Preparing for Fit-to-Standard Analysis Workshops

The systems that can be used for Fit-to-Standard workshops include:

• SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance
  • Best choice for most customers (new implementation and system conversion). For new implementations, partner line of business (LoB) experts use the system to demonstrate the SAP Best Practice business processes with SAP Fiori, which defines the look and feel of the user interface, applications, and additional functionality, including embedded analytics. SAP Fiori will be covered in detail in a future unit. Even for system conversions, there will be a small percentage of business processes that cannot be directly converted from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA. For those processes, either there will be an equivalent process listed in the compatibility scope, or the partner LoB experts are responsible for identifying a suitable alternative from the SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition in SAP Signavio Process Navigator. The customer may also want to turn on additional functionality in other LoBs after conversion, which means you need a system to demonstrate both the SAP Best Practices from the compatibility scope and the new functionality that's requested. This system is the best option for these demonstrations.
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition Customer Evaluation System
  • This system is delivered by the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) team and can be set-up with SAP Best Practices and SAP Fiori or as a sandbox to make a copy of the customer's existing production system and convert it. Because it tends to take longer to deliver and has a relatively high cost, it's a better option for larger customers, especially if the customer wants to copy the configuration from this system into other system tenants. So the approach here is a longer time for set-up, with a reduction in the time required during the Realize phase to configure and set up the customer's actual system landscapes.
• Converted Sandbox System
  • Ideally, the partner implementation team has already made a copy of the customer's productive system into a sandbox and has begun converting it in the Prepare phase. Because it can take a month or more to complete the initial conversion of the first system, the converted sandbox may not be ready in time for the Fit-to-Standard workshops. Even if the system IS ready, additional work would need to be done to configure the compatibility scope and additional functionality the customer may request. While SAP Best Practices content can be deployed easily through Solution Builder in a clean system for new implementation scenarios, this cannot be done in a converted system. First, the SAP Fiori apps involved in the SAP Best Practices business process must be activated, then the process flow must be manually built to define each business process. Because of the extra time this requires, we instead recommend using the SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance to demonstrate any SAP Best Practice business processes to customer LoB experts during Fit-to-Standard workshops.

Learn more about the task to Define and Prepare Systems in the SAP Activate Methodology.

Fit-to-Standard Analysis workshops are time consuming, because partner LoB configuration experts need to demonstrate an entire test script from start to finish (skip the "preliminary steps" section, just the "test procedures").

They gather the following information from their customer LoB experts:

• Configuration values for business process (Validate existing L2 BDCQ responses, gather L3 responses)
• Business role and corresponding space/page customizations
• Key user in-app extensions
• Output forms/email customizations (if relevant)
• Analytical app customizations (if relevant)
• Values for data migration or a contact who will be able to pull relevant data from the legacy system(s)
• Additional integration requirements
• Perceived change impact (to be shared with Change Management Team)

Use the length of the test script (number of pages in the Test Procedures section) as a gauge to estimate approximately how long it will take to cover the business process with your customers. For example, the Material Requirements Planning (J44) test procedures cover approximately 40 pages. This is in stark contrast to the Production Capacity Leveling (3LQ) test script, which is only 11 pages. It's going to take much more time to work through J44 than 3LQ with a customer expert. It would be realistic to cover 1-2 business processes for a half day (4 hours) workshop and 2-3 business processes for a full day workshop (you can define your own time estimates, these are just examples to get you started).

You also want to keep your workshop participants engaged during the majority of the workshop, which means stacking processes together where there are similar business roles completing the majority of the activities. Here's an example of how to organize business processes into workshops:

1. Look at the process flow diagrams for all business processes you need to cover in your workshops in SAP Signavio Process Navigator and write down the business roles involved in the majority of the tasks for each process.
2. Group together processes that have the same roles completing the majority of the tasks.
3. Check the number of pages in the test procedures for the processes you have grouped together and refer back to approximately how long it took you to work through each test script after creating your test users.
4. Use this information to fine-tune each workshop by adding/removing processes to fit into half-day or full-day workshops.

Generally, we recommend running the Chart of Accounts and Organizational Structure workshops first; the remaining line of business workshops can take place in parallel, in any sequence. If you are onsite, make a schedule and identify and book available meeting rooms. If you are offsite, make a schedule and set up virtual meeting rooms. This schedule will likely need to change depending on your customer experts' availability. Finally, reach out to the customer LoB experts you worked with for the Business Driven Configuration Questionnaire responses and invite them to the relevant workshops. There should be minimum 2 people representing each business role covered in a workshop, and no more than 4 representing a single business role, because this can lead to discussions getting side-tracked with "too many cooks in the kitchen". Adjust your original schedule and onsite/virtual meeting rooms as-needed.