SAP Activate: What’s the story behind the SAP Best Practices optimized for S/4HANA?
It’s now been a couple months since Sapphire 2015, and the announcement of SAP Activate. As a quick refresher, SAP Activate is a unique combination of SAP Best Practices, methodology, and guided configuration to simplify your consumption of SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA). And just last week, we got a glimpse into the methodology story, so we thought now would be a good time to provide some more details about the SAP Best Practices optimized for S/4HANA.
But before we get to that, perhaps it’s worth restating what SAP S/4HANA is in the first place: SAP’s next-gen business suite. It is a new product built on the most advanced in-memory platform out there (SAP HANA) and includes SAP’s new modern user experience (SAP Fiori). It is deployable in the cloud or on-premise and is built to drive a new level of value across most all lines of business and industries.
But how do you get to S/4HANA from wherever you are today? Easy. That’s where SAP Activate comes into play. You can start with a new implementation or you can choose to integrate your current landscape with S/4HANA. Or, as yet another option, you can migrate your current system to SAP S/4HANA. The choice is yours and SAP Activate is there to empower you, whichever route makes the most sense for your situation.
So what exactly are the SAP Best Practices included as part of SAP Activate?
These are the ready-to-run business processes optimized for S/4HANA that also cover the integration and migration fundamentals. And the best part is that they are still based on the same comprehensive and flexible model that the SAP Best Practices team has cultivated from implementations in more than 50 countries with well over 10,000 customers.
These particular best practices (for SAP S/4HANA as part of SAP Activate) are business processes that include finance and logistics. They can be integrated with other cloud solutions, such as SucccessFactors Employee Central or Ariba Network. Or if you choose the migration scenario, these business processes will guide you through the optimal steps, whether it be a migration from a legacy SAP system or a migration from a non-SAP database. And last but not least, included as part of these SAP Best Practices is a reference solution running in the cloud and details on extensibility for how best to enhance SAP processes for your own needs.
In short, SAP Activate starts with SAP Best Practices for any implementation and uses one methodology for any deployment mode – cloud, hybrid, on premise, or mobile. Our goal, and the goal of SAP Activate, is help you take advantage of all the power and potential available via S/4HANA but tailored to your circumstances and business needs.
Is this just part of the on-prem version or will guided config be available for the cloud based version of S/4HANA?
How can customers and partners retrieve the SAP Activate content?
Hi Michael,
ready-to-run business processes and the utilities of Guided Configuration are part of the product SAP S/4HANA. Each customer automatically can take advantage of these as part of the product license or cloud subscription. Also included are helpers to activate and extend the pre-configured content based on your scope requirements.
SAP Activate methodology today is shared through an SAP JAM group, we're in the process of investigating how to make it easier accessible soon.
Regards
Holger
You can also read some information in my blog -
http://scn.sap.com/community/rapid-deployment/blog/2015/08/14/sap-s4hana-how-to-manage-your-solution-with-sap-activate
What role do RDS' play for S/4 HANA? Are there RDS' for S/4 HANA available?
Hi Marion,
while SAP continues to develop, assemble and publish SAP rapid deployment solutions, the leading delivery entity for SAP S/4HANA will be SAP Best Practices. There is multiple reasons for that
Best regards
Holger
Hi Holger,
Currently we are discovering how SAP s/4HANA can benefit us and we have a sFin2.0 sandbox on SAP cloud for this discovery. I want to understand how can i activate SAP ACTIVATE to leverage guided configurations?
Regards,
Saurabh
Hi Saurabh,
please refer to the blog about "SAP Activate - How to manage your Solution". There we already discussed that Guided Configuration will only be available with the November release of SAP S/4HANA, on-premise and cloud edition.
Best regards
Holger
@Holger - Guided Config - is it available in S/4HANA 1511 OP release now ?
We do not find it in our installed 1511 OP version.
Thanks & Regards,
MP
Hey Monika - no it is not in the OP version at the moment.
You can activate the best practice config building blocks - but not all of the Cloud tools are available OP
Hi Holger
we are an SAP partner that are currently working on setting up a S/4 HANA on premise (1511) system as a demo system for our SAP add-on products (like SAP Invoice Management by OpenText). We are wondering if the pre-delivered Best Practise Demo client mentioned in the EXPLORE phase could actually serve as such a demo client.
Eventually we are missing the old IDES in S/4 and are looking for some replacement. Prio 1 for us is really Sales Order document flow and P2P.
Any help appreciated.
Many thanks
Michael
Hi Michael,
the model company included in SAP S/4HANA on-premise 1511 can definitely be used for demo purposes, although the initial itention is to provide a jump start for productive implementation projects.
The full scope can be explored at https://websmp206.sap-ag.de/~form/handler?_APP=00200682500000002672&_EVENT=DISPLAY&_SCENARIO=01100035870000000122&_HIER_KEY=501100035870000019235&_HIER_KEY=601200252310000010924&_HIER_KEY=601200252310000010925&_HIER_KEY=601200252310000011556&
As part of the documentation bill-of-material you can also access descriptions of the enterprise structure of the model company and the respective master data, contained in the core product.
The activation of SAP Best Practices is described in the Administration Guide.
Best
Holger
Hi Holger.
Can this SAP Best Practice be used for any country or only for US and DE? Anything to take care of if using it for another country?
Geir