Did you know?

1. SAP S/4HANA Finance is a combination of SAP Accounting powered by SAP HANA, SAP Cash
Management and SAP Integrated Business Planning (IP, BPC and embedded BW) for Finance and
also includes additional innovations in the areas of Treasury and Financial Risk Management,
Collaborative Finance Operations and more
2. SAP Finance comply both local and global requirements of finance department and hold solutions
specifically built for 25 industries in more than 50 countries
3. With SAP Finance, the life of the finance folks are simplified and mandates the use of Account -
based COPA providing the detailed information for cost of sold goods, production variance and invoice
quantities. The costing-based COPA avoids reconciliation issues between COPA and GL
4. SAP HANA will be deployed on the cloud (public and private), on-premise and via hybrid options.
Eighty-one percent of all organizations have made a move to the cloud for half of their future
transactions

A greenfield S/4HANA implementation makes you fit for

the future
At the end of 2014, SAP announced that their core ERP solutions (ECC, …) will only be
supported until 2025. This currently triggers many decision-makers to design their
organisation’s strategy to move to SAP S/4HANA. One of this strategy’s key components
is to decide how to implement SAP S/4HANA:

 Either to convert the current system landscape to SAP S/4HANA (= Brownfield

Approach)
 Or to adopt the Greenfield Approach, pretending the organisation has never used
SAP before and start from scratch.

In this article, you will learn why and how we implemented SAP S/4HANA with the
Greenfield Approach at one of our customers in the machinery industry. These lessons-
learned and best-practices will help you when you decide to adopt the S/4HANA
Greenfield Approach at your organisation as well.

Why SAP S/4HANA was chosen to implement

Our customer is a global machinery and equipment manufacturer and market-leader in
the pig-iron production. Their group activities include Engineering, Project Development
and Supervision of the installation and commissioning of complete machinery and
equipment components. In addition, a division of the group offers tailor-made services,
especially in the field of integrated planning and interdisciplinary engineering for urban-
development, high-rise building and infrastructure projects.

The Management faced a major challenge in 2015: the company had been strategically
reorganised with new business units that would each be answerable for their results. At
that time, the organisation was processed in SAP ERP through different systems and
clients, each with its own solutions, each of which was segregated from the others. To
depict the new structures, a central SAP-ERP system was essential in order to facilitate
the creation of centralised solutions covering all the different legal entities, and to drive
the harmonisation of processes and routines.

Since we at PIKON were already engaged as a long-standing consultancy partner with a

thorough knowledge of business management processes, we were asked to support the
customer during the blueprint and implementation phase.

SAP S/4HANA Greenfield implementation: decision factors

Most of our customer’s subsidiaries have been using SAP ERP for many years now; but
partly with different releases and clients. There were also subsidiaries that had not yet
implemented SAP at all. Due to the heterogeneous system landscape, some regional
subsidiaries were using a multiplicity of solutions and there was no standardisation at all.
Consequently, our customer was struggling to cope with increased costs, not only in
system admin, but also with the roll-outs of other projects. Moreover, the differing
systems made co-operation between individual sites, who would often work together on
a customer project, more difficult. This made our customer decide to implement SAP
S/4HANA (Version 1511), adopting the Greenfield approach.

Implementation S/4HANA: lessons-learned

Global Business Blueprint vs Local Business Blueprint

In the case of a Greenfield implementation, we recommend you pay special attention to

the blueprint phase. We even recommend you create both a Global Business Blueprint
and a Local Business Blueprint. This has the advantage of bringing clarity to
organisational structures, processes and functions at a relatively early stage of the
project. Also, possible enhancements to the SAP Standard can be discussed relatively
early in the project. Our customer’s policy prescribed that deviations from the Global
Business Blueprint would be permissible only where there were legal requirements in
particular countries (e.g. Luxembourg, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic) which needed to
be implemented in the SAP system. These were then described separately in the Local
Business Blueprint.

Why the human factor was a critical success factor

Some of the critical factors in the success of any implementation project are
hardly affected by technology but by the people at work. This is no different
during the implementation of SAP S/4HANA.

Right from the start of the project, slot-leads and key users who would be
involved at the blueprint phase, and who would help define the requirements
of the new system, were designated for each subsidiary. This method of
working ensured a high level of acceptance right from the beginning of the
project. We informed the slot-leads and key users on a regular basis about
the project progress. Moreover, we created a communication template, in
which all the items for project communications were included. This also set
out communication guidelines, to ensure that the lines of communication
would function in a co-ordinated manner throughout the company.

I highly recommend you create a communication template of this type

because it provides you with:

 a solid basis for cooperation between the individual subsidiaries,

 an opportunity to win acceptance of the project from the staff at an early stage,
 an opportunity to address and clarify any remaining issues as early as possible.

How to implement SAP S/4HANA

In terms of Project Management, an implementation of S/4HANA is similar to
an SAP ECC implementation. Even though there is a new database technology
and there are new data structures, the general procedure to run this project
has not changed that much.

As traditionally done in the implementation of an ERP system, we have gone

through the following steps for the implementation of SAP S/4HANA at our
customer:

 Customisation of the S/4HANA system

 Functional testing
 Two integration tests, with the integration of all subsidiaries. We conducted
these tests within the individual modules and processes (e.g. FI, CO, PS, etc).
Once this was done, we did cross-functional tests. These are tests of a universal
process through all modules and processes (i.e. from sales, through the project
execution, to project controlling).
 User Acceptance Test: our focus was to depict the processes, and to integrate
individual modules and departments.
 Migration test.
 Go Live in April 2017.

It is also worth mentioning that we conducted the tests centrally at the

headquarters. This did admittedly involve a great deal of organisation, since
a large number of participants needed to be coordinated together. However,
the effort was well worthwhile. The various employees who would in future be
working together on a particular project got to know each other. The cross-
departmental tests provided an opportunity to clarify any open issues on the
spot, with everyone taking part.
Early project acceptance by all involved parties

Solid basis for cooperation between the individual subsidiaries

Early clarification of any open issues

Well-considered enhancements to custom developments as a critical

success factor
Together with our customer, we paid special attention to custom
developments. We find again and again we find that our customers can never
benefit from the full potential for optimisations of a HANA migration, unless
the necessary adjustments to custom developments are properly analysed.
The adjustments required in this customer situation emerged after an analysis
which entailed the following questions:

1. First and foremost, have database reading operations been optimised, or are
further improvements still required here?
2. Are there any errors in the current code, such as implicit classifications that
emerge only after the migration?
3. Are there any structures, objects or modules used that will no longer exist in this
form after the implementation of S/4HANA?

If performance does not play a vital role, will custom developments still run
on S/4HANA? Therefore, a review relating to points 2 and 3 should be carried
out. The ability to run programs that are a legacy from “old” structures could
if necessary be achieved using compatibility views. These will continue for
example to make “old” tables available.

Conclusion
The implementation of SAP S/4HANA with a Greenfield Approach offers many
opportunities to optimise your historically-evolved processes and to get more
standardised processes, thereby making your organisation higher-performing
and fit for the future. Don’t waste this opportunity. Before you start your own
SAP S/4HANA implementation, we recommend you allow time for a reflective
phase in order to put the spotlight on these matters.
THE GREENFIELD APPROACH

A new implementation of S/4HANA, also known as a ‘Greenfield’ migration, enables

complete re-engineering and process simplification.
The Greenfield approach lets organizations predefine migration objects and best
practices, lowers Time-to-Value and TCO and facilitates faster adoption of
innovation.
THE GREENFIELD APPROACH

A new implementation of S/4HANA, also known as a ‘Greenfield’ migration, enables

complete re-engineering and process simplification.
The Greenfield approach lets organizations predefine migration objects and best
practices, lowers Time-to-Value and TCO and facilitates faster adoption of
innovation.