Part-3: SAP Active with New Implementation – Cloud Edition

In this blog, we are going to cover on New Implementation of S4H Cloud Edition with SAP Active Methodology.  SAP Cloud Edition is a cloud offering from SAP & unlike SAP On-Premise & HEC, it works only on Fiori Applications and there is no traditional SAP GUI for the cloud enterprise.

Introduction to Fiori:  So far, SAP has been focusing on giving business value to its customers and is the reason the user interfaces are not so role specific. But UX (User Experience) is also one of the main points of focus of SAP and the solution is SAP Fiori and Personas. We will discuss detail in Fiori as its more of our current topic relevant. Responsive user interaction and Comprehensive user experience are two aspects of new SAP Paradigm, which means whether you user Desktop, Mobile, Tablet the user experience will be the same.

 I have come thru a mere misconception on Fiori as technology. No, Fiori is a guiding principle to design SAP new user interface by keeping the users in the centre. The technology used for designing the Fiori is UI5/HTML 5 and Javascript.

SAP Active is the methodology recommended by SAP for transiting to S4HANA by all the 3 transition scenarios, namely New Implementation, System Conversion and Landscape Transformation. SAP Active comes with three principles Best practices, Methodologies & Guided configurations and with 4 stages Prepare, Explore, Realize & Deploy.

Prepare:   The preparation phase we just have to register with SAP Cloud trial account, which is free of charge for 14 days. The trail comes with full life cycle examples and it runs on the shared environment. Guided tours are available to help the customer for the first time The sample data allow the customer to create transactions in the system.

In the apps library (https://fioriappslibrary.hana.ondemand.com/sap/fix/externalViewer/) customer can explore the apps available for Business Processes. In the preparation phase keep all the key documents like Test Scripts, Process Diagrams, organisational setup by model company etc.

Explore: The outcome of the prepare phase is to have a valid trial licence provided by SAP for 14 days and have the best practices documents in handy. In the explore phase, we have to do the fit-gap analysis.
In traditional projects, the consultants conduct the requirement gatherings to understand the current business processes of the customer. The consultant maps the business processes to the SAP standard functionalities and analyses the gap. This is called blueprinting stage. The difficult part in this process is consultants understanding the customer’s legacy system & customer understanding the SAP system.

In contrast to the above process, in S4H cloud enterprise implementation, key users can directly explore the system (using Fiori Apps) readily available. This enables them to understand detailed SAP best practices and how these best practices can support their business objectives. During the process of deep understanding of the system, the customer will identify gaps between their expectation and system.
This method benefits both customer and consultants, customers will learn quickly with demo’s available and can be able to able to identify gaps & consultants don’t have to learn their legacy processes. This method reduces the consulting period drastically.

Key users will have to detail the gap on screen by screen, item by item within the scope. Consultants identify the efforts and possible solution for the above-specified gaps on the priority basis. at the end of exploring phase, the gaps are identified and signed off by a customer.

Realize:
 At the end of Exploration phase, we have the list of gaps identified by key users by exploring Fiori Apps.The realisation phase is divided into 3 phases namely, Configurations, Data Migration, Testing.
SAP provides an App to automate the process of configuring the organisational elements called Guided configuration.

The video below demonstrates how to perform guided configurations.

Guided Data Migration is a tool which chooses the data migration objects automatically if the customer is already having a SAP Business Suite / ERP system. If it’s a new customer having a Non-SAP legacy system, a template base approach would be given to upload the data.

Deploy:
During the deployment phase, the customer has to request SAP for production server access in the cloud environment. Upon getting the request for a production server, a customer would be guided by SAP for moving the configurations & Data to the production environment. Now the customer has to verify the data and have to request access to SAP for providing the access to End users in the cloud environment.

This is the overall New implementation process of SAP Cloud Enterprise edition using SAP Active methodology.