Business Trends
RISE with SAP: Get your projects started right with SAP Activate and Ready-to-Run Business Process Content
RISE with SAP
Last week, SAP announced availability of RISE with SAP (see Figure 1 below) that, as Christian Klein states in his blog, “bundles everything companies need to holistically transform their business with a fast time to value”. Specifically, this offer includes following components bundled under one contract for unmatched TCO:
- Business Process Intelligence: Process Discovery,
- Consumption credits for SAP Business Technology Platform,
- Embedded tools and services,
- SAP Business Network Starter Pack, and
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud
All deployed on infrastructure as a service of the customer choice. In this blog I will focus on what content, methodology and tools our customers, that subscribe to Rise with SAP, can use to gain unparalleled speed and guidance in their deployment projects.
Figure 1 – RISE with SAP
Over the past several years SAP continuously invests in ready-to-run business process content and continuously refines the deployment guidance in SAP Activate methodology that have been a staple for deployments of SAP S/4HANA Cloud solutions. Our customers receive access to structured guidance for execution of key activities on their SAP S/4HANA Cloud journey in SAP Activate methodology that they can access on SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer or in their SAP Cloud ALM tenant.
Fit-to-standard: flexibility where needed and speed where it matters
The principles that customers apply during their deployment projects are at the core of accelerating the time to value by maximizing the re-use of standard pre-delivered business processes where differentiation is not desirable, while allowing customers to tailor their business processes in areas where they differentiate from their competition. The process SAP Activate use is called fit-to-standard and as the name implies it emphasizes the re-use of pre-delivered business processes to accelerate time to value, but at the same time allows companies to tailor their business processes where needed using the available configuration, extensibility and integration techniques.
Figure 2 – SAP Best Practices Explorer ready-to-run business processes
The fit-to-standard approach is empowered by SAP-delivered pre-configuration (ready-to-run business processes – example shown in the Figure 2 above) content that is deployed into customer’s system very early in the project. It then allows the project team and business users evaluate the standard business processes in a working system. SAP currently delivers two types of pre-configuration depending on the deployment option customer choses. The SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud are available for customers deploying their solution in the public cloud setting and SAP Enterprise Management Layer for SAP S/4HANA Cloud is available to customers that chose the private cloud deployment route.
This approach of using working system has the benefit of allowing the business users to experience the business processes on a subset of organizational, master and transactional data before the design decisions are firmed up. That way, the users learn how the solution behaves and what capabilities will be available to them when the system is set to productive use. Which allows for better decision making than the approach that would be paper based (traditional design process used in the past). The fit-to-standard workshops are detailed in SAP Activate methodology in this guide and follow the six steps process shown in the Figure 3 below. In case your organization needs to execute them in remote setup, you can use playbook for planning and execution of remote fit-to-standard workshops using collaboration tools and videoconferencing. I have blogged about this playbook earlier in 2020 when we released it in SAP Activate.
Figure 3 – Six steps applied during the Fit-to-standard workshops
Strong governance sets you up for success
During the deployment of SAP S/4HANA Cloud organizations and project teams face many design decisions and sometimes it is hard to adhere to the “standard first” mindset. Organizations and teams are encouraged to establish a strong governance that helps drive the standard first mindset in the organization. Customers should leverage the project-based governance board we have detailed in the Solution Standardization Board governance framework (see example of recommended governance for extensions and integrations in Figure 4 below) and supported with additional guides that help steer the design decisions to use the modern technologies supporting sustainable build of the system. This blogprovides more details for customers taking the route of more flexibility on their SAP S/4HANA Cloud journey.
Figure 4 – Solution Standardization Board decision tree
SAP Cloud ALM helps you stay organized
SAP has introduced SAP Cloud ALM for cloud-centric customers last year and many of our cloud customers are already using the capabilities of the tool in their implementation projects and for their cloud solution operations. While we will not be discussing in detail the SAP Cloud ALM capabilities, it is important to understand that customers using Cloud ALM in their organization will gain access to the SAP Activate methodology and Ready-to-run business processes when they use SAP Cloud ALM. The SAP Activate methodology and SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud are embedded into the SAP Cloud ALM and are used during the implementation project as the project team completes the tasks like business process scoping, fit-to-standard workshops, capture requirements, confirm design, configure the solution and test it. You can learn more about SAP Cloud ALM on the SAP Support Portalwhere you will find many resources, including a demo system that you can use to experience the SAP Cloud ALM first hand.
Figure 5 – SAP Activate in SAP Cloud ALM
How to get started?
The best place to start exploring your path is in the SAP Activate JAM (request access) and in SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer. To explore the scope of the ready-to-run business processes, best way is to access the SAP S/4HANA Cloud packages in the SAP Best Practices Explorer here.
As we outlined about, SAP Activate covers all critical aspects of your deployment journey and every project team member will find information that will help them execute their job during the deployment project. The methodology is structured into hierarchy of phases, deliverable and tasks, and each deliverable and task are assigned to at least one work stream. Think of work streams as threads of work effort in logical areas like Project Management, Data Management or Application Design and Configuration that provide users all deliverables in their area of expertise with appropriate tasks. I recommend you to browse through the “How to use” tutorials in SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer that will show you how to use these powerful filtering features to zoom-in on the methodology content that you need (in this context “Filter Roadmap Content” tutorial is the best).
Stay tuned for more
Stay tuned for follow-up blog posts in the next weeks where we will go into more details on the ready-to-run business processes, SAP Activate methodology for deployment of your solution and enablement assets you can use to gain better understanding of the content, methodology and tools available for your deployment journey. We will update this blog with links to these subsequent posts when they are posted below.
Follow us on Twitter via @SAP and #S4HANA, or myself via @janmusil
Links and References from this blog post
This is a convenient list of key links and references we have used in the blog above, in case you wanted to save them for future reference:
- RISE with SAP
- Introducing RISE with SAP – Business Transformation as a Service
- RISE with SAP: “Game Changer” for Customers Becoming Intelligent Enterprises
- SAP Best Practices Explorer with ready-to-run business processes
- SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer
- SAP Activate – Explore Phase: Use Fit-to-Standard to confirm business process fit and identify gaps in your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Implementation
- Playbook for Remote Fit-to-standard Workshops
- Solution Standardization Board
- SAP Activate JAM (request access)
- SAP Cloud ALM on the SAP Support Portal
- SAP Cloud ALM demo system
In 2012 SAP introduced HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) as IaaS. Now with RISE we have Azure & GCP as hyperscalers & launch partners. Does this mean SAP will effectively exit IaaS.
Roy, the official Rise with SAP page states that customer can decide on their preferred deployment option for IaaS, including SAP-hosted. I copied that section below to save you the click and scrolling on the Rise with SAP pages. So, if customer wants SAP provided IaaS that is an option.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
Select deployment options for an SAP-hosted or hyperscaler approach to deliver IaaS benefits of high performance and reliability at scale to accelerate your journey to the Intelligent Enterprise.
Thank you Jan. We are very excited about 'Rise with SAP'.
Less than 15% of customers migrated to SAP S/4HANA and hope Rise will change that. The longer existing ECC customers takes to migrate, the harder it will become, and bigger the risk that they go for alternatives.
1) Hyperscalers are driving the move to the cloud, and systems integrators were driving business process optimization and consulting. In pre-cloud era the situation was different. Hopefully RISE will galvanize the market to be more cost-effective and move to SAP S/4HANA.
2) SAP is saying unmatched reduction in TCO (~ 20% reduction) : It is indeed good to consolidate everything with SAP and stay up-to-date in the innovation cycles. What is less clear at the moment is how many of SAP’s customers will consolidate under SAP.If SAP makes margin on services & cloud provided by other vendors then costs might stretch. Whether it will stretch the overall cost than tendering the services separately is to be seen.
3) Many customers opt multi-cloud strategy to optimize costs based on available infrastructure options. We need to wait & see.
Devil lies in the details.
Sounds like SAP is moving to Management Consulting, the place SAP had started in 1972, but than just transferred this piece of work to Multinational Consulting Big 5 and now SAP is back. This means that SAP is more Business Processes and less the software company, which might be a correct market placement for the company. Let's see how this will work out. Anyway, this is a brave move, Christian KLEIN
Jan you say “All deployed on infrastructure as a service of the customer choice” - can you confirm if S4HC Essentials can be deployed on a hyperscaler? This week on a partner sap session I was told it couldn’t - it was on a sap infrastructure only.
Hi David,
the information you received in the delta training is correct. The choice of provider is applicable in the private cloud space where IaaS is more applicable. In public cloud, SAP provides service across the entire stack. Hope this helps.
Jan
Hi Jan
Will it be correct in saying that the deployment options for
S/4 HANA Cloud - Standard or Essentials or Multi Tenant (previously known) Public Cloud - > SAP hosted
S/4 HANA Cloud - Private Edition 2021, Extended or Single Tenant (previously known) Private Cloud - > Hyperscalers
Basanth Swain it s close to what you wrote - (1) SAP S/4HANA Cloud, essentials edition will continue to be delivered on SAP infrastructure and data centers (you can see them in the SAP Trust Center (along with other products). (2) The SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition is available on hyperscaler or SAP infrastructure. Customers have a choice based on availability in their region - Azure, AWS, etc. Our sales teams can help answer those questions individually with customers.
Good day: Please, where can I access the Rise with SAP S/4Hana Cloud Playbook?
I solved it, thank you very much