service on SAP BTP (for example, SAP Business Application Studio). It would be most cost-effective for the customer to have their own developers tackle these side-by-side extensions, although a partner/SAP resource can also be brought on the project for an additional fee. For data migration, the partner/SAP implementation project team will need contact(s) within the customer organization that have the permission to access and extract data that needs to be migrated to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. For system conversions, data is migrated during the technical conversion process steps, however the customer may have additional data located in a different system that may need to be migrated separately.
Finally, the consumers of the solution (customer end user employees) need to be onboarded and trained by the change management team to ensure there is a successful transition from the old systems to the new SAP S/4HANA Cloud system in the Deploy phase.
