In our release party last week (Business Flows for Process Driven SAP HANA) one breakout session focussed on the ‘Discover & Prepare’ Phase of the SAP Activate methodology. I was joined by Christian Reiter (msg treobis) and Dr. Ike Allen (bpExperts). We agreed that the biggest challenge during this phase is setting the various aspects of your initiative into a structured business related context.

In a ‘top-down’ approach these elements are

• Company Strategy and Business Drivers
• Operating models
• Enterprise Structures and principal designs (Hub-Spoke Production/Warehousing/Sales, Centralized Purchasing)

Ascending ‘bottom-up’ you may have existing documentation on

• Processes and
• System capabilities (Legacy SAP & non-SAP Systems)

Additionally SAP provides a lot of ‘food for thought’ by providing

• SAP HANA capabilities
• SAP Best Practices (Scope items)

Business Flows sets all these elements into a joint business context using it’s E2E architecture. The framework is compatible with SAP’s Activate methodology and SAP Solution Manager Structures such as SAP’s model companies, SAP Best Practices & Scope Items and Process Steps libraries.

If additionally, you already analyzed your SAP R/3 landscape you may have gained a good understanding of how your business currently uses their ERP but the questions relating to the approach (‘brown’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’ or ‘blue’ field) can’t just be answered from a technical perspective but they become part of the business case.

 

Concerning the analysis of existing systems we therefore see the necessity to put the results into a business context

• System usage (transactions, reports)
• Business roles/authorizations
• Developments (‘Z transactions’, user-exits, reports)
• Performance metrics

We believe that being able to offer a technical ‘redocumentation’ (combining the technical analysis with mapping to business processes) is highly beneficial for an SAP HANA initiative. Therefore we are proud to announce that we are now partnering with msg treorbis - the market leader in technical redocumentation with their product msgFIT.

In combination we can now accelerate the prepare phase substantially by providing the best of the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approach in a consistent framework. An additional value of the partnership is that jointly we are capable of providing the content in various BPM platforms (ARIS, Aeneis and Signavio) as well as the SAP Solution Manager.
Looking at the work packages of our Business Flows for Process Driven SAP methodology (which is closely aligned to the SAP Activate methodology) as depicted in the following figure we have marked which benefit strongly from the reference content and results of the discover phase.

Copyright by bpExperts