SAP Activate Elements and Phases

SAP Activate guideline framework helps customers to move/migrate legacy system to S4HANA system by providing various general and solution specific roadmaps under roadmap viewer.

The below picture illustrates SAP Activate framework which comprises of Transition Scenarios, Enablers of business driven innovation (SAP Activate Elements) and Deployment solutions – Cloud/On-premise

SAP Activate

Transition Scenarios

SAP Activate supports different transition scenarios for customers adopting SAP S/4HANA and provides dedicated solution specific Methodology, Content and Tools.

• New implementation: Company does not have SAP in their landscape or have some legacy system and they want to start fresh implementation and know S4HANA capabilities and wants to try the product.
• System conversion: when company is already having sap in their landscape and company wants to migrate old system to new S4HANA system.
• Selective data transition: When company has lot of ERP’s running in their landscape or different legacy systems and wants to migrate some of them to S4HANA to leverage all the functionalities of latest SAP software.

SAP Activate Elements

SAP Activate Elements

SAP Activate Methodology

SAP Activate Methodology is a modular and agile framework helps project teams with detailed steps need to be delivered in each phase through the project by providing accelerators which makes work easier to accomplish task of a deliverable and workstreams which span across various phases.

SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer Access:

https://go.support.sap.com/roadmapviewer/

Get Started with the SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer

SAP Activate Methodology Community:

Visit the community and Follow to get the latest content on SAP Activate Methodology! https://community.sap.com/topics/activate

SAP Activate Content 

SAP provides ready-to-run business processes by providing ready-to-use content which can be used in SAP Activate journey. The best practices help customers minimize risk, accelerate time to value, and reduce the total cost of implementing SAP S/4HANA as well as continue innovation even after go-live.

Two variants of Best Practices:

SAP Best Practices and SAP Model Companies are used to accelerate customer’s SAP cloud and on premise implementation projects.

• SAP Best Practice Explorer
• SAP Model Company

SAP Activate Tools

SAP Activate offers various kind of tools for below purposes:

• Configuration
• Documenting the solution, including business process models
• System change management and transport management
• Data loads and data migration
• Testing
• Delivery of training and enablement
• Managing the project work
• Extending the solution
• Integration

SAP Activate Phases

SAP Activate comprises of 6 phases and at the end of each phase quality gate is present to make sure respective deliverables in each phase are completed as per the standards. Having said that, SAP Activate Methodology is agile framework hence all these phases are run in iterative manner in build a solution

Discover:

• Discover phase helps customers to get familiar with SAP S/4HANA before starting a project to implement SAP S/4HANA.
• During this phase, customers can apply for a free trial solution if applicable and try it out for themselves to check the features and functionalities of the solution which helps to understand the business value and benefit of SAP S/4HANA for our organization and to determine SAP implementation strategy
• This phase also enables the business users to prepare the business case for implementing SAP S/4HANA as well as preparing the deployment roadmap of the digital transformation journey.

Prepare:

• In this phase, initial project planning starts, where project plan for S4HANA implementation is defined which includes team assignments, defining project goals, scope, budget, roles and responsibilities and project timelines, trainings – all these details are captured in project charter by mutual consent from customer and partner
• Sandbox system set up is done with SAP Best practices

Explore:

• The business users explore the SAP best practices and standard business processes.
• Sample data  provided by company is also available to enable business users to run the end-to-end processes to evaluate how closely a standard solution meets the company’s business needs.
• The business users and the SAP consulting firm agree on the configurable objects required for the company and the same will be captured in KDS(Key Data Structure/Key Design Structure) and BPD(Business process document)
• Fit and Gap analysis is done which helps to identify the gaps that the standard S/4HANA is unable to offer (WRICEF objects)
• Other activities includes master data load preparation, SAP testing planning and Trainings gets started parallelly.

Realize:

• The project team build, test and validate the business scenarios and processes identified in the previous phase along with end users.
• End-users’ training is also planned so that relevant end users can be engaged at the right time and be trained only in their specific areas of working.
• Multiple levels of testing such as Unit Testing, String Testing, Integration Testing and User Acceptance Testing is performed to ensure the SAP system is configured according to the customer requirements provided by the business process owners.
• Data migration testing is also done to ensure the data filled in by the business users are in the correct format and ready to import to the brand-new SAP system.
• A cutover plan is made to move the configurations, WRICEF objects and master and transactional data to the Production system which will be the system used by the business in real-time. This signifies the end of the Realize Phase.

Deploy:

Deploy phase is to use setup production system Cutover activities involves uploading master and transaction data, validating roles and authorizations of end users.

Run:

Business is live with new implementation and any issues, errors or incorrect entries that may have occurred during the first few days of S/4HANA going live are quickly corrected and hyper care support is provided.

SAP Activate Elements provides project team to ready-to-use templates, accelerators which can be used in entire Activate journey with the help of step by step guidelines, what needs to be delivered in each phase and deploy the solution in Cloud/On-premise according to business needs. I can say, SAP Activate is a complete package which helps customers and partners implement SAP S4HANA smoothly.