Enable a Clean Core with SAP Cloud ALM- Webinar Summary

[NiharikaSol]

Enable a Clean Core with SAP Cloud ALM- Webinar Summary

Approach for this Blog

In this blog I have documented the summary from the Virtual Webinar Series on Enable a Clean Core with SAP Cloud ALM.

Summary of sessions:

• Session 1 - Maximizing Clean Core Benefits with SAP Cloud ALM- 20th November 2024
• Session 2 - Efficiently Managing RISE with SAP Projects: A Clean Core Approach Using SAP Cloud ALM-21st November 2024
• Session 3 - Streamlining Business Processes While Preserving a Clean Core- 26th November 2024
• Session 4 - Ensuring a Clean Core with SAP Cloud ALM: Test, Change, and Deployment Management- 28th November 2024
• Session 5 - Operational Excellence with SAP Cloud ALM: Driving the Clean Core Initiative – 3rd December 2024
• New & Planned offerings on the Cloud ALM Roadmap for clean core adoption
• Planned Future Roadmap to enhance Cloud ALM capability

Session 1 - Maximizing Clean Core Benefits with SAP Cloud ALM- 20th November 2024

What is Clean Core?

Clean core is a journey, which needs to be adapted by following a step-by-step approach.

Greenfield

• Unique opportunity to follow clean core principles right from beginning.
• Establish strong governance.

Brownfield

• Establish clean core principle for every new deployment.
• Plan your journey towards a clean core.

Benefits of Clean Core

Case Study of Hitachi

Challenges

• 9000 customization in legacy  SAP ERP application
• Manage ERP version upgrade cycle.

Value Driven Results

• Adopting fit to standard approach has allowed Hitachi to reduce core system customization from more than 9000 to 22.
• Developments are now reused across the landscape.
• A drastically less customized landscape has seen update cycle reduced from every five years to yearly.

The impact

• 94% reduction in customization footprint
• 18x handling of solution updates
• 100% of on-site maintenance requirements eliminated

Business Transformation and clean core

How each dimension of Cloud ALM supports clean core

How project management can be used for clean core.

• As clean core is a journey, it’s an ongoing process and cannot be adapted at once.
• We need to make sure we are following the Best practices and adapting the SAP Activate methodologies to be agile compliant in our clean core journey.
• Define teams and roles.
• Define Timeboxes and releases.
• Adapt Q-Gates Management
• Overall dashboarding for tracking the project progress.

You can find the E2E project management details in my blog which was demonstrated in the webinar. https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-members/all-the-buzz-about-sap-cloud-alm/ba-p/13881...

Rise with SAP Methodology Dashboard

• It fetches the data from multiple sources, Signavio, leanIx, Q-gates , readiness report etc.
• Supports in making decisions which steps to be taken in what sequence for clean core adaption
• Bridging the gap from analysis to execution by task creation and distribution among project team

Session 2 - Efficiently Managing RISE with SAP Projects: A Clean Core Approach Using SAP Cloud ALM-21st November 2024

What is Clean Core Functionality?

• Contains tasks to learn more about clean core methodology
• Clean core success plan is a subset of 118 tasks currently
• Cleanup unused code
• To be as close to standard

What is a Q-gate?

• Predefined milestones where a project is audited to check, if it meets the necessary criteria move to next phase.
• Checkpoints for the current defined project task

 What is the importance of Q-gates in clean core adaption?

To tack cross project clean core activities.

Automatically generated Q-gates in clean core adaption

Project Setup and roadmap selection for clean core adaption

There are three ways to manage clean core tasks

• As a part of implementation project
• As a part of system conversion
• In a consolidation project

For all the variants Q-gates are automatically created as per the selected roadmap. Selecting a roadmap while creating a project, below are the available roadmaps in Cloud ALM for project setup.

Select a roadmap and SAVE, the Q-gates gets auto populated as below.

Click on the generated Q-gate to open and start working on the pre-defined checklist with available drop down options as below.

What is the clean core governance preparation process?

• Create Tag group and tags

Below Tags were created under the tag group for clean core adaption as these are the Cloud ALM entities to establish clean core governance.

• Process
• Requirements
• User Stories
• Features

What is Solution Process Traceability and how it can be leveraged for clean core adaption?

To analyze the readiness of scoped solution processes based on the progress of related requirements and Test execution. We can find the answers to questions about the readiness of related entities. 

The Solution Process Traceability has been upgraded with a feature to do the indirect assignments as below:

New and planned offerings

• To have an automated dashboard to visualize clean core related information. The dashboard will automatically populate the clean core dashboard based on the clean core related information from the below data providers:
• Q-Gates
• Solution Process
• Requirements
• User Stories
• Features

Session 3 - Streamlining Business Processes While Preserving a Clean Core- 26th November 2024

How to transform business from strategy to execution?

Going from an ECC system to legacy S/4 Hana it's a continuous cycle, do a fit to standard workshop, document the findings and decided to redesign the process that needs to be implemented.

It’s a continuous process using SAP integrated tools.

• SAP Signavio: SAP Signavio Process tools are primarily used for process analysis and process mining activities.
• SAP Cloud ALM : It helps customers to implement and operate their cloud or hybrid solutions.
• SAP Leanix: SAP LeanIX is a SaaS application that allows to manage and optimize enterprise architecture.
• SAP Enable Now: SAP Enable Now is a digital adoption platform (DAP) from SAP that provides in-application help and e-learning content to improve the adoption, productivity, and efficiency of SAP software
• Tricentis: Accelerates testing of all your applications, data, and business processes and integrates with tools across your delivery pipeline.

What is SAP Rise with SAP Methodology Framework?

1. SAP Signavio is the starting point for modelling the business process.
2. Landscape discovery involves documenting the organization's IT landscape, planning, designing, and overseeing the implementation of architectural changes to meet changing business needs.
3. Create a project on Cloud ALM with required roadmap selection
4. Conduct fit-to-standard workshops, to identify the gaps.
5. Project execution begins in the realize phase with SAP Activate methodology.

E2E Process flow of SAP Rise with SAP Methodology Framework

Insights of the Clean core adaption for Business Process Transformation

• Define Solution process and create requirements with user story and subtasks.
• Adapt best practice solution process or customize if needed.
• Copy solution process flow diagram into a custom process
• Adapt Business Process accordingly.

Session 4 - Ensuring a Clean Core with SAP Cloud ALM: Test, Change, and Deployment Management- 28th November 2024

Cloud ALM Test management capabilities

• Test management in cloud alm can be manual or automatic through Tricentis. Test automation API’s provide liberty to integrate further 3rd party tools.
• Test case is associated to Solution Process scope & mapped to a requirement for test Planning.
• The test case can be built and executed manually or automatic through Tricentis.
• A Defect can be raised through cloud alm defect Management to identify the gaps in the test results.

How  Tricentis is used to build and execute the test cases?

• Module based test automation in the cloud.
• Use XScan to scan screen and relevant UI elements
• Use Builder to assemble the Test Case based Scanned Modules, Reusable test steps and SAP standard module.

Analyze the test results in a central entry for all test related information and activities in the dashboard.

Current change management capability of cloud alm

What is a Feature?

• Functionality that is represented by a feature must be deployed to a target system together
• Create a feature and assign a transport to be deployed in target systems.

• To restrict the manual TR creation and release on development system, as per the SAP recommendation it should be done through authorizations on the managed system.
• Mass deployment of transports to quality at the moment is only possible through the STMS import job. The deployment scheduler is aimed to provide the mass deployment functionality which will be based on release and feature status as optional where we can select transports based on a deployment plan and the target system for the deployment.
• SAP doesn’t have any plans for custom statuses in change management, but workflow API is planned for Q1 2025, where we will be able to trigger an external workflow. SAP is also looking into providing a custom field in future so that at least this sub-status or this sub-workflow status can be shown in Cloud ALM in the feature. But it is not planned to change the main status screen of the feature to add some custom status.
• To map a four-tier landscape in Cloud ALM SAP recommends looking into the workflow APIs as soon as they are available. For now, we can use the successfully tested status to do the checks in the QA and with the deployment scheduler feature we can have option to deploy the changes to the pre-production system. And then we can use the same approval as well for the production, so the ready for production status to render approval on the pre-prod and production level.

Current Workflow of change management in Cloud ALM

*Use Clean core tags to make the feature for clean core adaption.

Session 5 - Operational Excellence with SAP Cloud ALM: Driving the Clean Core Initiative – 3rd December 2024

How SAP Cloud ALM supports clean core approach adoption in Operations with its 5 principles

• Processes -Business Process Monitoring and Job and Automation Monitoring processes are running, and we need to monitor processes and several KPIs which are actually monitored by the business process monitoring application.
• Extensibility -   To drive business continuity of extensions for the Clean Core adoption is that when we try to do modifications and extensions in S4 system directly. SAP recommends not to modify too much as makes it easier to upgrade the systems.
• Data – The data is exchanged between different Cloud solutions, if we consider master data, we need to ensure that this data is exchanged between the process and is running as expected. The integration monitoring application is developed to start with message-based monitoring more at technical level, and we cover events as data exchange at different technologies. SAP is now trying to bring a kind of a business object view in these exchange processes to support the data dimension of clean core.
• Integration - Integration and exception monitoring is an entire application dedicated to the monitoring and supporting of   all type of integration artifacts from S/4 HANA, CPI, master data integration. We need to make sure that integration and data exchange processes are monitored and is happening in a reliable way. This helps in visualizing the message exchange between the systems with the status of the messages, so that we can understand if there is a problem in the integration between your systems to keep the integration clean
•  Operations – To have a holistic and secure application and business process operations, SAP is planning to have operations as to help the customers understand how the landscape is running and how it can be optimized to have a clean system.

Clean Core Operation Dashboards Overview

There are multiple dashboards planned to give a deep dive the possibility to evaluate the quality of operations and take measures accordingly to optimize the solution for a clean core adaption.

 Operations Dashboards preview for Clean Core project

New & Planned offerings on the Cloud ALM Roadmap for clean core adoption

Planned Future Roadmap to enhance Cloud ALM capability

Link to Roadmap explorer : SAP Road Map Explorer

Key takeaways: ​SAP Cloud ALM for clean core adaption

• A clean core helps customers to stay current and agile compliant with innovation from SAP
• Clean core is a journey, which needs to be adapted by following a step-by-step approach
• SAP Cloud ALM provides contribution for all five dimensions (processes, extensibility, data, integration, operations) of SAP’s Clean Core initiative.
• Customers can build custom processes and functionality using side-by-side or built in extensions
• Change Management in Cloud ALM is planned to be enhanced by Q4 2024 / Q1 2025
• End to end monitoring drives business continuity and quality of process execution
• SAP Cloud ALM operations will become the platform for clean core dashboards.
•  SAP plans to provide operation status as well as improvement dashboards covering business service availability, system operations, application operations as well as business process operations.
• SAP plans to provide security status as well as improvement dashboards covering security configuration as well as security runtime aspects.

Thank you for reading the blog, I hope this helps you find a summary on Clean Core Webinars.

Note: Some pictures have been taken from the slides shared by SAP for the webinar series.