SAP S/4HANA | AscendTechAdv Site

SAP S/4HANA Implementations

Implementing SAP S/4HANA can provide many of the critical enabling capabilities to run your business effectively and provide a competitive advantage. However, these implementations are difficult, and pose risks in terms of sub-optimal implementations, cost over-runs, organizational burn-out, and an over dependence on external resources longer than is healthy. The challenges, value proposition and services listed below are only a partial list. I can help your company launch your S/4HANA program quickly and effectively along with guiding your organization through a successful program as an unbiased Independent Advisor working with your employees and consultants.

Hiring a Senior Independent Advisor who has led several ERP Implementations (including S4) can add significant value to your SAP Program for the challenges that commonly arise and more.

Common Challenges

Consulting organizations (aka System Integrators or SI’s) incent their leaders to sell as many services as possible so their incentives may not be fully aligned with yours.

There is a shortage of skilled resources so the SI leadership will staff each engagement with a mix of their “A, B and C talent” because they can’t assign all their top talent to one engagement. Many of these less experienced or less skilled consultants are very expensive relative to what they deliver. Also, it is not uncommon to get in a hurry and just go to your primary SI for all staffing needs since you have a relationship and don’t have to create new Procurement agreements like MSA’s which can take a lot of time while the program stagnates.

Selecting your key vendors: evaluating your options and deciding how you should distribute the work between your primary SI, internal team members and other consultants

Structure and Negotiate Contracts: SI’s, software partners and other providers are very good at leveraging the structure of their contracts (MSA’s, SOW’s, licensing agreements, etc.) leading to less than favorable terms for your company if you haven’t been through this process several times.

It is common to have disagreements on how to execute your Program, these are complex endeavors that don’t always provide a clear best course of action.

SI’s may not have a sense of urgency to reduce your dependency on their services thus increasing costs.

Value Provided

As an independent advisor I don’t have external factors driving my incentives to deviate from your organization’s best interest.

I can provide advice on the optimal mix of internal versus external staff and when to use different types of external consultants. This includes determining the specific roles your program will require, but you can staff yourself saving 200% - 350% on these resources compared to an SI. It is also important to consider your internal team’s development of knowledge and skills so your organization can become independent in a reasonable time frame.

Since I have been on all sides of these transactions; leading Software Sales, Procurement, Corporate IT, Consulting Teams and Program Management I am equipped to lead you through your vendor selection process effectively and quickly.

You will hear from these vendors that certain contract terms are standard so they should be acceptable to you. I can provide guidance and insight that will not only save you money but provide your company with the flexibility you need and the ability to hold your vendors / partners accountable.

Reconcile differing viewpoints and approaches providing independent and ensuring comprehensive analysis while moving the program execution forward on a timely basis.

Provide specific strategies to prepare your organization (functional and technical) to acquire the necessary internal resources and skills to become independent.

Summary of S/4HANA Implementation Services

Startup and Assessment Phase of Work

ERP Selection: help determine / validate if SAP S/4HANA is a good choice for your organization and decide which version should be utilized
Accelerate your S4 Program start-up: Creating your vision, definition of success, initial program scope and related planning
Startup your Program Office: structure, resource planning, risk management, roles and responsibilities, governance, financial administration, change management, etc.
Key decisions and work to perform early in your implementation journey to gain velocity and ensure quality
Refine initial scope and select applications and tools. You will have several choices between SAP and other vendors for some applications and tools. Example, do you need Central Finance?
What preparatory work should be done with your teams to equip them for success? For example who needs some initial training to be a productive core implementation team member?
Deployment approach - greenfield (start from scratch), brownfield (upgrade) or hybrid?
What order should you build and deploy your solutions?
Code block design

Detailed Design and Build

Refining and complete requirements
Creating specifications
Integrating applications
Configuration and development
Code and configuration reviews and quality control
Change: Identifying the high impact changes and developing your change strategy and actions
Should your design drive any organizational changes
Training strategy, curriculum design and creation

Change Management, Training and Cutover Preparation

What training needs to be mandatory, and should you have future users demonstrate competency?
Operational readiness and managing open transactions
Final technical environments preparation and migration
Cutover planning
Data migration and validation (master data)
Hyper-care planning (processes, training, dashboards, SLA’s, etc.)
Final validation of data, environments and integrated applications
Communications and change execution (customers, vendors and employees)

Building your Program Plan and how to break down the phases of work
Scope of Initial Design and Build: How much of your enterprise-wide solution should you include in your initial design and build? There will likely be some unique components of the solutions based on regional or BU specific needs, but you will want to limit those.
Identify and define your key value opportunities to focus on and pain points to eradicate
Develop technical standards / best practices and make architectural decisions
Solution Design and Requirements: conduct design workshops yielding KPI’s, process design artifacts, preferred deployment approach, RAID logs, design to enable key value opportunities, applications portfolio and integration strategy,
Critical bodies of work besides the core S/4HANA applications that need to be planned and started: data, change management, training, infrastructure, security and controls, analytics, integrated applications and more
Interim State Strategy: If you don’t deploy S4 all to your whole organization at once with a big bang approach (which typically isn’t viable), that means you will have to operate the company partly in S4 and partly in your legacy systems. This is complex and needs to be well planned.

Detailed Design and Build (continued)

Cutover Plans
Testing: What kinds of testing are required, how many cycles do you need, what training do the testers need ahead of time and can you automate any testing?
Data: prepare your data, create reports for pre and post load validation, create your ETL scripts to extract, transform and load your data and optimize load times performance
Stage Gates: what stage gates should be required for each cycle of data loading and testing to proceed to the next stage of work?

Deployment and Hypercare

Final technical environments preparation and migration
Data migration and validation (transactional data)
Final validation of data, environments and integrated applications
Execute any organizational changes
Remaining cutover execution
Communications and change execution
Day 1 go-live and hyper-care execution