SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition - Tips and Tricks

Cirlei_Guedes · ‎02-10-2024

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is a ready-to-run cloud ERP that delivers the latest industry best practices and continuous innovation to help customers stay competitive and enable them to work toward their future business goals.

This solution tends to be the best fit for small to mid-size customers with minimal customization requirements and openness to adopting the pre-delivered SAP Best Practice business processes that are already available in the system. These processes are regularly improved with enhancements between releases, and in the major release upgrades that occur in August and February each year. SAP automatically installs enhancements and upgrades on a defined release schedule.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is also a good fit for larger customers when deployed with SAP S/4HANA on-premise or SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition in a two-tier ERP structure.

Fit-to-Standard Workshops

Fit-to-standard workshops are organized around the functional areas of the solution. During the workshops, architects and implementation consultants present best practices and discuss which adjustments are necessary. Business requirements are identified, discussed, and added to the backlog.

While fit-to-standard workshops have a business focus, the subsequent planning and design workshops have a technical focus.

The Fit-to-Standard Analysis workshops are an essential part of making sure the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system fits the customer's needs. In these workshops, the partner line of business (LoB) configuration experts demonstrate the SAP standard business processes that the customer executive sponsors have selected on the Digital Discovery Assessment to customer LoB experts, who are responsible for the job tasks covered in each business process.

"Fit-to-Standard" means "fitting" or teaching the customer LoB experts how the standard business processes work in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system.

It's important to remind the customer LoB experts that any change to a standard process is going to create more maintenance work for the organization through future release upgrades, so we are only looking for critical requirements that are necessary for the customer LoB experts to be able to accomplish their job tasks in SAP S/4HANA Cloud after go-live.

🔎ANY change to the standard process adds a layer of complexity when it comes to the long-term maintenance of the solution through future release upgrades.

For example, even adding one custom field to an application means the customer needs to check that app each release to see if there are changes (e.g. the original app is deprecated and replaced with a new app) and determine if there are follow-up tasks (e.g. adding the original custom field to the new app).

Learn how to conduct fit-to-standard workshops in SAP Cloud ALM. This video demonstrates the process of selecting the solution scenario scope, reviewing processes, and documenting Conduct Fit-to-Standard Workshops

SAP Activate Methodology Accelerator

The purpose of this accelerator is to enable and educate users on the fit-to-standard process to ensure a successful fit-to-standard that captures all configurations and integrations needed for the solution- creating an efficient and effective solution configuration in the Realize phase.

The SAP Activate methodology is a project-implementation methodology used to plan and execute complex SAP solutions. As part of the SAP Activate framework, it’s designed to improve the quality and success of any SAP project. More Information: SAP Activate Methodology

By following the methodology’s roadmap, project managers can implement SAP solutions with much more ease. The purpose of Roadmap Viewer is to provide access to SAP Activate methodology implementation roadmaps. More information: SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer

Fit-to-Standard Process

The purpose of the Fit-to-Standard Process is to match the customer’s business processes to the standard processes available and to capture optimization, and solution configuration, needed by the customer. It is a sub-process in the Application: Design and Configuration workstream.

Fit-to-Standard Analysis with SAP Signavio

Prerequisites

A dedicated SAP Signavio workspace with SAP Signavio Process Manager and SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub has been created for the fit-to-standard analysis.
Recommendation: All workshop participants have been licensed to view business processes in the SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub before the workshop.
The desired target state of the business processes and scope items has been roughly defined beforehand.
The business processes do not require localization.

For more information SAP Signavio Process

Business Driven Configuration Questionnaires

The Business Driven Configuration Questionnaires (BDCQ) are used by the partner line of business (LoB) configuration experts to gather configuration values that will ultimately be entered in SAP Central Business Configuration.

In the BDCQ, there are two levels of information - Level 2 (L2) values that should be gathered in the Prepare phase before Fit-to-Standard workshop delivery, and Level 3 (L3) values that should be gathered in the Explore phase during Fit-to-Standard workshops.

Documenting Requirements in SAP Cloud ALM

Requirements are differences between what the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system does with the standard functionality, and what the customer needs it to do.

To document requirements in SAP Cloud ALM, open the Processes app and select the business process being covered in the workshop from the list of scoped processes. Select the Create button in the upper right corner and choose Requirement. Document each requirement separately. The master list of all requirements can be viewed in the Requirements app.

Test Cases in SAP Cloud ALM

Through an integration with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud test system, automated test cases can be executed and tracked directly in SAP Cloud ALM.

The Test Preparation app is where you prepare your test cases before they can be executed.

You can manage both manual and automated test cases:

Create manual test cases and prepare their structure and content by defining activities and actions.
Integrate automated test cases from the test automation tool for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and Tricentis Test Automation for SAP integrated with SAP Cloud ALM.
Create automated test cases in the automation provider directly from SAP Cloud ALM.
Assign requirements and/or user stories to your manual and automated test cases to achieve full traceability from the creation, through testing, to deployment. SAP Help Portal Test Preparation

In addition to manual testing, which is performed directly in SAP Cloud ALM, you can also integrate SAP and third-party test automation providers with SAP Cloud ALM. Learn how to set up the integration between SAP Cloud ALM and the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Test Automation Tool or Tricentis Test Automation for SAP in SAP Help Portal Integrating Test Automation Providers

Embedded Generative AI Digital Assistant in the SAP Fiori Launchpad

Joule is called the next-generation digital assistant that uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) and replaces the previous digital assistant, SAP Conversational AI.

Joule offers conversational interactions between humans and computers to simplify access to information and automate business processes, thus improving both employee and customer satisfaction at scale.

Joule supports three conversational patterns:

Navigational
Helps users navigate to the functionality they are looking for
Transactional
Assists users in the efficient completion of their tasks
Informational
Helps users retrieve information from existing documents

Because Joule is embedded in the backend of all SAP applications, it has a more holistic set of data to use when providing support to an employee. An employee can simply ask a question or frame an issue in plain language and receive answers that take into account data across the SAP portfolio of products the customer uses. For example, a manufacturer could ask Joule for help understanding their past sales performance. Joule can identify underperforming regions, link to other data sets that reveal a supply chain issue, and automatically connect to the supply chain system to offer potential fixes for the manufacturer's review. New scenarios will continue to be released. Joule is also compliant with all SAP product standards, certifications, AI ethics, and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union).

The information about setting up and enabling Joule is detailed in the SAP Help Portal.

For more information: Joule Capabilities

SAP Central Business Configuration

The partner lead configuration expert creates two projects in SAP Central Business Configuration, with the project type of Implementation Project. One project is connected to the customizing tenant of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud development system, and one project is connected to the development tenant of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud development system.

Deploying Content in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Starter System

First, the lead configuration expert creates 2 projects in SAP Central Business Configuration. The process of activating the scope, organizational structure and finance settings, and product-specific configurations must be done for each project, because one project is connected to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud starter system customizing tenant, and one project is connected to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud starter system development tenant. For the starter system tenants, you are mostly confirming things that have already been predefined in SAP Central Business Configuration, because the starter system is meant to match the test scripts for each business process found in SAP Signavio Process Navigator for the SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition solution scenario. The organizational structure is predefined based on the selected country/region(s). SAP has a standard numbering and naming structure for organizational entities and this is prepopulated in the evaluation project so the data in the starter system will match with the test scripts for each business process. While you can add additional org entities, we don't recommend it because the starter system should align as closely as possible with the test scripts.

Virtual Data Model and CDS Views in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

The VDM (virtual data model) forms the basis for data access in SAP S/4HANA in, for example, analytical applications and APIs. The VDM of SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA is represented by CDS views. The CDS views that make up the VDM follow consistent modelling and naming rules. They expose business data - stored in database tables - in a format that is based on business semantics and therefore easier to consume.

A subset of SAP's VDM CDS views is available for reuse by customers and partners. For more information, see Stability Contracts for CDS Views.

SAP S/4HANA Extensibility

Extensibility covers many topics that enable customers and partners to adapt standard business software to their business requirements. This includes changes to software behaviour that go beyond the capabilities of business configuration, data model extensions, data exposure, layout changes to user interfaces (UIs) or forms and reports, and the creation of new UIs or own applications.

The extensibility concept of SAP S/4HANA Cloud enables lifecycle-stable software products. SAP software updates don't depend on extensions from customers or partners. This is achieved with proper interface approaches (using released objects, public APIs etc.), which means extensions in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud core don't affect upgrades, they're upgrade-proof. All extensions that can't be performed directly in the core, run side-by-side on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).

Extensibility in SAP S/4HANA Cloud consists of the following options:

Key User Extensibility through built-in capabilities
Developer Extensibility through the SAP S/4HANA Cloud ABAP Environment
Side-by-Side Extensibility through SAP BTP

Extensibility Cockpit

This feature enables you to explore the options available to extend an SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution through in-app extensibility. This app provides a detailed view of the extensibility options for business contexts associated with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Enterprise Management edition.