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Author's profile photo Polly Gan

Success Factors vs. Challenges in S4HC projects

This is responding to Gerard’s blog regarding Top 5 factors for success with cloud projects which gives great insights into the success factors when implementing cloud, especially S4HC projects as shown on the right side of the following picture.

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I myself as a business consultant, together with the project team have finished the S4HC project implementation for a Great China customer. They went live on the 1st of January 2020.

Using this opportunity, I would like to share some of the challenges we’ve been facing (on the left side) and would like to hear more from you, especially about the suggestions on how to turn the challenges into opportunities levering what is mentioned in the success factors.

  • Localization requirements
    On top of the standard, customers in the GB area always have localized requirements based on local regulation or local practices.
    It’s hard to fully convince the business users to follow the standard business practices. At the same time, in my point of view, it’s a perspective of possible improvements in customer experience to provide a certain level of personalized approaches when aligning with standard S4HC capabilities. Although we promote fast innovation in S4C. The ability and the platform ( ex. the influence portal ) provided for the customers to influence the core functions in S4H are still considered limited and the response time is far away than satisfactory.
  • Limited IT infrastructure
    The infrastructures at the customer site are sometimes very limited. For example, the MS team, or JIRA might not be accessible for the Chinese GB customers. We’re still relying on the emails and excel sheet when implementing the S4HC project for customer communications. The transformation to other tools even takes more time so we have to compromise to use old-traditional tools.
  • Customer adoption ability and readiness
    Standard documentations are everywhere but hard to allocate the right one. There’re many but sometimes confusing sources of information like best practices and accelerators in SAP activate. The test scripts are not shaped in a way that customers can adapt easily (for example no screenshot). The interaction tutorials don’t cover full scopes and are not supported in local languages, for example, Chinese. The project team has to put additional efforts that are considered potential obstacles preventing from having the rapid adoption of standard practices.
  • Maintenance cycle with downtime
    During the implementation, because of the nature of the cloud( for example 4 main downtimes for upgrades and some unforeseen downtime because of emergency maintenance), the implementation team and the customer need to highly rely on SAP’s support and operation team. The efficiency and reliable support from SAP is the key factor to keep customers’ trust in SAP. The downtime is critical for customers who are running businesses in for example process manufacturing or auto industry.
  • Integrations
    Considering the integrated intelligent suite built on the integration technologies(check Integration Strategy Paper) where the test automation is not available for now (as far as I know), we’ll still need to take the part of “volume testing” and manual testing into account which definitely is not a good best practice when we’re trying to adopt fast achieving lower TCO. Recently noticed that some integration scenarios have been changed to deprecated, how to keep sustainability becomes a big question.

Gerard and I hope we can start the discussion on any possible topic around S4HC from the product feature, methodology, framework, implementation, to customer experience in this community, as this place should be leveraged to have more influence on what we’re doing towards the journey of cloud transformation.

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      Author's profile photo Polly Gan
      Polly Gan
      Blog Post Author

      Gerard Koelmeyer Tony Yan

      Author's profile photo Feras Al-Basha
      Feras Al-Basha

      Thank you for sharing the valuable insights Polly Gan !

      Author's profile photo Sandeep Kumar
      Sandeep Kumar

      Polly Gan Great insights, thanks for sharing!

      Author's profile photo Gerard Koelmeyer
      Gerard Koelmeyer

      Polly Gan , what great insight. It's looking at both sides of any topic that allows us to progress and customers be well informed of what's involved on the road to S4HC adoption.

      Author's profile photo Polly Gan
      Polly Gan
      Blog Post Author

      Gerard Koelmeyer I'm happy that we started the conversation. I hope we can come up with ideas about how to change the challenges into our opportunities even become our assets.

      Author's profile photo HEMSAGAR ELUGU
      HEMSAGAR ELUGU

      Nice Blog Polly Gan

      Author's profile photo Sai Giridhar Kasturi
      Sai Giridhar Kasturi

      Good insight. thanks for sharing.

      Author's profile photo Eric Yu
      Eric Yu

      Thanks Polly for sharing this and as support engineer we may face the custom requirements in daily work, and some of these requirement/feature will help to improve the S4HC product, they will be considered in further release.

      Author's profile photo Polly Gan
      Polly Gan
      Blog Post Author

      Thank you very much Eric! In cloud, SAP support is crucially important, and thanks for your commitment, as always.

      Author's profile photo Amith Nair
      Amith Nair

      Excellent Thread!! Great Insight Shared and Tracked! Thank you Polly Gan

      Author's profile photo Priyank Kumar Jain
      Priyank Kumar Jain

      This is great. I see it as productive collaboration already !!

      Author's profile photo Vijayendra Tiwari
      Vijayendra Tiwari

      Nice Blog Polly. Thanks!!

      Author's profile photo Owen Liu
      Owen Liu

      Feel exactly the same as you do Polly Gan . If we can solve these challenges, S4C product will reach a new level. Thanks for the sharing!