Let’s imagine that you’d been assigned a project, the very next instinct that strikes your mind is all about the management and execution of the project, isn’t it?

Each one of us is a project manager in our very own way, right from framing deadlines and maintaining the skill of time management in our day-to-day activities we all do manage and execute various tasks in our lives.

On that note, ever wondered what managing the SAP projects for various organizations seems like, the challenges project managers face when managing projects for both internal and external clients, and the difficulties in planning your workflows, resources, and timelines for a million-dollar SAP project!

To assist SAP project managers around the world in completing projects with simplicity and clarity, SAP has developed SAP Activate. The common misconception among the SAP Community is the idea of thinking that the SAP Activate is just a project management methodology, well to make it clear it’s much more than that.

The 3 Elements of SAP Activate framework:

The SAP Activate is a combination of three prime elements,

• SAP Best Practices
• Guided Configurations
• SAP Activate Methodology

When these 3 pillars are taken together, project managers, consultants, and even business end users can be empowered to understand the SAP solution that is used to address their business pain points. Let’s look at each one of them in detail.

SAP Best Practices

With its 45+ years of widely recognized experience and knowledge in the industry, SAP has produced business processes that are ready to use and have been SAP S/HANA-optimized. You can view these business processes in the Best Practice Explorer (BPX) which offers a standardized set of assets with knowledge of business processes.

These assets are available with offline downloadable links on SAP BPX and are widely classified into general documents, delivery and positioning, and implementation for easy access. It consists of best practices for the extension of the current processes with the customer’s own processes through migration, extensibility, and integration. In the form of business process flows, roles and responsibilities, and common test scripts that double as user manuals, the Best Practice Explorer gives consultants and clients access to all best practices across LoBs (Lines of Business).

Guided Configuration

The guided configurations, one which makes it simpler for consultants and clients to configure their SAP systems, make up the second component of the SAP Activate framework. In order to standardize best practices across industries, SAP is working to make them global. SAP gives users access to pre-built configurations that can be used to carry out business processes in line with the same.

Additionally, SAP offers a self-service configuration user interface for customer-specific requirements. The guided configuration also provides content lifecycle management capabilities, which essentially involve reviewing the configuration settings and making sure that they are not affected by new versions of best practices or processes that are included in the upcoming release of the SAP solution. In the cloud, where the release cycle is much more condensed, this is extremely essential.

For example, each quarter, the Public Cloud/Multi-tenant Edition of SAP S/4HANA Cloud introduces new features and functionalities. One optional and one required upgrade is included with the Private Cloud/Single-tenant edition of SAP S/4HANA Cloud each year.

A yearly upgrade is given to on-premises SAP S/4HANA. The rate of upgrades is higher for the cloud-based SAP S/4HANA versions than for the on-premises versions, so it’s crucial to use the guided configuration tools that SAP provides to ensure standardization.

SAP Activate Methodology

The SAP Activate methodology employs an iterative process to continually deliver and improve in order to improve the quality and success of the project. By offering accelerators that make it simpler to complete a task for a deliverable and workstreams that revolves across different phases, the SAP Activate Methodology is a modular and agile framework that assists project teams with the detailed steps that must be delivered in each phase through the project.

The phases involved in the SAP Activate Methodology are: 

• Discover
• Prepare
• Explore
• Realize
• Deploy
• Run

The SAP Activate methodology incorporates the execution of the project’s roadmap respective to each of the above phases through the SAP Roadmap viewer tool. According to the SAP Solution in the statement, the SAP Roadmap Viewer has 15 distinct SAP Activate methodologies  and has classified them into the following:

• General
• SAP Activate Methodology – New Cloud Implementations (Public Cloud-General)
• SAP Activate Methodology – Business Suite and On-Premises- Agile and Waterfall
• Solution Specific
• SAP Activate Methodology – SAP S/4HANA Cloud
• SAP Activate Methodology  – SAP S/4HANA Cloud(extended edition)
• SAP Activate Methodology – SuccessFactors
• SAP Activate Methodology – SAP Service Cloud Roadmap
• SAP Activate Methodology – SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
• SAP Activate Methodology – Intelligent Spend Management Roadmap
• SAP Activate Methodology – SAP Analytics Cloud
• SAP Activate Methodology – The Intelligent Enterprise
• SAP Activate Methodology – SAP Sales Cloud Roadmap
• SAP Activate Methodology – Transition to SAP S/4HANA
• SAP Activate Methodology – Transition to SAP BW/4HANA
• SAP Activate Methodology -SAP S/4HANA Upgrade and Product Integration Roadmap
• SAP Activate methodology – S/4HANA Central Finance

To Conclude

The SAP Activate combines SAP Best Practices, guided configuration, and methodology to allow for smart building and simple operation. The freedom to run quickly with Fiori UX, a lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), and continuous innovation with built-in modifiability to fit different needs is provided by SAP Activate Framework.

Hope this blog would be helpful, moving forward we’ll be discussing the phases of activate methodology.

Until then stay tuned and do contact our experts for further queries!