Drive Your Digital Transformation
When transitioning your organization to an SAP intelligent enterprise it is best for your firm to be in the proverbial “driver’s seat.” There, your firm’s best interest remains intact. Internal and external driving forces such as cultural barriers and system integrators' agendas can often challenge your firm’s interest. Deploying and adopting the right transformation infrastructure coupled with proven transformation processes are key components to enabling a business-first approach as you drive digital transformation. A business-first approach drives your firm’s priorities to deploy technology solutions that best facilitate your organization’s stability and efforts for growth.
Effectively taking the driver’s seat requires a sound application lifecycle management solution. With the right solution, your business has the tools to effectively manage the following:
- Accurate solution documentation
Solution documentation details every aspect of the technical environment configurations, as it was designed and aligned with the business processes. Documentation also includes all project and program artifacts such as test cases, design documentation, process flows, and technical objects.
- Maintain Technology infrastructure requirement
Maintaining a technological infrastructure that aligns with your current and future business operational needs is the focus. It is imperative for ongoing business success to assess and document the requirements deployed for both short- and long-term operations. Tools that produce data that help size computing, network, and storage requirements are ideal.
- Track Software development
When managing digital transformation projects, it is important to closely track the configuration and/or customization activities required to enable system functionality. This tracking includes maintaining design documentation, assigning development efforts, unit testing your work, and preparing test cases for more thorough cycle of testing. Having a system that manages all these activities and ensures end-to-end traceability is a key goal for any organization looking to successfully transition to an intelligent enterprise.
- Manage end-to-end cycle testing
Verifying and validating your IT system’s functionality is critical both in the project and production landscapes. A solution that will allow your firm to quickly maintain automated and manual test cases, prepare test plans based on risk, and execute all cycles of testing is critical. An internal verification and validation ecosystem includes this capability.
- Migrate error-free code into production
Moving verified and validated code into production without causing business disruption can be challenging. Having the right tools and processes are essential to deploying functionality effortlessly. A solution that verifies at the T code and object level is ideal and necessary in the SAP environment.
- Ongoing change demand in your production environment with little to no downtime!
Over the course of the deployment, your transition into production can be seamless if documentation is maintained properly. All strategically documented objects, design documentation, test artifacts, etc., can be strategically leveraged to enable continuous innovation delivery. This functionality allows your organization to maintain a technology infrastructure that keeps up with the speed of your business.
What should my infrastructure look like?
First, your infrastructure must cover every aspect of the application lifecycle. Everything from Requirement Gathering to Continuous Support is necessary with the right solution. With such an environment, customers can effectively plan and deploy hardware, software, and processes that provide a platform that leads to measurable success when
transitioning to S/4HANA.
The Digital Transformation IV&V Platform
The above diagram illustrates a high-level overview of all tools that are required to enable and support your business and IT transformation. The following is a list of applications that could serve in the capacity of each tool’s functionalities:
- Solution Manager & Focused Build
SAP has developed a software solution that covers six use cases outlined:
- Project and Portfolio Management: used to manage tasks and time at both the project and portfolio levels.
- Process Management: where all process documentation is created and stored
- Requirement Management: used to manage all requirements associated with managing a project
- Test Management: an end-end enterprise test planning, execution, and defect management tool
- Change Request Management: used to effectively manage code movement from system to system in your landscape
- Release Management: used to manage the code releases across your landscape
The system functionalities above are license-free with enterprise support but require installation expertise and custom training based on your specific configurations.
Integrated with Solution Manager, the correct application lifecycle management tool can be extremely powerful and offer an aggressive return on investment.
- Business Process Refinement Tool
An accurate account of your business process hierarchy is critical to successful business process operations. The right tool combined with the right approach will enable extremely efficient operations while creating opportunities to lower TCO.
- Manual and Automated Test Management Tool
It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to deploy and support a sound digital transformation platform without thorough testing. Testing in an SAP environment, if not performed correctly, could prove ineffective and expensive to maintain. The proper approach is to leverage an accurate business process hierarchy to build and maintain manual and automated test cases. These cases will be the cornerstone needed to enable the continuous testing required for continuous innovation delivery.
- Robotic Process Automation
As your intelligent enterprise continues to mature, you can leverage your digital transformation platform to further reduce costs and improve efficiencies with Robotic Process Automation. This solution will allow your organization to reassign human resources to more meaningful and less routine type tasks. This approach will allow your organization to do more with less.
- Expedited Transformation Management Ecosystem Deployment
The deployment of these technologies can be a very daunting and involved process. A pre-configured solution that has the components enabled has proven to be successful. By leveraging the pre-configured solution offered by Xceleon and
Dell, you can save time and money because of quick deployment and expedited availability.
What should my process look like?
The process should always start with realizing the business processes that must be aligned with the technology environment. The plan continues by fully documenting your solution and building any necessary requirements that would be needed for your business use. The requirement scope will then drive the hardware infrastructure deployment, software development and testing efforts, followed by an error
-free deployment of code. Finally, once the solution is in the production, the artifacts created during the deployment can deploy continuous innovation in production disruption.
End-to-End Digital Transformation Process
Measuring your success
Following the Scaled Agile Framework software deployment approach, there are key metrics that are used to track the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of your software deployment projects. The areas of focus are Time to Market, Productivity, Quality, and Engagement. Each of these is an area of focus when using the sound digital transformation platform detailed in this document along with a proven Agile-based method.
Time to Market: Define the time it would take to do a full deployment. They can improve this by 30-75%
Quality: Improve the quality of the software that is deployed by 25-75%
Productivity: Increase business productivity regarding efficient operations by 20-50%
Engagement: Increase end-user engagement with the system by 10-50%
What’s Next?
SAP has a mandate for all customers to transition to S/4HANA by 2027. This date is quickly approaching and resources with the skills to assist will become more and more scarce. The very first step in improving your odds of successfully transitioning to S/4HANA is to engage with a viable digital transformation partner. Your partner should be skilled in every aspect of the digital transformation and possess expertise in SAP-endorsed application lifecycle management tools. For more information on contacting a partner to begin your project, start here:
Pre-Assessment – Xceleon
