SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides ready-to-use business process content for core business processes in finance, sourcing and procurement, manufacturing, sales, and the supply chain, as shown in this figure.
These processes are supported by SAP Fiori for a role-specific, intuitive, and simple user experience. In addition, SAP S/4HANA Cloud offers SAP Best Practices for integration with other cloud solutions, such as SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP Concur, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Ariba. The SAP Best Practices for Data Migration package complements the foundation of business processes and offers a non-disruptive, simplified transition of your data to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. In the following sections, you’ll see how you can access all these assets in SAP Best Practices Explorer.
SAP Best Practices Scope: We won’t list the current scope of the SAP Best Practices content in this post; by the time it reaches you, the content will have been updated a few times by SAP as the SAP S/4HANA Cloud content gets updated several times a year. We recommend that you access the content in SAP Best Practices Explorer at http://s-prs.co/v502715.
Structure of the Content
The hierarchical structure of the SAP Best Practices content starts with the package, which serves as the entity that groups together all relevant scope items into logical groups, such as finance, sourcing and procurement, and manufacturing. Each of these groups is then split into subgroups that correspond to business functions; for example, the finance group contains subgroups for accounting and financial close, financial operations, enterprise risk and compliance, and so on.
You can navigate the content in SAP Best Practices Explorer by expanding the selected group and subgroups in the SOLUTION SCOPE section to access a specific scope item (you can also think about a scope item as a process). In addition, the package information contains the description of the package in the Solution Information section within the Overview tab, as shown here.
The package also has several key pieces of information available that help you understand the solution scope, organizational structure, chart of accounts, key master data that is delivered in the package, and additional package-wide pre-configuration details. You can find these assets in the Accelerators tab in SAP Best Practices Explorer (see next figure).
The key assets in this area are the following:
- Scope presentation
- Availability and dependencies of scope items
- What’s new
- Task tutorials
- Organizational data overview
- Master data overview, financial accounting master data, and controlling master data
- Chart of accounts
- Preconfigured tax codes
- Account determination (global and local)
- Fiscal year variants
- Forms
- Configuration apps
- Application programming interfaces (APIs)
Now let’s take a look at the scope item information and assets that are available to you in SAP Best Practices Explorer. Each scope item comes with a Description of the functionality the scope item delivers, Business Benefits, and the Key Process Flows in the Overview tab; localization information in the Country/Region Relevance section; and detailed assets describing the functionality and capabilities of the scope item in the Details section. The key assets are the following:
- Task tutorials: These guided enablement materials for business users show the functionality in easy-to-follow tutorials. The task tutorials are available for many scope items, and the coverage continues to grow.
- Test script: Detailed scripts are provided for executing the processes in the scope item with business roles, sample data, and step-by-step execution details.
- Process flow: Business process flows show the process steps in swim lanes by business process participants.
- Set-up instructions: Additional setup of integration settings and other setup instructions are provided here for scope items that that require these instructions.
The next figure shows an example of one scope item, Requisitioning (18J), with the previously described assets. You also can choose to view the description in other languages by using the Language field selection on the screen. Note that some assets may only be available in English.
If you’re familiar with SAP Best Practices content and structure, you can use the compact view of all the assets included in the package by clicking on the SAP Best Practices Content Library link (not shown) in the Accelerators section of the package. This view allows you to access any of the SAP Best Practices content from one screen, eliminating the clicks required to navigate the hierarchical structure in SAP Best Practices Explorer. The following figure shows the SAP Best Practices—Content Library screen for the SAP S/4HANA Cloud package.
SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud are available in multiple languages and localizations for many markets. At the time of writing this book, the package is available in 43 local versions in 27 languages, as follows:
- Local versions: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong (China), Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan (China), Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States.
- Available languages: Arabic, Bahasa (Malaysia), Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish.
Always check for current coverage in the SAP Best Practices Explorer in the Scope presentation, which you can find under Accelerators in the Delivery and Positioning subsection.
Best Practices for Integration, Extensibility, and Hybrid Deployment
In addition to the business process–based SAP Best Practices, you can also access content for integration, extensibility, and hybrid (or two-tier) deployment. You can find these scope items by selecting the appropriate group in the selection box in the SOLUTION SCOPE section of the package in the Overview tab, as shown in the next figure (note the selection was made to display content for SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Integration). You also can use this selector to access the content for extensibility and hybrid deployment.
What’s New Viewer
You should also frequently review the information about new, updated, and deprecated scope items in SAP S/4HANA Cloud in the What’s New Viewer that you can find in the SAP Help Portal at http://help.sap.com. Enter “SAP S/4HANA Cloud” into the Search field, select the SAP S/4HANA Cloud entry on the right, select the What’s New tab on the next screen, and then click on the What’s New Viewer link. You can then use the search capabilities or filters to identify changed and updated scope items in the viewer.
Release Assessment and Scope Dependency Application
If you’re using SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP recommends that you use the Release Assessment and Scope Dependency application to learn about new functionality and changed functionality in each release of the product. The application provides insights and recommendations that are specific to your scope. The application provides the following information:
- Tailored scope analysis based on your activated or implemented scope
- Categorization of changes as functional, API, deprecated, core data services (CDS) views, authorizations, and Self-Service Configuration UIs (SSCUIs) for quick analysis of the impact on your existing scope
- Testing recommendations based on the degree of change and impact of change to the scope items
- Information on new scope items that you can potentially activate based on the dependencies among scope items
The next figure shows a landing page of the tool that helps you better understand the impact of the new functionality on your activated scope and assess the potential new capabilities you can activate in your solution. You can access the Release Assessment and Scope Dependency application directly from the SAP Best Practices Explorer entry screen.
Further Resources: You can review a blog post about the application at http://s-prs.co/v502716.
Activating SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud
SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud are delivered pre-activated in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution. The starter system will contain pre-activated SAP Best Practices for the entire solution, whereas the quality assurance system and production system activation will happen based on your selection of scope items after the fit-to-standard workshops.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book SAP Activate: Project Management for SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud by Sven Denecken, Jan Musil, and Srivatsan Santhanam.
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