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"Scaling Success Through Sharing” - Top Insights from 2,222 Cloud ERP Go Lives supported by our Product Success Team
The number 2.222 holds a special significance in my world. Now, over the past decade, our Product Success teams had the opportunity to support – hands-on - an amazing number of 2.222 customer project go lives, marking an incredible milestone in our journey when empowering our customers and partners on their transformation journeys with SAP S/4HANA.
Growing up with Star Wars and Marvel, I have always been a big science fiction fan and the year 2222 is often associated with futuristic visions and advancements. Similarly, SAP S/4HANA has paved the way for ERP systems. Almost a decade ago, when we founded our engineering-led team to look after adoption and the product experience of our S/4HANA customers, we were at an inflection point to all learn ERP again.
SAP S/4HANA came with re-imagined business models with Everything as a Service and a move from mass production to mass customization; re-imagined business processes like event-based revenue recognition and new dynamic inventory management; embedded analytics with radical new Insight-to-action and simplified data models leveraging in-memory database usage, real time analytics, embedded AI & Intelligence, as well as next generation business processes for the digital age.
From small beginnings the Cloud ERP Product Success team, namely S/4HANA Customer Care and the S/4HANA Regional Implementation Group (short: RIG) engaged with customers following a simple paradigm.
Walk the Talk: Make the solution successful and share the knowledge.
To do so, our execution plan followed a simple recipe: Spend 50% of the capacity on
- learning and supporting customers,
and spend the other 50% on
- Giving feedback to our Engineering unit to improve the product and journey and remove adoption hurdles,
- sharing the knowledge on Best Practices and workarounds with the growing community of customers and partners.
As an engineering-led organization it was crucial to not just work with the product as-is but constantly give feedback and shape it, based on first-hand experience from customer projects. As the adoption of S/4HANA increased and through hands-on support of customer projects, our team has built up an outstanding level of Product and Consulting Best Practices to help new projects achieve successful and timely go lives. With growing success, the team prides itself on sharing this knowledge and enabling the broader S/4HANA community and has developed significant enablement and community skills to focus on areas where there is most demand for knowledge assets and support. I can even recall some of our first product related blogs back in 2015/2016 on:
SAP S/4HANA Frequently Asked Questions - Part 1 - the fundamentals by Sven and
Time Saving tips to import many languages for ERP/S4HANA Installation by Mahesh
These are no longer relevant any more, 😊 but an interesting starting point for a journey with a certain durance.
When the openSAP platform turned 10 in 2023 and reopened the 10 most viewed courses as self-paced experience, we were proud that 6/10 courses were SAP S/4HANA courses, and 4/6 were built based on our hands-on experience. One prominent course alone attracted 65k learners and drove ¼ of a million of learning hours and encouraged us frequently that our experience was being well received.
The first years focused on the basic capabilities of S/4HANA, before the conversion of ECC customers to S/4HANA came into the focus. As well as the tools, which have been built by the product and shaped by our experience, to support the various journeys of our customers. One example is the Readiness check, a tool which didn’t exist in 2015 and is now used by almost every customer in their preparation of the implementation journey. To date, the Cloud ERP Product Success team collectively achieved an incredible 16 million views on knowledge assets. We firmly believe that assisting the 2222 customers in going live is a milestone worth sharing, including the most viewed assets in one cumulative blog with the audience. We would like to present the most viewed assets and most listened podcasts in a comprehensive blog for our audience.
This would not be possible without the tireless contributors from the Product Success team and supporters within their respective domain areas. To make it more consumable, I have clustered the information along the most requested categories.
The initial S/4HANA RIG group back in 2015
Why Cloud? – Fully embrace a cloud mindset
Adopting a cloud mindset is crucial for the success of a cloud ERP implementation project these days. This mindset involves embracing cloud philosophies and strategies, which are distinct from traditional on-premise solutions. Without it, projects may face fundamental issues like unexpected obstacles and impractical customization proposals if the Fit-to-Standard approach is not properly followed.
To mitigate these risks, we recommend to empower your team through SAP-led learning sessions to understand the cloud mindset in the context of implementing SAP cloud solutions.
Since SaaS ERP was natively developed in the cloud with the highest degree of standardization, adopting a cloud mindset is an essential must do, not a nice-to-have concept. This includes adhering to SAP Best Practices, leveraging modern cloud-like integration technologies enabled by the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), and driving business differentiation through cloud configuration capabilities and extensibility.
We often discussed how to best visualize the difference between Cloud and On-premise and as many people like to “cook at home” vs “eat in a restaurant”, I think that an analogy of subways and cars fit to the different deployment options of ERP solutions. The flexibility and individuality represented by the intricate network of streets and cars can be synonymous with a private cloud option, whilst the efficiency and communality of a subway can be that of a SaaS offering. While individual transport options, like cars, also have their own advantages. For simplicity, efficiency and transport capacity, a subway is really the backbone of transportation for non-differentiating mass processing.
SAP Activate was a component of our Product Success group, where project success is closely tied to the agile and native SaaS methodology. This approach supports customers throughout the lifecycle of activating and running cloud solutions. Jan laid it perfectly out in this article on SAP Activate – Explore Phase: Use Fit-to-Standard to confirm business process fit and identify gaps .... And latest and greatest SAP Activate roadmaps can be found today via SAP4Me here.
Transformation has been a topic that guided us through the entire journey and I recently had the pleasure to share some of our thoughts and motivation in a podcast “Transform every Day” sharing my thoughts about Cloud ERP reimagined and why I believe that a move towards transformation is rather a lifestyle or habit than a one-time-program you can run to become agile.
Skill conversion also stays TOP OF MIND for many of our customers and partners. We created a blog, sharing our experience in this – not always easy – The transition from being an SAP ERP - SAP S/4HANA on-premise practitioner to an SAP S/4HANA Cloud p.... It demands change, adaptation, and the embracing of new technology and mindset within a traditionally well-established system of record. The blog serves as a guide, outlining recommendations and strategies that you can adopt to transition smoothly and quickly. It leverages your business expertise from an on-premise environment to the public cloud, written by Marco. And the Cloud Mindset journey continues with the best extensibility practice as laid out here: Drive competitive advantage through differentiation in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition – my experi....
Function, FIORI and generic topic blogs
Function and Feature blogs have been highly regarded by our domain experts. We were often pleasantly surprised by how well they resonated with the community and continued to generate significant views over time. Here is a selection of some of our most notable entries:
A milestone and one of the most wanted topics, how does FUE work. Pascal delivered here a masterpiece in explaining it. Did you say FUE? A definition.
Another amazing example, written by Sheldon on things good to be known about SAP Travel Management for SAP S/4HANA.
And one of our TOP authors if it comes to FIORI, Jocelyn, here with a small selection of her blogs how to boost User Experience SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – Upgrade Faster – Managing app lifecycle impacts on users. If you click on her name – which also applies to the other authors – you find a lot more content on how to make FIORI successful.
Business Partner Management, introduced as mandatory element with S/4HANA, an evergreen in successful blogs, here one from Andi on SAP S/4HANA Business Partner – Address Management at Contact Persons.
With Release 2023, Advanced Intercompany Sales in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition became a hot topic with many views on our content blog, posted by Kazuhita.
Another one with more than 30.000 views has been created by Alina in 2023 on Multiple Valuation Approaches/Transfer Prices in SAP S/4 HANA - Implementation hints.
Customers moving from ECC to S/4HANA
The process of moving house begins with a decision. Living in a cozy, casual home for many years was great, but you had always dreamed of living in a more luxurious and visually spectacular place. Space becomes a challenge as the family or income has grown and the next house upgrade is required. Beyond a certain point and after careful consideration, finally the bold decision to embark on a new adventure is taken.
The same applies to ERP. It is important to consider that the changed requirements and size of your organization or the need for more agility and speed of business process adoption is in most cases the trigger for a decision to move. It is not the technology itself that is or even should be the trigger. Finally, an ERP system is an enabler for the business, not a self-fulfilling purpose for the sake of a technology upgrade. The fast-paced innovation cycles across all industries are enforcing a frequent adoption of businesses improvements. Moving ERP is like moving HOUSE.
For customers moving from ECC, we tried a new format and developed a special flagship concept with our S/4HANA Bootcamps (for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition). The customer bootcamps are designed to accelerate and remove risk from their S/4HANA journey. These workshops focus on critical aspects of a successful S/4HANA transformation, and are offering hands-on experience from experts to experts.
- "10 Steps to S/4HANA" providing a structured framework for end-to-end implementation,
- "5 Steps to Fiori" enabling the transformational aspects and how to create a seamless user experience,
- "10 Steps to Clean Core" outlining strategies for maintaining a future-proof, simplified system. These bootcamps provide hands-on guidance, best practices, and a deep understanding of key principles.
But we also focused on the skill conversion and on customers looking to transition directly from ECC to Public ERP in a Greenfield approach.
- The Transformational Motivation for customers to transition right away: Accelerated Business Transformation – Moving from SAP ERP 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
A comprehensive list of our most viewed learning assets on the SAP Learning Platform (lSC: Learning.sap.com) can be found here:
Clean Core became an important topic over the years. I mentioned the Clean Core bootcamp already and we also constantly tried new formats to transport the message and, in this context, we joined the UKISUG for a Podcast on Clean Core. This is in general a great format, which we also utilized for many more expert talks with our S/4HANA Insights series. You can find a complete playlist here, where we constantly invite new customers and partners and share their individual project insights.
Early Innovation Adoption
The team has also played an integral role over the years in supporting early adoption of key innovations or technology improvements such as Joule, Embedded AI or the introduction of the 3-system landscape (3SL) to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, helping our early adopter projects and sharing lessons learned both internally with SAP Engineering and the broader ecosystem. Two great recent blogs from Marco, serving as good example giving a consolidated overview of both topics:
- Foundational Elements for Harnessing the Power of Business AI in Your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Ed.
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, three-system lan... - SAP Community
We also improved the journey for our customers to stay updated on innovations as their business strategies evolve. Whether expanding, opening operations in new countries, or increasing productivity, reviewing new innovations is crucial for enhancing business value. At a minimum, follow the Highlights (e.g. 2302) and Highlights (2502) our team prepares, which are provided by me (Bert) for each major release. If time permits, review the "what’s new" documentation and utilize the SAP release assessment and scope dependency (RASD) tool for personalized system usage insights. This can help plan and adopt new functionalities like business processes, apps, automation, analytics, machine learning, and expanded operations at your own pace.
What’s Next?
We will continue to share our hands-on knowledge with the community to ensure smooth, fast and successful projects of our customers moving either via RISE with SAP or GROW with SAP in SAP’s ERP world and our SAP Business Suite. We invite you heartly to not only follow blogs, but to join and engage in the SAP Public Community to bring yourself up to speed with expert blog posts which focus on key innovations or key learnings from the product. This is the largest virtual community of experts, and it provides an active Q&A area monitored by our team with an exceptional >92% answer rate. And the remaining 8% are not, because we don´t like the question 😊, but they are often so deep in the context of the implementation, where we sometimes miss contextual information to answer it.
Join us here: https://pages.community.sap.com/topics/s4hana-cloud and consume the latest blog posts delivered by the Cloud ERP Product Success organization.
And we go beyond! We care about all your product questions and have built the GenAI assistant “EDITH” that helps us enable asset creation at scale, Most Asked Question (MAQ) analysis, as well as consultative question answering. Read the blog post on our genAI expert assistant EDITH to understand how we boost efficiency and enhance the quality of our enablement materials.
Enablement Wheel
Stay connected with our product expert team and find a lot of content structured along webinars, expert blog posts and videos, as well as customer podcast episodes.
https://chart-bdmaicr0au.dispatcher.eu2.hana.ondemand.com/index.html?hc_reset
If you want to share your own story, simply reach out via insideS4@sap.com.
Finally, a sincere thanks to our customers, sponsors and the Cloud ERP Product Success Team
I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all customers and partners who were driving the SAP S/4HANA journey with us over the years, learned, exchanged, motivated and inspired us and our sponsors including Thomas Saueressig, Muhammad Alam, Bernd Leukert, Michael Kleinemeier, Jan Gilg, Wieland Schreiner and last but not least the Cloud ERP Product Success team who have stood behind our customers over the years and are, next to the product, the stars of this journey. Many have been with us from the beginning, while others have been with us for a certain time but will always be an inherent part of this amazing journey and stay within the S/4HANA Cloud family.
We hope to provide you with more good content also in the upcoming times of the SAP Business Suite. Looking forward to a fruitful collaboration.
Bert
on behalf of the Cloud ERP Product Success team
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