In the previous blogpost, I had mentioned about few of the concerns raised by SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers during implementation, which in turn lead to the development of SAP Central Business Configuration tool.
In this blogpost, I would like to explain about Project Experience, Scoping and Central Configurations – the 3 pillars of SAP Central Business Configuration and how it provides the desired flexibility SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers.
Project Experience allows you to manage your configurations for SAP cloud implementations centrally. First, you should create projects in SAP Central Business Configuration. There are 2 types of projects:
- Starter Project
- Implementation Project
Starter Project supports the customer during Prepare and Explore Phase of their implementation. It is connected to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Starter system, where customers can explore the business processes before beginning the actual implementation.
Implementation Project is required to manage the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Quality and Production systems. Its used during Realize and Deploy phase of implementation.
Starter and Implementation projects also have their own phases, which is different from the phases in SAP Activate Methodology.
Use Interface for both projects are same. You can divide the UI into 3 parts – Header, Search Criteria and Item (Figure 3).
- Header – gives you an overview of project, detailing the name, phase, status and milestones. For Starter Project, the phases Explore and Realize can be seen. However, for Implementation Project you have Explore, Realize and Deploy phases.
Again, do not confuse these phases with that of SAP Activate Methodology.
- Search Criteria – gives you an option to filter activities based on phases, mandatory/optional and status. You can also do a free text search.
- Item – gives a list of activities to be executed in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The activities are categorized based on their status as shown in Figure 2 i.e. Open, In Progress and Completed. Each activity is unlocked based on the project milestone and completion of the previous activities.
Further details for milestones – starter project milestone and implementation project milestone
Figure 1: Screenshot of Project Experience UI – Part 1
Figure 2: Screenshot of Project Experience UI – Part 2
There are separate tabs for Configuration Activities, Teams and Systems. Within the tab “Systems”, the SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Starter, Quality and Production systems are shown. As a project manager, it is possible to maintain the project team members within the tab “Teams”
Scoping
As shown in Figure 2, the first activity you see within the Explore phase of starter and implementation project is “Define Scope”.
On clicking “Go to App”, you will be navigated to detailed scoping screen (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Define Scope – Detailed View
The first step for scoping is selection of the countries/region. Customers can now select the countries/regions without any limitation on the number (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Define Scope – Country Selection
Next, the scope bundle to be activated in SAP S/4HANA Cloud should be selected. For Starter Project, customers only have scope bundle “Enterprise Management” (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Define Scope – Scope Bundle in Starter Project
However, customers can select from 3 scope bundles in an Implementation Project i.e. “Enterprise Management”, Professional Services and Finance-Led ERP (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Define Scope – Scope Bundle in Implementation Project
Furthermore, the scope items which are not included as part of the default activation (you can find the list in SAP Best Practices Explorer) can be selected from scenarios list as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Define Scope – Selection of additional scenarios/scope items
Even if the scoping is completed you still have an option to enhance the scope and select further countries via “Initiate Change” (Figure 8). However, to Initiate Change, you should complete at least one milestone within the project.
Figure 8: Initiate Change – Enhance project scope
Customers may require the priced or non-standard scope items as well. These are not included in the initial list (Scope bundle or scenarios explained earlier) and for now, customers must raise a request to the SAP Support team for activating these scope items. The activity “Request SAP S/4HANA Cloud License-Dependent and Non-Standard Scenarios via Ticket” explains about the same (Figure 9).
On clicking “Go to App”, you will navigate to SAP Best Practice Explorer, where you can review the scope items.
Figure 9: Requesting License dependent and non-standard scope items
In case you have already raised request for license dependent scope items, you can set the status of the activity as “Complete” (Figure 10).
Figure 10: Requesting License dependent and non-standard scope items – maintaining status
Thus, CBC provides flexibility and control to the customers to choose the country/region and scope as per their business requirements.
Once scoping is complete, the next step is to make Fiscal Year Variant and Group Currency selection as well as organizational structure definition. In the starter project, the Fiscal Year Variant and Group currency is defaulted to K4 and USD respectively. However, customer can make their selection in the implementation project.
You can refer the blog written by my colleague Sahil Grover on setting up organizational structure using SAP Central Business Configuration here.
Central Configuration
SAP Central Business Configuration is intended as a central point for managing the configurations across SAP’s cloud products. Like mentioned earlier, we have connected SAP S/4HANA Cloud with SAP Central Business Configuration. In the Fiori application “Manage your Solution”, the configurations were referred as Self-Service Configuration UIs or SSCUIs. However, in SAP Central Business Configuration these are referred to as Configuration Activities and the availability of any configuration activity depends on the scope selection.
The configuration activities are grouped based on the Line of Business such as Sales, Procurement, Manufacturing etc. (Figure 11). It is possible to navigate to SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems from the configurations activities
Figure 11: Configuration Activities in SAP Central Business Configuration
To conclude, SAP Central Business Configuration provides SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers with the desired flexibility and guidance to implement the solution. Also, the touch points with SAP Support team is drastically reduced, thus reducing the overall time for system provisioning and scope enhancement.
Useful Links:
- SAP Central Business Configuration Product Page : https://help.sap.com/viewer/product/DRAFT/CENTRAL_BUSINESS_CONFIGURATION/DEV/en-US
- Application Help: https://help.sap.com/viewer/55c9333eed324cd284f6c4e5dab8462f/2020_11/en-US
- Setting up of SAP Central Business Configuration : https://help.sap.com/viewer/3c391b7b79604a608e02d4914f6b1fbf/2020_11/en-US/b4bec37558014fe79f01085219c8ac3d.html
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community Topic Page: https://community.sap.com/topics/s4hana-cloud
