SAP is “The Experience Company powered by the Intelligent Enterprise” with SAP S/4HANA as its Digital Core. To ease the adoption of the Digital Core, SAP is providing lots of assets and accelerators, along with tools to consume them. This article will clarify some of the accelerators and the tools in question and how they can support the complete lifecycle: from adoption to operation.

Accelerator and Assets

These are for existing customers, who decide to go the migration route to the digital core. There are many tools, like SAP Readiness check, SAP Transformation Navigator, SAP Innovation and Optimization Pathfinder, among others. Some of these assets, like Roadmap Viewer, SAP Best Practices Explorer, KPI Catalog, are valid for net-new implementations or greenfield approaches as well. These assets are made consumable by SAP Solution Manager and its add-on family, for instance Focused Build and Focused Insights.

Tools

SAP Solution Manager 7.2 is the primary tool supporting the SAP S/4HANA adoption. For migration use cases below metro-map view, an illustrative version, could be interesting for the customers to consider. Here, SAP Solution Manager 7.2 provides the usage data (collected via usage procedure logging /SCMON) to provide transparency to customers of what is used, and, most importantly, not used in the system. Further capabilities, like custom code management and SAP readiness check, then help the customer to adapt their critical developments to SAP S/4HANA. The metro map needs to be customized for each customer to bring together all assets like methodologies, tools, and Premium Engagement Services.

This context might look a bit different for net-new implementations or greenfield approaches. Focused Build for SAP Solution Manager, an add-on of SAP Solution Manager, provides the ability to consume SAP Best Practice Processes as a starting point, instead of a clean slate. Alternatively, customers could also use a SAP Model Company. This approach could be referred to as “Fit-centric” (less WRICEFS). Alternatively, “Build-centric” (with many WRICEFS) approach, leads to a substantial amount of deviation from standard.  Regardless of the approach, the add-on allows you to start the very first steps of adoption, documenting the outcome of the Fit/Gap process to define customer requirements which are a combination of SAP standard and identified process gap. This is also the best time to gather the business-relevant KPIs that might be needed to be setup in the final solution, the KPI Catalog could be a great source of information. Constructs like work packages and work items allow the customer to breakdown the requirements and associated tasks in the adoption journey, in an easy way. All of these objects defined in the add-on, and the very nature of usage, allow the project managers to get a holistic view of the entire project via the “out of the box” Solution Readiness Dashboard. All the artifacts, like design documents, test cases and others, stay linked to the process structure. These structures are also the basis to connect both technical- and business-process monitoring objects, all in one tool, supporting integrated build and run phases of SAP S/4HANA.

There are both commercial value and subjective benefits to using SAP Solution Manager. Commercially, there is no license cost. Customers can implement the complete tool chain on their own. However, to accelerate the implementation and deliver the best practices, the Premium Engagements team offers services under End-to-End Hybrid Operations to deliver end-to-end tools support. In addition to the commercial value, benefits include the following:

• • Jump start for Fit Gap workshop

• • Transparency of project status

• • Traceability of requirements

• • Efficiency

• • Audit compliance

• • Faster transition to operations

• • Technical- and Business-Process Monitoring enablement