SAP Activate

Project Management for SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Sven Denecken, Jan Musil, Srivatsan Santhanam

• Publisher: SAP PRESS
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781493222148
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

1 SAP S/4HANA Fundamentals

Planning and executing digital business transformation is essential for the success of every business during this time of constantly changing markets, customer needs, and competition. SAP S/4HANA provides an intelligent, integrated ERP system that runs on the SAP HANA in-memory database to help innovate processes across a wide range of businesses and industries.

For today’s businesses, success comes when you can work together across all domains and jointly focus on business outcomes. Having visibility of information across business domains and being able to perform periodic course corrections based on forecasting and reporting isn’t enough.

Therefore, the new challenge for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is to overcome today’s fragmentation of business decision-making and execution and to bring about truly integrated business management without the limitations and complexity of legacy environments. Informed decisions and agile simulations of alternative business scenarios will allow enterprises to adapt and continuously advance. Modern ERP systems need to help businesses evolve from reactive decision-making and partially informed execution to continuous and proactive simulation of possible business outcomes. Such outcomes will be executed by a fully informed workforce that can wholly focus on value-adding activities and off-loading low-value tasks to system-automated processes—all to the delight of customers at every touchpoint with the company.

SAP provides organizations with the foundation to become intelligent enterprises, enabling them to run business operations better, become more resilient to changes in the marketplace, increase profitability, and become more sustainable. At the core of the intelligent enterprise, SAP S/4HANA redefines enterprise management by exploiting modern technologies, such as integration of online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transactional processing (OLTP), artificial intelligence (AI), big data processing, and automation, while simultaneously applying them to new digital business practices. With such capabilities at play, enterprises will be able to consume new data streams from partners, consumers, and devices.

Enterprises will also be able to supplement these capabilities with automatically identified patterns and predicted data points, provide them as insights of previously unknown depth and breadth to all stakeholders of the enterprise, and effectively engage them in collaborative value creation and customer focus.

In this chapter, we’ll establish the SAP S/4HANA basics, including key technologies such as SAP HANA and SAP Fiori, the available offerings and deployment models, and the transition options. To begin, we’ll explore the context in which SAP S/4HANA is positioned: the intelligent enterprise.

1.1 Transition into an Intelligent Enterprise

Today’s businesses are constantly tested with changing business environments, evolving customer needs, and evolving market situations. Over the past two years, the entire world experienced massive changes to the way consumers behave, employees work, supply chains behave, and governments respond to evolving health crises. If anything, the pace of change each business needs to respond to only accelerated. Many businesses are in the thick of the transition to the intelligent enterprise and need to develop business models resilient to disruption. Table 1.1 notes the differences between traditional enterprise management and enterprise management suited for the intelligent enterprise.

Traditional	Intelligent Enterprise
Focus on supply/demand matching and profitability	Focus on customer experience along the entire value chain
Bottom-up versus top-down (strategy, business plan, and directives)	Strategy execution at all levels of the corporate structure
Periodic planning of resources to meet time-bound profitability goals	Ongoing business optimization via simulation of scenarios and embedded valuation
Management process focused on forward projections and results review	Management exploiting strategic opportunities through organizational agility
Automation of simple recurring tasks only	Automation of comprehensive processes that used to require human intervention
Enterprise focuses on top line and bottom line	Social, sustainable enterprise focusing on top line, bottom line, and green line

Table 1.1 Differences between Enterprise Management Today and in the Future

The effectiveness of this new style of management hinges on the extent to which meanin...

Table of contents

• Dear Reader
• Notes on Usage
• Table of Contents
•   Foreword
•   Preface
• 1   SAP S/4HANA Fundamentals
• 2   Introduction to SAP Activate
• 3   Accessing SAP Activate
• 4   Starting with a Working System
• 5   Configuration, Data Migration, Extensibility, Integration, and Testing
• 6   Agile Project Delivery
• 7   New Implementation of SAP S/4HANA
• 8   System Conversion and Selective Data Transition to SAP S/4HANA
• 9   Deploying Hybrid System Landscapes
• 10   Organizational Change Management
• 11   SAP Activate for Other SAP Products
• A   SAP Activate Certification Preparation
• B   The Authors
• Index
• Service Pages
• Legal Notes