Implementing SAP S/4HANA in SAP's Public Cloud in 7.5 months

Congratulations to the Briggs of Burton team and the consultants from the SAPPHIRE implementation Partner who set the system live on the 29/11/2021.
 

From the first Kick-Off TEAMS meeting to making SAP live in SAP’s Public Cloud, in such a short time of 7 ½ months, is a record to my knowledge.
 

With such a rapid implementation, the time and money spent by the Clients team and the Consultants is drastically reduced, realising the benefits much quicker. And being in SAP’s Public Cloud there is no expensive hardware to purchase or maintain.
 

SAP’s ACTIVATE & RISE methodology led the team through a prescriptive methodology with the SAP Roadmap viewer detailing what must be completed at the various stages of the programme including Stage / Quality Gates. Contained within it, are lots of accelerators and templates that quickly guide the team through each piece of work.
 
They cover everything from the technical setup of the system; the work that the Consultants would do with the Client’s Business Process Experts to understand the processes used in the Standard system, configure it, then test it using CALM. This provides tailorable Test Scripts (based on the Standard SAP processes) to lead the team from Unit testing, through system Integration Testing to User Acceptance Testing, and then all the way through to Go-Live and beyond.
 

There is also a Data Migration Cockpit to help manage the Data Migration from the old legacy system(s) to the new system.
 

It also covers the people side of the programme and Organisational Change Management. SAP provides lots of online tutorials and video’s that can be accessed by the team to self-train both themselves and the wider teams, at their own pace. These are obviously available to them for future reference.
 

As it is in SAP’s Public Cloud, SAP also upgrades the worldwide system regularly (currently every 3 months, soon to be every 6 months). Naturally, this requires the end client to use Standard SAP processes which are well documented and available online. Using the RISE methodology, the Client can also interface the SAP processes with their own off-system processes. It uses a swim-lane view so it’s easy to see who is doing what part of the process. This can then be used to set up the user roles and the access security of the system.
 
Unlike my previous implementations where I had to send out thousands of emails over the Go Live weekend, containing each user’s login credentials and individual password (using Words mail merge with an EXCEL listing), SAP now handles that for you as well, at the flick of a button!
 
Due to Covid, this programme started off working remote, then went on-site in the summer of 2021, and back to remote working before Go Live, as Covid concerns rose again.
 

But SAP in 7 months! Wow!
 
Contact me, if I can help your company achieve the same rapid success