Road to Nirvana...and the choices you need to make

The goal of any transformation journey is to go beyond S/4HANA, it’s what I call attaining the Nirvana. S/4HANA re-defines the core and is an enabler to the Intelligent Enterprise, where the true value is delivered. This is where IBM-SAP Evolution partnership is helping clients on that next phase of the journey. 

The discussion on why organisations should ‘Shift’ to S/4HANA and the Intelligent Enterprise has been briefly discussed by @Mihir Gor and @Allan Coulter so I would encourage you to take 5 mins to refresh your memory.

When talking to clients about their transformation journey to S/4HANA, there are a few things which come up again and again. There is an obvious nervousness about having so many adoption and deployment approaches, not to mention hosting options. In this blog I’m going to explore the various deployment options available and how clients can make an informed decision on picking the right solution, with confidence.

What are the deployment options?

There are two popular deployment options known as S/4HANA (AnyPremise) and S/4HANA (Cloud), each have further options which can give additional differentiations. 

S/4HANA AnyPremise offers features of Bring Your Own License (BYOL) to client’s own Datacentre (On-Premise) or Any Cloud provider (ERP on Cloud) and is suited for any industry enterprises which require a full range of features consolidated with highly flexible customization. 

S/4HANA Cloud offers Software as a Service on chosen Hyperscalers and provides customers with a range of features accompanied by a set of guardrails (Golden Rules) and Fit-to-Standard (F2S) approach. The SaaS offering is delivered in two modes, S/4HANA Cloud Essentials Edition and Extended Edition each giving a different variation on Scope, LoB, Industry Solution, Extensibility and so on.

What criteria should you measure against when comparing deployment options?

I accept that this is very subjective, and the list can be exhaustive, but I’ve tried to cover as many of the criteria’s based on my discussions with clients, these are:

Infrastructure – Standardised landscape based on T-Shirt sizing or flexibility in customised infrastructure, including bare metal. 

Business Process – The approach by which you wish to implement the S/4HANA Solution generally falls into 3 categories – 

1. Fit-to-Standard approach is where SAP Best Practice or Pre-Configured SAP Solution e.g. Model Company, IMPACT Industry Solution, is implemented as the target solution.

2. Customization – adapting the Pre-Configured solution to the requirements of a company.

3. Modification – extending the Standard Best Practice, by modifying the underlying SAP Code.

Add-Ons – You can enhance your standard SAP Solution by adding Industry Solutions, plug-ins, or customer-specific development. If your business relies heavily on Add-Ons this could make a material difference in which deployment option, you choose.

Project / Implementation Duration – The more the solution shifts to Fit-to-Standard the faster the implementation and shorter the duration. The complexity of the solution has a direct correlation with the duration of the project. 

Accelerators – These refer to the Pre-configured Solutions e.g. SAP’s Model Company or IBM’s IMPACT Industry Solution which include Process Design Documents, Fiori Apps, Test Scripts.

TCO / Licensing Cost Model – Perpetual license compared to Subscription model and additional Services being offered to bring the TCO lower.

Functional Scope – Business processes that are supported by the solution. These include Localisation, Languages, Countries, Line of Business etc

Industry Solutions – S/4HANA Enterprise Management software contains Industry specific core functionalities and business processes, it’s important to understand whether the deployment option will support your industry. 

Flexible SLA - Service-level agreement (SLA) defines the level of service expected by a customer from a supplier or service offering. These can vary from 99.5% - 99.95%. Disaster Recovery also plays an important part in whether it forms a key part of your Business Continuity strategy.

Integration – Level of integration maturity of external systems interfacing with S/4HANA solution

Migration / System Conversion – ability to carry out Migration or System Conversion from an SAP ECC system

Release cycle – Frequency of innovation and software release strategy

AMS – Application Management Service

The table above, brings the various deployment options and criteria’s together and provides a best-fit to worst-fit comparison for SAP S/4HANA in an easy to follow table. 

How do I start the adoption Journey?

IBM offers a remotely managed Rapid Discovery assessment which provides a value-centered, hypothesis-based approach to quickly identify, validate, size, solution and draws up a clear end to end road-map both from a deployment as well as adoption perspective.

So in summary, deciding on the journey to the Intelligent Enterprise is the first step and I hope what I have outlined above will provide a clearer path on how to deploy S/4HANA with the myriad of options we are now faced with. It’s important to not only think about how the organisation will have to adopt to the Intelligent Enterprise using S/4HANA at its core but also look to leverage the way you deploy on to the new Business Technology Platform.

For more information, feel free to reach out to me on [email protected]