On Tuesday, October 4, the SAP Activate team held a community call via a live YouTube session.  The main topic of this SAP Activate Community call was “SAP S/4HANA Cloud, 3-system landscape.”

We were joined by Jan Musil (Chief Product Owner, SAP Activate), Lisa Kouch (Product Owner, SAP Activate), Aanchal Chopra (Product Expert), and Nishat Fatima (SAP Activate Community Lead).

Agenda:

• Introduction – by Nishat Fatima 3:05 – 5:33
  • SAP Activate Minute
    • Quick minute video of SAP Activate related topic
    • Released every Friday at 9:00am CST
    • Access via SAP Activate Community or YouTube Playlist
  • SAP Activate Community
    • Follow the SAP Activate Community for up-to-date news and content
    • SAP Activate subtopic page where overview documents, customer success stories, learning journeys and SAP Activate courses can be found
• Current state and future direction of SAP Activate – by Jan Musil 5:35 – 15:15
  • SAP Activate Community
    • Helping our users adopt SAP Activate
    • Answering questions from the community
    • Collaborating with sister communities
  • SAP Activate in SAP Cloud ALM
    • Try out Cloud ALM
    • Guided procedures to assist implementation teams in executing specific tasks
    • Access tools and accelerators that aid your team members in performing project task
    • Leverage SAP Best Practices for fit-to standard workshops
    • Run your project in remote, on-site or hybrid mode
    • Easy to access and use in SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Roadmap Viewer
  • RISE with SAP Adoption Framework
    • Quickly identify RISE with SAP Adoption Framework activities inside SAP Activate methodology
    • Connect your Activity Map to tasks
    • Reduced view to the Adoption Framework related deliverables
  • Experience Management Transformation
    • Available in private cloud edition
    • Currently in process of bringing into the public cloud
• SAP Activate for implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, 3-system landscape by Lisa Kouch 15:25 – 22:10
  • Deploy with SAP Activate
    • Journey Overview, Key Milestones and System Landscape over time
  • Landscape Overview
    • Identity Authentication Service (IAS)
    • SAP Cloud ALM
    • SAP Central Business Configuration
    • Starter system
      • Customizing Tenant
      • Development Tenant
    • Development system
      • Customizing Tenant
      • Development Tenant
    • Test system
    • Production system
  • SAP Activate Content Updates for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, 3-system landscape
    • Release notes
  • SAP Cloud ALM project overview
• SAP Activate for upgrade of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, 3-system landscape by Lisa Kouch 22:11 – 23:41
  • Release Cycle
    • New roadmap created for updates and upgrades: SAP Activate for Upgrade of SAP S/4HANA Cloud 3-system landscape
• Product Expert perspective from customer adoption of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, 3-system landscape by Aanchal Chopra 24:00 – 34:10
  • Getting Started with 3-system Landscape
  • Sprint Scheduling and Finetuning
  • Transport Management
  • Using SAP Activate methodology for S/4HANA Cloud, 3-system landscape
  • Learnings
  • New blog post: SAP Activate for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, 3-system landscape
• Q&A – by all 34:13 – 1:01
  • Community member questions and answers

Here is a recap of all the questions asked during the call:

1. Question: Can we transport from Starter pack as well?

• Answer: There is no connection from your starter system to development. It is a standalone system.  Although you can move developer extensibility through GitHub; there is a way to move code from starter to your development system using GitHub.  The transports of configuration are not set up between starter and development.

1. Question: What is the difference between the 3-system landscape and S/4HANA Cloud roadmap?

• Answer: The primary difference is that 3-system landscape has an extra system. Within the landscape there is Development system, Test system and Production system.  With S/4HANA Cloud there is only the Quality system and Production system.  3-system landscape also requires the use of SAP Cloud ALM and Central Business Configuration (CBC).

1. Question: Are Starter, and 3 Tier all provisioned with the full code line scope?

• Answer: 3-system landscape in SAP S/4HANA public cloud has the full functionality. The functionality in terms of functional coverage across Finance, Logistics and all functional areas is the same for all customers.  What has changed is some of the technology underlying that functionality to include more flexibility in developer extensibility as well as an additional system so you can have a true test environment before you push the functionality to production. There are also enhancements that are added to the transport management system that allows you to manage your transports much more granular so you can move smaller elements across whereas in 2-system landscape you were limited to the one change request that had to be closed each sprint.

1. Question: What are some of the best practices from a customer viewpoint on using 3-system landscape?

• Answer: Have a very defined project plan – plan backwards once the go live date is set. Always take the time to enable on the material and follow the documentation. In terms of Transport Management, the best practices are using fewer transports and regularly transporting (transports to your production system cannot be older than n+1 release; if it has been two releases you will have to recreate that transport). For more information on Transport Configuration, please review the help document here.

1. Question: Is the Adoption Framework just a group of activate tasks relating to adoption? What type of tasks go into that group?

• Answer: The Adoption Framework is a list of activities that are tailored for accelerating the adoption of RISE offerings with the customer that acquired the RISE offering. It is a specific engagement from the SAP side that empowers the customer to know exactly the sequence of steps and activities they need to do, the activities that their SI will be doing, and the activities that SAP will be doing. It is basically a compression of the entire activate essential steps that you need in the initial adoption of RISE with SAP. Check out the list of activities in the SAP Activate roadmap available for the Adoption Framework.

1. Question: Does CBC also support Private cloud S/4HANA Cloud provisioning and configuration?

• Answer: Currently Central Business Configuration (CBC) only supports our public cloud offering.

1. Question: The accelerator ‘Availability Dependencies’ that states to use this document before provisioning of your tenant to decide on the appropriate scope for your needs.  How important is this?

• Answer: It is very important because it will give you the dependencies between the scope items. You will know which scope items will be included in your scope.  If there are dependent scope items in your project scope, this accelerator will explain how they are dependent.

1. Question: How do I know if my feedback is taken into consideration, and where do I see the updates?

• Answer: There are multiple feedback channels. For example, if you have a current project, you can provide feedback through the channel of your PE’s as well as through the project itself, which is tracked in the program. For general feedback on the roadmap, there is a feedback icon in the Roadmap Viewer to provide feedback, which goes directly to the SAP Activate team. Feedback can also be provided through the SAP Activate Community. For more information on SAP Activate feedback please read the blog post Have SAP Activate Feedback? We Want to Know. 

1. Question: Is the Main line, Project line and Developer line available now? If not, do you know when it will be available?

• Answer: All customers that are provisioned now going forward on 3-system landscape are getting the Developer and Main line. The Project line is currently under development.

1. Question: What can customers expect during an upgrade cycle and how does that affect downtime?

• Answer: There are two types of downtime that you will see during an upgrade:
  • In your Central Business Configuration – you can still use it, but you are not able to deploy anything new to your S/4 system. A schedule is provided with restrictions during the software change for updates (hotfix collections) and upgrades.
  • Weekend downtime for the major upgrades.

1. Question: Is Experience Management Transformation available in other roadmaps besides private cloud?

• Answer: Experience Management Transformation is currently in process of being analyzed for revisions for the public cloud and will be released soon.

1. Question: How does SAP Activate help with RISE projects and how does it enhance the implementations with RISE?

• Answer: There are a standard set of steps that we recommend our customers to follow. In addition, a customer gets entitlement for additional services such as detailed guidance on enablement that is necessary, all the services that should be included in their project scope, and how to consume them throughout their execution of their project. One improvement is the Adoption Framework view of the essential activities in RISE implementation.

1. Question: What in your view is the cloud mindset? How does it apply to activate and how does it help our customers?

• Answer:
  • Having immediate access. One of the benefits of having everything in the cloud is that you can access everything immediately, and if you make a change, it is available immediately.
  • We offer upgrades on a more regular occurrence.
  • Not starting from scratch. Not rebuilding best practices. Not reinventing the wheel. Starting with something that SAP put together and then build on top of it.
  • Check out this blog post by Bob Byrne to get started on your Cloud Mindset

Resources mentioned on the call:

Please be sure to follow the SAP Activate Community topic page to stay up to date on all the latest news and content. Make sure to subscribe to the SAP Activate Minute YouTube playlist for more quick videos on SAP Activate related content, new videos are released every Friday.

Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast

As always, I would like to encourage you to subscribe to our new podcast “Inside SAP S/4HANA.” This podcast leverages the unique knowledge and expertise of SAP S/4HANA product experts, partners and customers to address your needs by sharing product insights and project best practice. There is no customer success without product success and project success; we help you get to the next level and make your SAP S/4HANA projects a success. Subscribe now and benefit from the shared knowledge.

openSAP Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA

Just a couple of months ago, we launched openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA as an exciting new learning opportunity. What began with a small batch of 20 videos, has now become a channel with more than 50 microlearnings that have generated over 20,000 views since then. Today we cover multiple lines of business, like Finance and Manufacturing & Supply Chain, and key technology topics like Master Data Management, Extensibility, User Experience, and Upgrade Management. We are continuously adding new microlearnings to the SAP S/4HANA channel, so make sure you check them out.

Your voice matters! 

If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, join our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Customer Community. This platform which is available to SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers and partners has a clear mission: deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions.

For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here
• SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here

• Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
• Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist
• Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Customer Community: register here
• SAP Activate Community here

• Feature Scope Description here
• What’s New here
• Help Portal Product Page here
• Implementation Portal here

Follow us via @SAP and #SAPS4HANAValueSeries #SAPActivate