Moving to S/4HANA is “transformation” and not just a technical upgrade. Those who have taken this transformation journey have realized the true benefits of S/4HANA adoption. These benefits go beyond digital business models enablement, business process innovation, or collaboration. The potential of S/4HANA is in accelerated automation of controls and systems, the ability to seamlessly restructure and realign business operations, and streamline processes—these are the value-additions that give businesses the impetus to improve and realize their strategic goals. However, like any digital transformation, moving to S/4HANA is a complex undertaking that requires a watertight business case and a roadmap that clearly defines the need for the move, the strategic objectives that need to be achieved, and a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis of adopting a solution like S/4HANA. But before this elemental step, the critical questions that businesses should ask are:

• What is the current health of the operating models of the business?
• What strategic goals does the business need to achieve?
• What are the pain points or the key drivers that necessitate the move to S/4HANA adoption?
• What are the existing operational capabilities or readiness in terms of cost and benefits to undertake the move?
• What support does the business need to implement such a solution?
• What is the ROI and the potential improvement range from S/4HANA?

Outlining such questions and addressing them not only helps determine the need and influence of S/4HANA adoption and implementation, it also is the first step in getting the executive buy-in. Value Drivers for SAP S/4HANA Adoption The accelerated need for product and service transformation and the aspiration to be faster, intelligent, flexible, and better connected with internal and external systems have propelled many organizations to adopt intelligent solutions like S/4HANA. SAP S/4HANA allows businesses to innovate continuously, standardize processes, and measure the success of transformative initiatives. Below are the key value drivers that motivate organizations to adopt SAP S/4HANA. Process optimization, harmonization, and standardization Optimizing, harmonizing, and standardizing business processes and data is crucial for agility and operating efficiently in an ambiguous business ecosystem. This not only allows organizational visibility but also allows for financial performance comparisons and can give an accurate picture of organizational health. Especially in the current business ecosystem where mergers and acquisitions are rampant, supporting multiple legacy systems can lead to integration issues and is time intensive and disruptive to the overall organizational operations. Similarly, a lack of clear business framework in any organization that necessitates heavy customization of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions often results in a lack of transparency and organizational inertia. With harmonized and standardized operations, organizations can achieve efficiency and sustainable growth, and negate integration challenges especially during post-merger integrations. Application rationalization and sunset strategy​ It is crucial to identify technologies and tools that deliver strategic business goals in a digital business landscape. This means evaluating the existing technology portfolio and validating their business value to help reduce redundancies and the cost of ownership. With businesses spending significant resources and cost on supporting under-utilized legacy applications and technologies, technology rationalization not only enables organizations to optimize their technology stack, but can also reduces support costs for redundant technology. This enables them to invest in automation and other innovative technologies and build a technology architecture that aligns with the overarching strategic business goals and deliver value. Operating model ​enterprise value​ For operating in a disruptive environment, sustaining accelerated speed, agility and efficiency require businesses to build a next-level operating model that seamlessly integrates digital technologies and operations capabilities to drive revenue, lower costs, improve quality, and increase transparency. When organizations work with complex models especially with multiple, siloed initiatives and approaches to improve performance or achieve any other business goal, the result is often unsustainable and give short-term operational improvements and limited visibility into organizational working and structures. Businesses often take a piecemeal approach to improving processes instead of holistically looking at adopting a sequential approach to achieve a compound impact, increasing collaboration, and improving customer journeys. Instead of changing the individual business units, integrating the corporate and business-unit strategy and varying business models into one and building a functional model that helps improve resource utilization, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing. Requisites for Building a Business Case for SAP S/4HANA Any step toward adopting future technology architecture or platform such as SAP S/4HANA should start with clearly defining the business benefits it can provide—and how the operational architecture can be tailored to realize the business goals that the platform looks to achieve. Successful adoption and implementation of S/4HANA needs a strong executive business leadership and sponsorship, a shared vision, a mission for all business, IT and third-party partners, dedicated full-time resources with strong functional and technical capabilities, accountability on workstream owners to deliver against their pre-defined scope, and a strong mechanism to track progress for the project team and leaders. For a successful business case assessing the value of SAP S/4HANA, the following steps should be considered.  Identify the pain points The most crucial step in developing a business case for S/4HANA involves identifying the pain points or issues the business is struggling with and needs to solve. The most common pain points businesses have are highly manual processes that create significant levels of operational risks. These can be:

• Manual reporting processes (Excel-based)
• Gaps in data consistency and integrity
• Manual close processes (Excel-based)
• Manual transactional processes (like invoice allocations, tax accounting, and cash application)
• Redundant data entry across the technology landscape
• Manual budgeting and support function cost allocations,bank reconciliations, third-party financing, or bank covenant monitoring

S/4HANA capabilities analysis S/4HANA is an integrated solution that allows for enhanced automation, risk reduction, simplified processes, and scalability. However, before adopting the solution, businesses need to gain a holistic view of the solution and map it to their business process or innovation needs. Such an assessment allows businesses to make informed decisions and understand why S/4HANA is the right choice. Some of S/4HANA’s capabilities include:

• Flexible, dynamic and detailed reporting capabilities through reporting strategy and architecture implementation
• Optimized data governance model through the Master Data Management (MDM) process
• Accelerated close and reporting processes through consolidation system implementation
• Automated transactional processes through Chart of Accounts (COA)
• Organizational structure rationalization and AP/AR process optimization
• Fully integrated technology landscape through integrations build
• Optimized financial planning and budgeting through FP&A process optimization
• Support function cost allocation solution
• Optimized core-accounting treasury function through core-accounting treasury solution implementation​

Key considerations for building a business case for S/4HANA Businesses should consider that adopting and implementing S/4HANA is a complex undertaking, and the transformation process involves a series of assessments. The components of an overall decision framework to determine if an organization is ready to embark on implementing S/4HANA are: Stakeholder alignment: Stakeholders across the business and IT need to be aligned on the roadmap, the case for change, and finance transformation. Value creation: Business case must justify the costs to execute the roadmap and have a framework for continuous value creation. Value delivery: Initiatives delivering value must be sequenced in a manner that maximizes return for the client and is aligned with internal improvement initiatives. Resource availability: Resource availability to manage competing priorities are needed. Ensuring that key stakeholders are backfilled in their daily roles is critical for uninterrupted project support. Change management: A focus on end-user adoption for new capabilities, organizational readiness, and communicating early and often are core change management factors that need to be considered. Organizations need to keep the following key considerations in mind before embarking on S/4HANA adoption.

• “One-size-fits-all” approach does not apply. Someone should tailor the approach to industry-specific business needs, which demands business engagement and leadership.
• Business-led transformations enable companies to drive from their strategic “way to play,” or differentiating way of approaching the
• Data Structure and IT Architecture should reflect a company’s way to play in the balance between “Core” and“Edge” functionality.
• Migration strategy decisions whether “Brownfield” or“Greenfield” should reflect both the readiness to invest and innovate within the company and the willingness or need to safeguard past investment and develop competitive advantages.
• S/4HANA transformation is increasingly seen as much more than a technical conversion, such that the true value of transformation comes from the opportunities to enable advanced, digital business models.
• SAPS/4HANA Roadmap should be supported by leading practice models, proven methodology, and agreed design principles based on strategic “ways to play.”

Key differentiators for a successful S/4HANA roadmap A successful S/4HANA roadmap should prioritize and align an organization’s key business and technology drivers, define the project scope, and demonstrate how the solution can support the strategic business goals and priorities. The following key differentiators enable a successful S/4HANA roadmap. One common vision: Focus on establishing a common purpose and vision across all business units Business-driven: Early business engagement to avoid the perception of an “IT-driven” project Global framework for local use: Identify unique global, regional, and local business needs to drive process and data harmonization Doing the right things: Taking a pragmatic and risk-adjusted phased approach to accelerate value for clients Build up organizational governance: Establish active PMO and decision governance with clear ownership and accountability Platform design and leading architecture fit: One technical platform solution across all regions Change to a data-driven future: Activate change management early on to recognize and address the implications of modernization Link to S/4 and other initiatives: Reach out to planned and in-flight initiatives to identify alignment opportunities and dependencies Building the case Most organizations struggle to identify the starting points for their S/4HANA transformation journey. A structured approach that identifies and encompasses all the elements and aspects of this journey contributes to the overall success of the adoption and implementation process. A business case for S/4HANA should begin with five core steps:

• Defining the vision and strategy
• Evaluating scope
• Readiness assessment
• Analyzing opportunities
• Cost and effort estimation
• Resource availability estimation to support transformation
• Migration roadmap

Additionally, classifying business processes into categories to make the process of building a case for S/4HANA easier should be executed in the following manner: Must do’s: Technical and business activities, which are prerequisites for transformation Clean-up: Getting rid of unused data, settings, and programs Back-to-Standard: Bringing the platform back to standard SAP, where possible Innovation: Areas identified by business needs, process adaptations, and new technologies and agreed upon via common process  Implementation roadmap To clearly lay out the next steps and gain additional guidance on decision-making, a roadmap detailing the structure and timeline of the adoption process should be created. An implementation roadmap should include activities under the cohorts of process, data, security, reporting, technical, change management and testing, unpinned by regulatory, tax, and infrastructure frameworks.Potential pain points during implementation As with any transformation journey, organizations migrating to S/4HANA can run into implementation challenges. For large organizations, the top pertinent challenges relate to solution option decisions (both in greenfield and brownfield transformation settings). In brownfield transformations, the other challenges revolve around implementing solutions and testing efforts and focus while in greenfield transformations, the pain points related to understanding S/4HANA benefits and driving best design. Whereas for small organizations, the top challenges often translate into testing effort and focus (for brownfield migrations) and understanding S4/HANA benefits (for greenfield migrations) followed by implementing solutions (for brownfield migrations) and driving best design (for greenfield migrations.)  Conclusion When organizations are contemplating the move to SAP S/4HANA, an evidence-based holistic analysis of the core business needs, and what needs to be achieved is crucial for making informed decisions. Devising a business case enables alignment on the value of the project, the goals it seeks to achieve, determining whether the project is viable, if the resources are effectively used, and if priorities are clearly established.