Are your business users and technical teams ready for GROW with SAP?

If you are looking to modernize your ERP, chances are you’re evaluating cloud options — including the solutions and accelerators that form the GROW with SAP offering.

GROW with SAP provides a cloud-ready ERP (SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition) and the services and capabilities to rapidly realize an effective ready-to-go solution. While there is a wealth of information available about the functionality, deployment methodologies and what to expect from adopting a leading ERP solution from SAP, far less is written on business and technical team readiness for GROW specifically.

The aim of this blog is to share some initial advice on readiness steps for adopting GROW with SAP and SAP’s S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition — and what your company (and team members) can do to be ready for the tasks ahead.

A change in approach?

As with any cloud-ready solution, adopting GROW with SAP requires a change in mindset, especially for teams accustomed to highly configured and tailored legacy solutions. With public cloud, the solution, methodology and overall project success are all about retaining the focus of adopting a ready-to-go solution, with only focused areas of refinement where business needs are critical or delivery must fit into the company’s own landscape.

For companies just starting their SAP journeys, the project team needs to be clear on this change in mindset and the impacts of adopting GROW with SAP.

This is not to say that GROW with SAP can’t have configured solutions and/or developed enhancements specific to your business. However, the underlying rationale for selecting GROW with SAP is underpinned by an often more confined budget (or timeline) based on adopting a standard public cloud solution.

Any readiness for the deployment of SAP S/4HANA within a GROW with SAP approach must retain this mindset and prepare teams to adopt a rapid and available set of pre-set configured solution components. There needs to be an awareness of the need for, and willingness to adhere to, the expected deployment methodology of SAP’s Activate to maximize what is available from standard configuration and ensure the adoption of a clean core “side-by-side” approach for any bespoke development.

How to prepare for GROW with SAP

If yours is like many organizations evaluating GROW with SAP, it may not have the budget, time or experience of large ERP business transformation implementations. Thus, it will likely benefit from a very focused level of support around the preparation and delivery of the GROW with SAP implementation. For many in your IT and business teams, this will be a new task and something that may not be repeated within the organization again for years, if not decades.

What follows is advice on preparing for GROW with SAP. Do realize, though, that many of the approaches and lessons learned from other SAP projects are still often applicable. I have covered much of this in earlier blogs on data preparation, cloud-native delivery and various aspects of newer SAP and wider technical delivery. While these may not be specific to GROW with SAP, they still contain many good points on preparation and delivery.

1. Know your starting position: Teams may initially be reluctant to discuss preparation, as SAP public cloud may seem new, and it can be challenging to even know where to start.

   However, all companies must know exactly from where they are starting. Thus, detailing your current main business capabilities, applications, interface touch points and sources of master and existing transactional data is imperative. Collating available information and revalidating the basic understanding of core business and technical capabilities within your company is a key first step in being ready to fit the new SAP solution into your own company’s business and technical context.

2. Understand the GROW with SAP solution set and methodology: This may sound like an obvious first step, but many individuals only know about SAP’s older solution set and/or its private cloud or on-premise solutions.

   The methodology for public cloud delivery also has its own nuances and there are parts of SAP’s Activate methodology specifically for public cloud. Some approaches, tools, technical delivery and functionality are realized in a specific manner when working in a public cloud GROW with SAP framework. So, the first step is to be clear on exactly where there are specific solutions, approaches or methods when dealing with GROW with SAP.

3. Get access to a working SAP S/4HANA system and supporting technical tools: There is no better way to understand — and thus be ready for the journey ahead — than experiencing it all for yourself firsthand. The good news is that demo systems of the application and supporting tools/services are freely available. The challenge is finding people with the time (and skills) to provide effective high-level overviews.

   SAP has helped by providing Learning Journeys in learning.sap.com, yet you still do need to identify suitable paths for key resources, and it can really help to supplement virtual learning with having someone around physically to support and answer questions.

   To this end, HCLTech has invested in both physical and virtual labs (called ideaX) to help guide you through all this, with the added ability to pilot specific specialized functional or technical issues if needed.

4. Understand best practices and visualize the solution early: SAP provides standard business solutions in the form of best practices. Understanding what these are and their supporting documentation, process flows and how they are realized and tested in a GROW with SAP solution will be critical to your ability to translate available functionality into business processes that match your business needs.

   At the very earliest stages, it can be useful to have a first informal pass at assessing areas of expected high fit, those that may have possible issues/gaps and areas where there may already be known extra work needed (i.e., interfaces into your own system landscape). This early preparation work can help you plan which areas of the system may require more time to explore and/or investigate, as well as provide a very early view of areas that may require specialized functional and/or technical delivery.

   To understand and validate the SAP S/4HANA public cloud solution, then, early in the project, engage in a series of Fit-to-Standard workshops where standard functionality is demonstrated to your business representatives (and supporting technical team). They can then validate if this can work for your business, and any issues and/or concerns can be recorded as possible solution gaps. This process will allow the teams to identify areas to re-assess and decide if any gaps need to be added to a possible backlog. Decisions can then be made on any specialist solutions being proposed, and any extra project work (or business change effort) can be assessed to confirm how any resolution would be handled and planned for.

5. Align your people: Early on, identify the people in your organization and/or others that are going to help make the project work. This should include key people that may need to be supported or even fully freed from their current roles to provide time for the new project, so be sure to align budgets and people to backfill specialists in putting to the new project.

   As you identify people, you will need to budget time to upskill them in the new SAP functional solution, technical topics, delivery methods and your own company’s project expectations.

6. Business-led configuration: To speed the delivery of GROW with SAP, SAP provides business-led configuration guides. These help extract key information from the key business areas/resources to help collate early configuration requirements, possible setup information and possible areas for more in-depth analysis. HCLTech has supplemented these with additional business (and technical) questionnaires in wider functional and technical areas to further accelerate initial fact finding and input during preparation.

7. Integration and development with a public cloud solution: The integration approach and development of solutions in a public cloud solution, where there are strict controls on maintaining a clean core and only side-by-side development, mean that the technical delivery team must be on-point. There are no short cuts or options to complete older, classical application changes or small bespoke code modifications to fit the solution to your company.

   This will be a different way of working. While many of these modifications were ‘quick’ fixes initially, they often then became more in depth, more complex, and lacking in documentation. Ultimately, these customizations became a barrier to change and drove additional effort during upgrades. So, all parties will need to understand the framework within which they will now operate, and while there are ways to tailor the solution, these are in cloud native manners using newer methods, which teams will need to adopt.

   To help in this area, an introduction to SAP’s Business Technology Platform and its tools and services can help bring this all to life. Short demonstrations, review of SAP’s Learning Journeys, or requesting that HCLTech share capability or overviews in our Virtual Labs (ideaX) can also help show your teams what the future will hold.

8. Data readiness: Many systems and solutions only work if the data entered is correct and of a suitable quality. This is true not just for the initial data loads, but also fundamental to day-to-day operation. You will need high-quality data to ensure that the intelligent, data-led analytical and AI insights into information or processing can work correctly.

   Assessing your own data, knowing what is relevant for migrating into the SAP solution and re-assessing its quality are critical preparation steps. In many ways, this is no different from other SAP delivery projects (i.e., RISE with SAP, yet under growth with SAP, tighter controls exist on your options to mass change or change processing or configuration) around possible data requirements or issues. The requirements to get data right and fit to SAP’s data model and business rules (and a purer GROW with SAP solution) are critical.

9. Enterprise architecture: SAP’s new LeanIX helps with this new style of understanding business capabilities, and linking to other systems and underlying data, as well as integration flows mentioned earlier. Having a clear understanding of enterprise architecture helps align the business and technical teams and, importantly, will help visualize and support discussions. Yet you don’t have to be as formal as fully adopting LeanIX, as many of the tasks suggested by SAP in using LeanIX are practical first steps to really understand and document where you are and where you could be going.

   HCLTech has experience with LeanIX and other open enterprise architecture tools and can help establish a base level of formalized enterprise architecture definition. We can also help collate this information and load it as documents into any project repository such as SharePoint or Confluence or start off with Excel information or Lucid diagrams at an early stage, which can then all be pulled into LeanIX, if applicable later.

   The key point here is that your current team will probably be the only real true source of this information!

10. Organizational change management (OCM): With any ERP solution, OCM is a key part of the puzzle for not only business solutions but also within the project and surrounding solution areas. However, in GROW with SAP implementations, additional constraints often exist, including tight timelines, more fixed and lean budgets and very high exposure to the business impacts of deploying a full ERP into the business landscape. This is thus an area where OCM needs to be engaged right from the start, and the messaging around project objectives, methods of operations and impacts to all parties is critical.

To help customers take this journey, HCLTech has a range of supporting methods, tools and services to ensure effective early work and project delivery. We can help guide companies through early preparation and throughout the SAP implementation and into on-going operation.

If your organization has SAP-focused objectives, we’re keen to help you understand how to transform your delivery capability. If you are specifically interested in how this affects SAP development, please check out our other blogs on many aspects of newer ERP-based business transformation and enterprise architecture delivery topics.