SAP’s Original Article on SAP S/4HANA : CLICK HERE
Key Takeaways & Thoughts from this SAP S/4HANA Article:
1. Developing a Vision: “SAP isn’t a strategy, but can support our vision excellently”. This seems obvious, but I’ve seen where companies think they can just buy SAP and hope that it solves all of their problems. Organizations need to start their technological journey by essentially forgetting what technologies exist in the marketplace. They need to dream a bit and say things like, “In a perfect world, it would awesome if I could…. (in this case, have all of my care professionals record all of their care plans on a tablet.). This now brings us to developing business processes.
2. Defining Business Processes: Once I’ve outlined my vision (dream), it’s time to create those ideal business processes. As the article insinuates, this shouldn’t come from the top down. These business process master templates should come directly from business process owners. Once each individual business process owner has mapped out their own processes, then someone should take all of those unique processes and find a way to tie them together (on paper). Congratulations! You’ve now created your scope.
3. Targeted SAP S/4HANA Exploration: Now that you’ve got your scope identified, it’s time to present this to SAP and map specific SAP S/4HANA functionality to business needs that are already mapped, identify gaps, and create plans for filling those gaps. This approach will prevent your company from blindly exploring interesting SAP S/4HANA features without a case for leveraging the feature. It’s okay to explore new things like this, but this type of exploration should come AFTER you’ve mapped your core business processes to available technologies.
4. Implement Project Management Fundamentals: The goal should be for the organization to support changes throughout the project. Just because you made the best decision possible about implementing a feature or process at the beginning of the project doesn’t mean that changing that decision midstream isn’t the right move and the team should be collectively supportive of this. Finally, including buffers in your project plan is essential. SAP S/4HANA is the DNA of your operation. Implementing it is a major initiative and things will never go perfectly. If they did, we wouldn’t need consultants would we?
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