Leverage presales discussions to start your S/4 Implementation with Cloud ALM

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In the last years, SAP spent a lot of effort promoting S/4HANA adoption to their installed base and released a number of tools to that effect. One of the key challenges customers face today is to evaluate the volume of business changes that is to be expected. Fort the most part, they rely on partners, independent consultants and their business network to clarify what the latest release of S/4 has to offer and how big of an impact it will be.

Of course, we live in a Cloud world where processes should be integrated with one another so any impact has to be assessed across your entire IT landscape, not just your SAP systems. The first question then becomes: which edition of S/4HANA should I purchase? And how do they work with other SAP solutions, such as C/4, Ariba or Concur?

Enter the Digital Discovery Assessment app (or "DDA").

While you probably heard about the Readiness Check (technical analysis tool for ERP transition to S/4HANA), the Digital Discovery comes much earlier in the Discover phase where the customer has yet to sign the S/4HANA contract. This is basically an interactive discovery workflow between SAP, the customer and its partners to help refine where S/4HANA fits in the business.

The first step is the Quick Qualifier. This is a determining factor for the DDA because it helps you pick the S/4HANA Edition your business needs. For example, any System conversion or Operational-focus companies (as opposed to Finance-Led) would be recommended S/4 Private Cloud or On-Premise, while new implementations generally get what they need from S/4 Public Cloud.

Digital Discovery - Products selection

Sure, it helps scoping the legal contract binding the customer with SAP but, more importantly, it sets the business priorities for the implementation project. Like many, you may want to organize your Sprints around a first Go-Live focused on Finance, and get into Manufacturing as a next step. But what does "Finance" mean in S/4HANA?

Finance (or HR, IT, Sales, etc.) is simply a group of processes falling under that particular category. The real work is to pick which processes are relevant to your company: this selection is your scope. And the DDA makes it really easy for you to understand how they function in SAP, all the way down to the transaction users will be using. You can also organize scope processes by priority and phases, make notes, describe specifications, and more.

Digital Discovery - Scope selection

There is a reason why the DDA is part of the Discover phase in SAP: you, as a customer or partner, already started working on the implementation project during those presales discussions. So, would it not make sense for that discovery to be an actual input to your project team during the requirements workshops?

SAP Cloud ALM does exactly that. As part of its Implementations suite, you can now email the DDA Excel report to your favorite Project Manager and have your CALM project automatically created from that report. You can define phases, sprints and milestones as well as the team working on the project.

SAP Cloud ALM - Digital Discovery project

Of course, there is more. Based on the Quick Qualifier results, all of the solution processes covered in the S/4HANA Edition for the countries of your choice are now available within the project. Your team can now easily pick and look into those processes you will be reviewing during the project workshops. This does not mean you have to use SAP Cloud ALM for the implementation, you could use it as a window shopping experience or integrate the platform with your own project management solution.

As a partner, this is truly an interactive processes library with tons of information, including editable business diagrams and transaction information, that you can share with your customer before or during the project. Not only does this mean better collaboration, but also enhanced transparency!