How to operate with a lean IT organization in S/4HANA Cloud

These days, S/4HANA Cloud is not just for large enterprises. Companies with limited IT resources have also taken advantage of S/4HANA Cloud, a software-as-a-service solution to connect processes and improve insights. Such companies probably won’t be able to afford a full-fledged Customer Center of Expertise to support, operate and continuously improve the usage of the implemented solution.

What are a few things that a lean IT organization should do to stay on top of things when running their companies’ business in S/4HANA Cloud? Here is my top picks of SAP tools and services that IT organization can leverage. They are not in the order of importance, rather equally important in my opinion.

• Search Knowledge Base in SAP ONE Support Launchpad for answers. When end user raises an issue, most likely he/she is not alone. Other customers may have faced the same challenges. Incidents may already reported, workarounds, fixes and/or lessons learned maybe already available in SAP’s knowledge database.
• Subscribe to receive notification of planned and unplanned downtimes. Cloud System Notification Subscriptions app in SAP ONE Support Launchpad makes it easy for customer to subscribe various different Cloud Availability Center notifications. It is not limited to just planned and unplanned downtimes, but it is certainly the most critical ones that IT don’t want to miss.
• Leverage Test Automation Tool to reduce regression test effort. When it comes to software upgrade, it is very common to have mixed feelings. On one end, it is awesome that there are new features coming with the upgrade. On the other hand, regression testing is also unavoidably time consuming. SAP executes Post Upgrade Test in customer’s tenant if consent is provided beforehand. Although, it can’t replace customer’s own test, it certainly allows customer to skip the very basic ones and focus more on what is most critical to their respective business. Additionally new automated test scripts are released during each upgrade. Adopt and make use of these automates via Test Automation Tool is definitely worth the one time setup effort.
• Check What’s New viewer and look for additional capability in Product Roadmap Viewer to continuously innovate in order to meet new business challenges. Coming from quarterly release in the past, SAP introduces continuous feature delivery model by reducing the number of major releases in a year and delivers features in a non-disruptive manner. This reduces the IT effort during system upgrade, and allows faster solution adoption by customer when needed.
• Request Test Data Refresh service. Have an ongoing project and need a clean test environment that with plenty of real data for end to end process testing and/or user training? SAP can help you refresh your testing environment with master data and transactional data from your production system, scrambled.

To summarize, here is a list of tasks in SAP Activate methodology Run phase where you can find accelerators of mentioned tools and service.

• Review Hotfix Collection Information
• Access SAP Support Service
• Evaluate and Request Test Data Refresh Service
• Evaluate and Activate Continuous Feature Delivered
• Prepare for Post Upgrade Testing by SAP
• Execute Regression Testing

Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast

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openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA

We also launched openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA as an exciting new learning opportunity. It covers topic cross multiple lines of business, like Finance and Manufacturing & Supply Chain, and key technology topics like Master Data Management, Extensibility, User Experience, and Upgrade Management. We are continuously adding new microlearnings to the SAP S/4HANA channel, so make sure you check them out.

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