Organizational success for a for successful S/4HANA migration pivots on innovation and agility. It means deploying customized digital solutions, cost reduction, process automation, and transparency for delivering better business and customer outcomes. But how can organizations innovate and be agile?

In the third part of the interview series with Craig Brown, Chief Transformation Architect at Xceleon, Brown talks about innovation delivery platforms for S/4HANA migrations, and why such platforms are essential for organization's transformation success. Brown emphasizes the importance of adopting an agile approach for driving innovation and talks about leveraging tools like SAP Business Process Change Analyzer that can discover system changes to ensures that the solutions work before moving into the production environment. Brown continues to talk about how Xceleon’s Innovative Transformation Platform improves operational efficiencies that contribute to organizational success and how Xceleon supports organizations in their transformation journeys.

Learn more about Xceleon here. Read the interview excerpts below. 

View Part 1 of the interview here. 

View Part 2 of the interview here.

SAPinsider: What does it truly take for businesses to innovate?

Craig Brown: For any business to innovate, the core thing is to have an innovation delivery platform that teams can leverage to capture all the changes that are needed, all of the necessary innovation, and then manage that innovation to closure so that businesses can take advantage of that innovation. Although, the biggest thing is the innovation delivery platform, it is also about adopting an agile approach.

SAPinsider: When we talk about the agile and innovative approaches that organizations need, how do they integrate with the SAP functionalities or the solutions they offer? Do they change accordingly, or how?

Craig Brown: When talking about the agile approach, it is more complex if not done with SAP because SAP is integrated. However, when we look at the agile approach, we are looking at it from a development perspective in the SAP world. Before development, when we talk about gathering requirements and doing system demos to get the final requirements in that final scope – all that is a waterfall approach. The waterfall approach can obtain the real advantage of the agile approach during the development or realization of the activated methodology because that might bring some requirements. When the IT group or the system integrator starts to do the iterative approach and development during testing and making adjustments, it becomes more agile.

As the development approach is completed and testing is done, it then turns back to a waterfall approach. But in the production environment, it is agile because the focus is on solving individual incident issues. But what is extremely important for enabling that agility is a robust regression testing suite or if the organization has an automated testing suite repository because testing can be done quickly and thoroughly to ensure that nothing is broken during implementation. SAP tools like BPCA can discover the exact changes in the system, which can be included in the testing scope. Automated test cases can be assigned and run to ensure that the solutions work before moving into the production environment.

SAPinsider: There's also the security and governance aspect when you talk about migrations and on this level, it is all the more important to consider such factors. Can you tell me a little more about that?

Craig Brown: There are various security aspects when one talks about SAP. Is security within the tool to configure different access for users? There is always the threat of external threats accessing the systems both locally in the environment and from a cyber perspective. But from the standpoint of “how do I manage that and how do I ensure that I'm protected?”- Number one, organizations want to ensure that they are well protected with all the security patches within their environments. And number two, organizations need to ensure that they have a set of anti-virus solutions on their local systems to be free of any viruses that may be there. And number three is that organizations need to be clear about protecting themselves from any cyber-attacks from a network perspective. Some components within Solution Manager allow organizations to participate in the external protection of all SAP systems.

SAPinsider: How is Xceleon supporting organizations in their transformation journeys?

Craig Brown: Xceleon is a company that deals in the application lifecycle management space. One of the things that we focus on is setting up the innovation delivery platform and helping customers throughout the entire transition and every aspect of their transition, their migration S4. We help them with assessments of their current environment infrastructures, either cloud or on-premise. We assess their environments from an application perspective through the S/4HANA readiness check. And we also have our own internal tools that help them to build a business case that extracts data from multiple locations and pulls that into one central application. It creates a business case with all the roadmaps and financial benefits that they can receive from going to S/4HANA, and they can provide that document to their leadership and make sound decisions.

We also help to build out the innovation delivery platform by deploying tools such as Solution Manager, Focus Build, SAP Cloud, ALM, and Tricentis tool sets from a testing perspective, Signavio. We have a massive amount of skills in that area as well. And we have our own internal tools there also where we have an Xceleon universal adapter that is able to connect customers who have already built or already utilized PMO tools such as JIRA, MS project as your DevOps, for example, and who have made some investments and to utilizing those tools from a project management perspective but needs to use Solution Manager for all of the reasons why we talked about before. So that adapter can take data from those project management office tools and then port it into Solution Manager and Focus Build at the suitable locations and status those as appropriate as well.

Having an innovation transformation platform causes no disruption to the business and the IT organization and enables visibility. Also, S/4HANA transformation and managing its scope and SI is what that innovation platform can do. And that's what Xceleon is exceptionally equipped to do. We have two relevant certifications that have proven our expertise. Number one, we are a unique SAP ALM hub partner in the space. We are also a Tricentis certified implementation partner, so we can deploy multiple products in the Tricentis space with all our skills in performance testing, automation testing, automation, front-end test management, and development called Q test, for example. We have many certifications in that area, which has proven our ability, along with seven rising product projects helping customers transition to four. We have a lot of experience and background in enabling that.