The other day, I got lost while driving in the city. I blame my GPS.
Trying to navigate downtown Boston on a rainy night, I followed my GPS apps guidance and took a sharp right turninto a construction site. (In my defense, that road used to be an on-ramp to the highway.) In an attempt to course correct, I reversed and opted for the soft right turn, prompting my GPS to not-so-helpfully redirect me back to the closed road. I realized that I was going to need to puzzle out the route on my own.
Its difficult to keep up with change, whether youre heading across town or toward a new software implementation. Your transition path to SAP S/4HANA evolves with the changing SAP landscape (whats the buzz about RISE with SAP? Whats available for hybrid landscapes? How has the product terminology changed?). To ensure a successful implementation project free of wrong turns and wasted time, you need an up-to-date map. This second edition includes the latest guidance for your SAP S/4HANA project, whether your journey is a new implementation or system conversion, and whether your destination is on-premise, public cloud, or private cloud.
What did you think about SAP Activate: Project Management for SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud ? Your comments and suggestions are the most useful tools to help us make our books the best they can be. Please feel free to contact me and share any praise or criticism you may have.
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Foreword
The past two years of the global pandemic, during which time we have experienced significant disruptions to the business environment, only underlined the need for businesses to rapidly respond to the pace of change in order to continue thriving. This accelerated the impact of the digital- and innovation-driven economy that is now the reality for us all.
The pace of change that businesses need to deal with will continue to accelerate throughout this new decade and can only be managed with the ability to modernize and evolve business processes utilizing agile and intelligent ERP platforms. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, businesses are best placed to utilize the embedded intelligence and analytics to reimagine business processes and to make the right decision at the right time.
To maintain and build this agility, more and more businesses are quickly turning to cloud or hybrid deployment approaches for their ERP system. A cloud approach provides businesses with a much quicker time to value as they welcome a fit-to-standard approach to rapidly deploy. This approach provides the business with a more flexible IT strategy that can more effectively support the changing business strategies that the digital marketplace demands.
It has become clear that a prescriptive guidance that delivers pre-configured content is the key to ensure the aspirational benefits of a cloud approach to rapidly deploy solutions at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO)/total cost of implementation (TCI) for the business. This is something that I am proud to say confidently that SAP Activate delivers. The combination of SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Activate is unique in the marketplace and demonstrates the thought leadership that SAP brings to the table based on its decades of experience delivering ERP solutions for customers across the world and in all industries.
As youll read throughout this book, the broad span of SAP Activate not only covers the initial deployment, where the focus is on enabling and supporting a fit-to-standard approach, but also supports the customer running the solution to continuously adopt the innovations that SAP S/4HANA Cloud delivers through regular upgrades. The global pandemic also changed how we get work done. SAP Activate fully supports teams working in hybrid or fully remote setups with dedicated playbooks and tools that help project teams deliver on business values without missing a step.
Finally, I would like to thank the authors of this book for taking the time to constructively and concisely lay out all aspects of SAP Activate and its strategic importance for SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers. The expertise of these authors is market leading. They have hands-on experience in many projects from around the world, and you can be confident that what follows in this book is the most up to date and relevant information about SAP Activate from the most trusted sources.
Jan Gilg
President and Chief Product Officer SAP S/4HANA, SAP SE
Preface
Welcome to the second edition of the most comprehensive book about SAP Activate for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA, in which well take you on a journey of deploying and innovating your software environment in your organization.