The most critical part of a S/4HANA move is convincing your organization to take the journey. This can be accomplished by building a business case on why the move is necessary and valuable to your organization. Unlike the IT days of old, saying a piece of software is out of date or out of support isn’t justification enough to upgrade. The line between IT and business is so blurred and intertwined that IT supports business drivers. Therefore, the justification for an upgrade must include business values as well. ROIs from both IT and business. Time and cost savings from both. Value from both.
Thankfully, SAP has invested a lot of time and effort over the last few years to help customers build these cases. SAP took an in-depth look at its broad and deep pools of customers to collect an unprecedented amount of data. They then created various tools leveraging this data to guide customers, which we will look at in this series of articles.
Each post will highlight one tool I feel has significant value to SAP customers in their S/4HANA journey. This series will not be a comprehensive list of all available tools. So if you’re interested in others not covered over this series, feel free to reach out.
Today we will cover SAP’s Business Scenario Recommendations. This tool is built on Spotlight by SAP. First, it’s essential to understand this Spotlight platform. Spotlight was started in 2019 by a few SAP employees as a platform to leverage a customer’s actual data to get immediate insight into performances and efficiencies of business processes. This was unique for SAP because previously, their tools were benchmarks from an average of SAP customers across industries, sizes, etc. Now SAP and customers have the power of self-help tools to immediately yield results about how they leverage SAP.
SAP Business Scenario Recommendations on Spotlight will provide tailor-made recommendations based on data extracted from your SAP system. The results will help business decision-makers in your organization understand the value of moving your current SAP ERP to S/4HANA.
Before we can jump into this tool, let’s take a moment and review the pre-requisites.
Must be ECC6.0. All EHP versions included.
ST-A/PI Version 01S or higher hall be installed on your ERP
Authorization objects SM_PBM_DET and S_DEVELOP must be added to the user who executes the report.
Must be run in SAP ECC Production environment only. No PRD system copies or other systems may be used.
So what is looked at? What do you get?
There are five lines of business included in the analysis:
Finance
Sales
Supply Chain
Sourcing and Procurement
Manufacturing
Other processes like HR, etc. are not included in SAP Business Scenario Recommendations.
Process Overview
There are four steps to completing the SAP Business Scenario Recommendations Process. Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps to understand the process and effort.
Step 1 – Extract Data
To extract your SAP data to be analyzed, there are six steps.
- Implement SAP Notes 2758146 and 2745851. These notes contain data collection frameworks and business process performance metrics extraction functionality. Note: These notes are also used in the SAP Readiness Check, another great S/4HANA tool covered in another blog post.
- Run the Extraction program in your Production environment. In production run report RC_VALUE_DISCOVERY_COLL_DATA in SE38.
- Schedule the data collection job. This can be run immediately or scheduled as a background job. You can select the data collection time period. I recommend the past 3 months. The max is 6 months, but if the extraction is taking too long, use 1 month.
- Download the collected data. Once the job has successfully ran, use SE37 to download by clicked the Download Analysis Data button. Save locally to your PC or directory.
- Review the collected data. Verify the contents of the ZIP file. It should include four or five XML or XSL files. Note: The XMLs do not contain any personal or financial data.
- Final Review. Ensure that all XMLs contain data. Also, there should only be 4 or 5 XML files (depending on your SAP Note version). If there’s any more or less, then it was incorrectly ran or created. Also, verify that the ZIP file format is BSRAnalysisData-system ID – extraction date.
Step 2 – Initiate Your Request
After your file is extracted, go to www.s4hana.comand request the SAP Business Scenario Recommendations on Spotlight by filling out the form and uploading your ZIP file.
Step 3 – Confirm Your Request
After your request has been submitted, you will receive an email confirmation. This email will ask you to confirm your request by pressing the Confirm button.
Step 4 – Receive Your Results
SAP will email you the results report in 5 business days or less.
Based on the results you receive, you’ll be able to benchmark your system’s performance against what is possible in S/4HANA. These KPIs and outputs are taken based on existing S/4HANA customers, so they are obtainable real-world results… in theory.
This result is very comprehensive; the last time I ran one, my PDF was 241 pages! In addition to the PDF, you’ll also receive digital access to your report on Spotlight by SAP. This digital version allows you to navigate to specific sections or dive deeper into processes warranting further investigation.
One big thing I’ve yet to mention yet is that this comprehensive tool is 100% free of charge. Besides the small effort, it will take to implement the SAP Notes and run the report. It’s a wonderfully useful tool with a wealth of information, making it easier for you to build your S/4HANA business cases.