Maximizing Your SAP Landscape
Do you feel like SAP is constantly trying to sell you something rather than focusing on how to help you be successful with what you already have? As someone who has worked for SAP for 16 years, and who was a customer for 11 years prior to that, I’m always surprised at how many of our customers are not aware of—and don’t take advantage of—the many free offerings that SAP has available.
The goal of this article is to highlight some of the key programs and tools that are available free of charge to help our customers be successful.
Discovery and Optimization
One of the most impactful areas where SAP provides free guidance is process discovery. These tools are meant to help customers identify areas where they’re not getting the most out of their existing system. They also highlight areas that can be optimized by moving to newer versions of SAP, like
S/4HANA. One caveat is that you do need a current maintenance contract with SAP to be able to leverage most of these tools.
One of the most powerful solutions is the
SAP Innovation and Optimization Pathfinder on Spotlight. This report provides customer-specific recommendations on areas of relevant SAP innovations, business process improvements, and IT optimization potentials for your
current core SAP system (SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA).
Instead of evaluating everything you can optimize via Spotlight, a lighter touch option is to only evaluate Fiori applications that might provide benefits straight out of the box. To help enable this analysis, you can leverage the
Fiori Application Library and Recommendation Report. This report will identify what
Fiori apps you can take advantage of
today (including those available in ECC), as well as ones that are relevant in subsequent versions of SAP based on your actual system usage.
If you’ve already optimized your existing ECC system to its fullest potential, including leveraging available Fiori apps, and want to instead focus on new features and functionality,
Process Discovery is your tool. This tool is meant for customers running SAP’s ECC ERP today. It provides tailored recommendations for six lines of business and seven end-to-end processes of how S/4HANA could improve your business based on your actual system usage today.
Evaluating S/4HANA
Once you run this process discovery tools and make the decision, you’re ready to move to S/4HANA (or upgrade your existing S/4HANA system). The tools below are great first steps to evaluate the technical impact of those changes. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of everything you will need to do to prepare for an S/4HANA project. However, it gives you a very good overview of the core areas that will need to change.
- S/4HANA Readiness Check for Conversion – Click Here
- Check the readiness of your current ECC system for the move to S/4HANA.
- SAP S/4HANA Maintenance Planner – Click Here
- Check your components, add-ons, active business functions, and industry solutions to ensure compatibility with S/4HANA.
- S/4HANA Readiness Check for Upgrade – Click Here
- Check the readiness of your S/4HANA system for the latest upgrade.
- SAP Fiori Upgrade Impact Analysis – Click Here
- Understand the impact to Fiori of upgrading your S/4HANA System
If you need some more hands on help to help in implementing both Fiori and S/4HANA, our Regional Implementation Group (RIG) is here to help! They have been delivering two FREE hands-on boot camps to help our customers in these areas:
- 5 Steps to Fiori Bootcamp – Helps you define your UX adoption strategy and gain practical hands-on skills in activities, technologies, and tools to adopt SAP Fiori UX.
- 10 Steps to S/4HANA Bootcamp - Helps you to get a good understanding of what it takes to convert your system to SAP S/4HANA. Please note that this is only relevant for customers that plan to migrate their existing ECC system to S/4HANA, commonly called the Brownfield approach.
SAP knows that not all customers are ready yet to tackle a full transformation or optimization program. In addition to the tools above, Enterprise Support Services provide numerous checks to help you maintain and technically optimize your current system. My experience is that customers who pay for Enterprise Support woefully underutilize these services.
Enterprise Support
The best starting point is the
SAP Enterprise Support Getting Started presentation to get a jump-start into services and tools available as part of the SAP Enterprise Support agreement. In addition, I highly recommend you bookmark the
Enterprise Support Scope Description document. How many times have you wondered what the Service Level Agreements are for support? This document will define it for you.
All Enterprise Support customers have access to the
Enterprise Support Learning Hub. This is such an amazing free resource that no one knows about! There is a plethora of free training available on here. An example is below:
In addition to the Learning Hub training, Enterprise Support customers can leverage remote services called
Continuous Quality Checks (CQC). These are free remote services customers can leverage to have SAP assess the health of their systems. A couple are highlighted below that I find have been most beneficial for my customers:
The Early Watch Alert CQC is something that you have to request and the information becomes stale the longer it takes you to review the analysis. One very recent addition to our offering of tools is the
Early Watch Alert Workspace. It allows you to go in and evaluate the technical health of your system on a daily basis. As highlighted in the linked blog, there is tutorial to help you in leveraging the most out of this new tool.
Community
Finally, we know that sometimes you just need to talk to other customers who have been through it before. To that end, the North America Chief Customer Office has established several communities to help connect our customers with each other. Please note these communities are meant for customers already live or actively implementing these technologies, and they are not meant for prospects. If you are interested in joining any of these communities, please reach out to me directly at
jayne.gibbon@sap.com.
- S/4HANA and Analytics Executive Innovation Council: A forum for sharing use cases and implementation experiences. The Council also provides peer-to-peer executive networking opportunities and is focused on C-level executives.
- S/4HANA Customer Meetup: This is a virtual collaboration forum where customers live or in-flight with S/4HANA share journey stories and implementation lessons learned, as well as hear from SAP experts on hot topics.
- SAP Analytics & Reporting Customer Meetup: This is a forum for customers with Analytics use cases to share "need to know" items from the world of Analytics along with direct updates from SAP experts on product roadmaps and hot topics
- SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) Community: This is a forum for customers implementing EWM to share best practices and lessons learned
It’s simply impossible to highlight all the free offerings SAP has, but I hope this article has provided some that you weren’t aware of and that you can take advantage of right away. I welcome the chance to connect with you via the comments or directly.
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