How to bring visibility to end-to-end business processes in a modern SAP landscape?

There has been a long debate on breaking the silos, building composable environments, supporting continuous change, transformation to the cloud, and so on, and SAP with S/4HANA has a central role in all this. How SAP should be implemented is changing, both methodology and technology-wise, but after all, the support for business and end-to-end processes is what counts.

There are several ingredients in the soup. You need to follow S/4HANA clean core and lean data, keep extensions clean, and keep the whole integrated landscape aligned and reliable. You should support flexibility and fast-paced change – you notice you may have contradictory objectives. But from a business point of view, these technology-related topics should not take over your real objectives.

How to solve the challenges?

The main thing is to engage the business to align S/4HANA with the target operating model. Think of the capabilities and requirements of the business, study your processes, and whether they cater to the needs of a wider audience, including surrounding systems and connections to the outside world. Go deeper and define data flows, data granularity, dimensions, allocations, frequencies, and preparation of data within and from S/4HANA. And then build a roadmap for a larger audience – not just for SAP users. You can utilize a pre-project to clarify the goals, before making technology decisions.

Business value matters

This is something we have been living with for years, but the means to solve are evolving. For example, SAP BTP caters to several solutions and should be an integral part of the S/4HANA landscape. BearingPoint has implemented projects using BTP integration and Datasphere to support data transparency and agility in a unified SAP platform, but also connections to other systems. These include, for example, group- and statutory reporting and EPM solutions.

We have been able to support creating a seamless environment for the Record-to-Report process, including financial planning. The unified system landscape should be measured from the business user experience. The business process is what matters, technology is secondary and can be solved.

An example of components in an SAP hybrid landscape, to be aligned with a customer-specific landscape.

Complexity relieved by the right solutions

Often you have several source systems, SAP and non-SAP ERPs. You may have parallel processes, decentralized master data, missing postings, and variations in calculations across business areas. A lot needs to be done to prepare the data: enhance, harmonize, and transform. SAP Datasphere has proven to be a flexible cloud-based platform, supporting transparency and reconciliation, and expediting the end-to-end process.

We have used Python and Databricks alongside Datasphere to drive new flexibility for changes and introduced the Finance department to participate in the work – as there are capable employees who understand the data content and the need for transformation on their data. This is lowering silos and bringing data, users and IT closer together.

When you are implementing a new operating model or have a phased transformation with several ERP systems, you need system architecture that supports business through all the phases and roll-outs, usually spanning several years. This tends to get more complex when you have simultaneous mergers and acquisitions. This is the reality for many customers.

Author:

Tapani Tuoma
Senior Business Advisor, ERP team
BearingPoint Finland