SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA is a powerful tool executed in your existing SAP system that supports several scenarios including SAP S/4HANA conversions and SAP S/4HANA upgrades. Focusing on system conversion scenarios from a functional perspective, the tool provides meaningful information that can be used for a high-level estimation of the amount of work your team will be required to complete to prepare for your transition of SAP S/4HANA. SAP Readiness Check also helps identify the skillsets of the experts that must be involved in your project. Mandatory tasks, tasks that can be resolved prior to project start, and tasks that can be left to future project phases are clearly identified.
Sometimes when you receive the result of your SAP Readiness Check your first question is, “So, now what do I have to do?” If that is your case, then this blog is for you! I will try to explain how to consume SAP Readiness check from a functional view.
The first thing you should be aware of is that this tool is more focused on “how to move to SAP S/4HANA through a system conversion” than “why to move to SAP S/4HANA through a system conversion”. This means It won’t necessarily help the business/final users to understand the business value of moving to SAP S/4HANA. For that, we have other tools like Process Discovery for SAP S/4HANA Transformation. SAP Readiness check is more technical; therefore, it must be used by the IT department/Center of Excellence (or any other name you may use to define a similar team in charge of your ERP).
Let’s focus on consuming SAP Readiness Check. Let’s assume you are in the Discover or possibly in the Prepare phase of your transition. To start getting ready for your conversion, you need to identify the most relevant priority work tasks for your functional experts. “In [the] Discover [phase], the Simplification items along with the Financial Data Quality and Customer Vendor Integration Analysis are the main inputs for a functional review of your system”.
The next step will be to prepare and run what we called the “Simplification item workshops”. For that, you must schedule individual sessions by business unit. For example, a workshop for finance and another workshop for procurement topics.
In these sessions, you should go through each simplification item. For better planning, we suggest using the following classification:
- Need functional/technical remediation: Most simplification items fall into this classification, and all must be addressed before the technical conversion. Normally the required changes do not disrupt the end-to-end processes. For instance, it could be the need to remediate inconsistencies at the database level.
- Need fit-to-standard workshop: In SAP S/4HANA we have functionalities that replace features our customers use in SAP ERP. Some of them are mandatory, such as Settlement Management to replace Rebates. Also, we have others that are optional. For example, customers using Logistics Execution Transportation (LE-TRA) should strategically consider moving to TMS (SAP Transportation Management System) since LE-TRA is no longer the target architecture within SAP S/4HANA and SAP has no plans for further innovations. However, customers may elect to continue to use this functionality (via Compatibility Scoping) until 2030 (see SAP Note 2270199 - S4TWL - Transportation (LE-TRA) for additional details). Adoption of those new features has the potential to disrupt current business processes. Therefore, it is needed to carry out fit-to-standard workshops (as you would in a greenfield project) to implement the new functionalities.
- Non-relevant: SAP Readiness check could list some simplification items that in the end are not relevant for you. So, you must double-check and confirm that indeed is not relevant to your system. Why could this happen? Because SAP Readiness check validates things like master data and configuration, it could be that your system has configuration/master data of functionality that you are currently not using. Therefore, it is your responsibility to confirm the simplification item is a “false positive”.
Here you can find a summary of these groups:
The outcome of those workshops should include information such as the activities to be performed, when those activities will be carried out, the estimated effort, and who will be involved:
Let me explain this with one example. In the logistics workshop you will discuss the simplification item S4TWL - Business Partner Approach supported by the result of Customer Vendor Integration Analysis
First, this Simplification item will be assigned to Group 1: Need functional/technical remediation because it must be completed before carrying out SUM (the conversion) and it won’t need Fit-to-standard workshops because the sales or procurement end-to-end processes will not be impacted by this change. Of course, it will impact the way you create/update customers or vendors, but the final users responsible of the purchase or sales orders creation will not notice that change.
The result of this discussion should address who, how, and when you are going to tackle Customer Vendor integration. Below you can find some examples of the conclusions after this workshop:
According to the errors identified by Customer Vendor Integration Analysis, it was decided to execute an initial CVI setup and synchronization in a sandbox system. Therefore, the synchronization will be run as a pre-project considering:
- This pre-project will not be only about data remediation and configuration, but it will also include business decisions, custom code remediation and testing.
- The master data error will be remediated in the sandbox system and the PRD system. But the synchronization will be run only in Sandbox.
- Other tasks like final user training and change management will not be part of this pre-project. But they will be included in the system conversion project.
Based on the previous analysis you can create the following outcome chart:
In SAP Activate Methodology for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, we have created a task called Conduct Functional Review Workshop presenting in detail other examples that will help you to better understand how to classify each simplification item, and how to run those workshops. Those examples are:
I hope this blog post was helpful for you. If so, click on “like” or “share”. I’m looking forward to your feedback and comments. If you have any questions, I encourage you to post into the Q&A using the tags: SAP S/4HANA and SAP Readiness check. We will try to answer all your inquiries as soon as possible.
Special thanks to monicareyes990, vivianmafraschulz, and thiago.zanguetin for your great contribution!
Brought to you by the SAP S/4HANA RIG team.
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