How to use SAP Activate for your ×

SAP S/4HANA Roadmap

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 August 28, 2018
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Introduction
CIOs, IT Directors, SAP project managers and consultants
involved in SAP S/4HANA on-premise or cloud implementations,
upgrades, migrations or conversion projects can benefit from
using SAP Activate Implementation Methodology – an agile way
for companies to implement SAP software. SAP Activate is the
successor of ASAP (Accelerated SAP) methodology that was
extensively used for SAP ECC implementations and upgrades
projects. SAP Activate implementation methodologies are not
just available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud or on-premise but also for
SAP BW/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP C/4HANA (formerly
known as SAP Hybris), and SAP Ariba.

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SAP Activate leverages the SAP best practices to explore

solutions for a company’s specific business scenarios and propose
the most relevant solutions. Instead of preparing business
blueprint document to cover every business scenarios, SAP
Activate gets straight to conducting fit-gap analysis (known as Fit-
to-Standard in SAP Activate) and leverages SAP best practices as
well as rapid deployment solutions to see how best the SAP
system addresses the features and functionality gaps.

Figure 1: SAP Activate – The Big Picture (Image credit: SAP)

SAP Activate implementation 

methodology consists of the

following six phases:
• Discover phase
• Prepare phase ×
• Explore phase 
• Realize phase
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• Deploy phase
• Run phase  
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Figure 2: SAP Activate Implementation Methodology (Image credit: SAP)

Let’s discuss each of the six phases of SAP Activate in some detail.
For the purpose of simplicity and understanding, we’ll only be
discussing SAP S/4HANA on-premises implementation but the
same approach can also be adopted with other SAP software:

The Discover Phase

In this phase, the project teams discover the SAP solution’s

capabilities, so as to better understand the business value and
benefits of implementing S/4HANA. It also enables the team to
define the target technology architecture as well as determine
the implementation strategy to follow. 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.
You can explore the free trial versions of SAP S/4HANA Cloud
and on-premise via the following link.

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The Prepare Phase

In this phase, the initial project planning and preparation at the

project management level takes place, which entails preparing the
project plan for the S/4HANA implementation as well as team
assignments. Other critical activities of this phase are defining the
S/4HANA project’s goals, identifying and quantifying business
value objectives for implementing S/4HANA. Executive
sponsorship is secured and project standards, governance and ×
organization are established. Reporting and tracking the project’s 
progress is finalized. The roles and responsibilities of the project Contact Us
team are also finalized in this phase.
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The Explore Phase 

In this phase, the business users explore the SAP best practices
and standard business processes (known as Fit-to-Standard) such
as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay or hire-to-retire that are
mapped for S/4HANA. Sample data of a fictitious 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. Here, the business users and the SAP
consulting firm agree on the configurable objects required for the
company. Configurable objects can be a company code
responsible for all legal and financial reporting, a plant that can
also be a manufacturing unit or a head office, a warehouse or sales
organizations such as one is responsible for local sales while the
other handles export sales. A complete fit-gap exercise ensures
greater visibility of the gaps that the standard S/4HANA is unable
to offer. In such cases, a fit-gap strategy decides if a system’s
enhancement, a customized application, or activating a business
add-in will address the identified gaps.
Additional but critical activities of this phase include master data
load preparation, wherein data templates in MS-Excel are shared
with the business users so they start working on and preparing
clean, correct and comprehensive master data for loading in the
S/4HANA system. Further, an initial groundwork on SAP testing
and training’s needs also take place in this phase. A special
emphasis is placed on planning the integration testing that entails
bringing people, processes and teams working together in an
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‘integrated’ or in a closed-loop environment.

The Realize Phase

In this phase, a series of activities incrementally build, test and
validate the business scenarios and processes identified in the
previous phase (the Discover phase). Master data is loaded to
check and validate the correctness and completeness that ensure
smoother, error-free transactions and business processes’ ×
working. All custom-developed objects are also tested in the 
realize phase. Key business users are trained as ‘trainers’ with the Contact Us
objective that these SAP trainers will eventually train the end-
users (the train-the-trainer approach). 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. The
business users and SAP consultants delve deep into end-to-end
integration testing involving different SAP components to ensure
the data and information flows from and into various SAP
components are complete and correct.

The Deploy Phase

In this phase, the master trainers conduct end-user training. The

cutover activities, in which the company transitions from legacy
systems to S/4HANA, take place. Some of the critical cutover
activities include preparing the SAP production system with final
master data uploads, uploading the cutover or the closing
financial and inventory balances from the legacy systems into
S/4HANA, testing and validating all roles and authorizations for
business users and end-users. The change management activities
culminate with all stakeholders aligned for ensuring a transition
to S/4HANA is not only accepted but is also smooth. The
S/4HANA system goes live and business and end-users can begin
entering the data by starting with first entering the backlog data
that accumulated during the transition from the legacy systems to
S/4HANA (this period is known as the ‘blackout’ period in which
no data is entered into the legacy systems).

The Run Phase 

In this phase, the S/4HANA system is further stabilized by

ensuring all of the possible issues, errors or incorrect entries that
may have occurred during the first few days of S/4HANA going
live are quickly corrected. Establishing a dedicated IT or SAP
helpdesk to resolve such issues goes a long way towards the
smoother working of S/4HANA. Here, the business users again
play a critical role in ensuring trouble-free S/4HANA, by closing
working with a company’s internal SAP helpdesk as well as with ×
SAP consultants to quickly and comprehensively resolve the 
issues faced. A successful and timely financial closing of the first Contact Us
month within the S/4HANA is a litmus test to validate the correct
and reliable business processes’ working.  
Figure 3 shows the end-to-end SAP Activate implementation 
methodology roadmap involving the six phases, the tasks and
activities involved in each phase, and the quality gates (QGs – the
blue diamonds) that are necessary to ensure timely and effective
SAP software implementation.

Figure 3: Quality Gates in SAP Activate Implementation Methodology (Image

credit: SAP)

It will not be long before SAP Activate implementation

methodology will be the de facto approach for companies to
follow for their SAP software implementation and upgrades.
Therefore, it makes sense for CIOs, project managers and SAP
consultants to quickly enable themselves on SAP Activate, and
arm themselves against the unexpected challenges of an SAP
S/4HANA implementation. Fortunately, a plethora of resources
are available to make this enablement possible and easier.
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