The business scenario recommendations help you to identify the most valuable digitized business scenarios – running on SAP S/4HANA – based on your current ERP usage information. This is a fantastic toolkit that allows you to derive where the best value-added changes/scenarios can be driven from.
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 in this series, feel free to reach out.
Covering SAP’s Business Scenario Recommendations. This tool is built on Spotlight by SAP. First, it’s essential to understand this Spotlight platform. The 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 S/4HANA simplifies and accelerates key business scenarios with in-memory technology. The table below shows the business scenarios in your system that could be simplified or improved and impact your business value.
Before we can jump into this tool, let’s take a moment and review the prerequisites.
- Source Release: SAP ECC 6.0 (with or without EHP)
- Apply SAP notes 2758146 and 2745851 on your productive SAP ERP system
- Execute report RC_VALUE_DISCOVERY_COLL_DATA for data collection
There are five lines of business included in the analysis
- Finance
- Sales
- Supply Chain
- Sourcing and Procurement
- Manufacturing
- Process Overview
- Other processes like HR, etc. are not included in SAP Business Scenario Recommendations.
There are four steps involved in 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 analysed, there are six steps.
Ø Implement SAP Notes 2758146 and 2745851. These notes contain data collection frameworks and business process performance metrics extraction functionality.
Ø Run the Extraction program in your Production environment. In the production run report RC_VALUE_DISCOVERY_COLL_DATA in SE38.
Ø Schedule the data collection job. This can be run immediately or scheduled as a background job.
Ø Download the collected data. Once the job has successfully run, use SE37 to download by clicking the Download Analysis Data button. Save locally to your PC or directory.
Ø 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.
Ø 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.com and 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.
This result is very comprehensive! 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.
SAP has provided tools to help your company through the 4 steps needed to lay a foundation for an SAP HANA migration. Turning to a technology partner for guidance in choosing an approach and a hosting option may provide an unbiased second opinion about migration.
