SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides ready-to-use business process content for core business processes in finance, human resources, sourcing and procurement, manufacturing, professional services, R& D/engeineering, sales, and the supply chain.
The figure above shows the scope information for SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2402, which you can find on the main page in the SAP Signavio Process Navigator.
These predelivered processes are supported by SAP Fiori for a role-specific, intuitive, and simple user experience (UX). In the following sections, we’ll outline all the assets that you can access in SAP Best Practices in SAP Signavio Process Navigator, including the What’s New Viewer and the release assessment and scope dependency tool.
Note: We won’t list the current scope of the SAP Best Practices content in this post; by the time you read this, the content will have been updated a few times by SAP as the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition content gets updated several times a year. We recommend that you access the content in SAP Signavio Process Navigator at https://me.sap.com/processnavigator/HomePage.
Structure of the Content
The hierarchical structure of the SAP Best Practices content starts with the solution scenario, which serves as the entity that groups together all relevant solution processes items into the line of business (LoB) groups, such as finance, sourcing and procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, and so on. 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, advanced financial operations, enterprise risk and compliance, and so on.
You can navigate the content in SAP Signavio Process Navigator by expanding the
selected group and subgroups in the Line of Business section to access specific Solution Processes, as shown in the next figure. Note that the updated solution processes are highlighted with the Update label in the listing.
In addition, the solution scenario contains the description of the content in the
Description section and additional accelerators that you can see at the bottom of the figure. This information is provided to help you understand the solution scope, organizational structure, chart of accounts, key master data that is delivered in the preconfigured solution, and additional details about the preconfigured solution. You can find these assets in the Accelerators tab in SAP Signavio Process Navigator.
The key assets and resources on the Accelerators tab are as follows:
- The What's New section contains the following:
- Release assessment discovery tool
- SAP Road Map Explorer
- What's new
- What's new: specifically for deprecated solution processes
- The Getting Started section contains the following:
- Availability and dependencies of scope items
- Access to trial edition of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
- Highlights of various capabilities such as analytics, finance, product compliance, and so on
- Link to SAP Cloud ALM
- Note on language availability
- The Implementation section contains the following:
- Application programming interfaces (APIs) on SAP Help
- Link to business-driven configuration questionnaires
- List of configuration apps
- Guidance for creation of your own master data
- Accelerator with fiscal year variants
- Preparation steps to test public section management in the starter system
- Links to SAP Activate methodology in the Roadmap Viewer
- The End-User Information section contains the following:
- Accelerator with an overview of apps or transactions in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition system and how they can be mapped to solution activities that are described by solution processes
- Task tutorials
- The Reference section contains the following:
- Chart of accounts
- Financial statement items
- Forms
- Master data overview
- Organizational data overview
- Preconfigured general ledger account master data for YCOA (global)
- Preconfigured general ledger account master data for YCOA (local)
- Preconfigured tax codes
This list is based on the information delivered with release 2402 of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition; assets may change in future releases.
Now let’s look at the individual solution process and the information and assets that are available to you in SAP Signavio Process Navigator. Each solution process (also referred to as a scope item) comes with a diagram showing the solution process flow; accelerators providing assets such as setup instructions, task tutorial, and test script that we’ll discuss later; and a description of the functionality the scope item delivers, including the business benefits. Additionally, the solution process details provide additional information such as assignment to a solution component(s), country/regional relevance, industry relevance, and list of solution capabilities. The figure below also shows the solution process flow.
This figure displays the assigned accelerators, solution process description, a list of key process flows, and the key business benefits.
SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is available in multiple languages for many markets. You can find the latest information about country/region and language availability in SAP Note 3369272 at https://me.sap.com/notes/3369272/E.
SAP Best Practices for Hybrid Deployment
In addition to SAP Best Practices for deployment of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, you can also access content for hybrid (or two-tier) deployment in SAP Signavio Process Navigator. You can find these solution scenarios by accessing the main page and using the search box to search for “Two-tier”, as shown in the next figure. Then, select the latest release, and access the content by clicking on the blue text. In our case, we’ll access the 2402 version.
Once you access the solution scenario for Two-Tier ERP, you can review all the supported solution processes for deploying a hybrid ERP solution, as shown here.
You can see that the structure of the content follows the same model we’ve discussed for the SAP Best Practices SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition solution scenario.
What's New Viewer
You should also frequently review the information about new, updated, and deprecated scope items in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition in the What’s New Viewer that you can find in the SAP Help Portal at http://help.sap.com. Select the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition entry on the main page in the Enterprise Resource Planning section, 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 Tool for SAP S/4HANA Cloud
The release assessment and scope dependency tool for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is a simple, self-learning tool for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers. This tool enables the ease of consumption and adoption of impacts, improvements, and innovations rolled out with each release and upgrade.
The tool presents to customers a tailor-made list of deleted, deprecated, new, and
changed objects such as apps, APIs, core data services (CDS) views, scope items, and so on for each SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition release, and continuous delivery. This list is filtered based on the customer’s used and activated scope, which means that the customers only see the changes relevant to them and not the entire list.
The figure below shows the Release Assessment and Scope Dependency for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition landing page, which helps you to better understand the impact of the new release or feature delivery of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and assess the potential new capabilities that can be activated in your solution. You can access the tool at www.sap.com/rasd.
SAP customers can access the tool via their customer S-user IDs. This tool is free for all customers who have implemented SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The release assessment and scope dependency tool is also available in six other languages besides English (German, Japanese, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese). The figure above gives a view of the landing page of the application providing an overview of the changed, updated, and deleted objects in specific releases of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
The release assessment and scope dependency tool is divided into five tabs, each consisting of several tiles. Let’s walk through the tabs and tiles:
- Used Objects: This tab provides an overview of the changes introduced in the release for the objects used in the customer system. The following information is available on the tab:
- Deleted/deprecated extensibility objects: Displays all extensibility objects that are deleted/deprecated based on the customer's usage.
- Where-used list for deletions and deprecations: Shows custom CDS views and apps impacted by deleted business catalogs and CDS views.
- Deleted/deprecated business catalogs and renamed app titles: Contains information related to deleted/deprecated business catalogs along with their successors based on the customer's usage. This tile also contains information on renamed app titles along with their current name and changed name.
- Applications: Contains information on delete/deprecated applications, along with new/changed/must-know information related to applications.
- Changed extensibility objects: Displays all extensibility objects that are changed based on the customer's usage.
- Used Scope Items: This tab displays data filtered based on used scope items by the customer. You can find the following information on this tab:
- Scope item impact: Displays scope items by their impact sorted in descending order.
- Personalized What's New Viewer: Displays the What's New Viewer filtered by the usage of solution processes by the logged-in customer.
- New features: Filters features based on category.
- Changes: Filters based on LoBs.
- Activated Scope Items: This tab displays data filtered based on the customer’s activated scope items. You can see an example of the tab information in the next figure. The tab contains the information listed in the Used Scope Items tab. In addition to that information, this tab also displays the localization updates, which list all the entries that are linked to the regions localized for the customer.
- Complete What's New Information: This tab displays the entire data set of the What’s New Viewer that we’ve discussed in the previous section. In addition to the information displayed under the Activated Scope Items tab, this tab also displays UI/UX Updates information, which lists all the changes related to the SAP Fiori UX technology.
- Successor Companion: This tab provides additional information for the customer, including the following data points:
- Scope item impact: Provides you with a bird’s-eye view of a customer’s scope item implementation statistics. This compares the used scope item to the activated scope item and gives the customer information on what percentage of scope items are used compared to the scope items that are activated in the system.
- Deprecation coverage: Identifies the deprecated attributes/objects from previous releases based on their usage metrics from the past three months and recommends their respective successors, facilitating a smooth transition for customers.
Additional features that customers can access in the application are as follows:
- CDS Comparator: Compares a deprecated CDS view with its successor and provides a side-by-side comparison.
- SAP Cloud ALM Integration: Allows you to download deletions and deprecations as a spreadsheet and then upload them to SAP Cloud ALM to create project tasks.
- Downloads: Allows you to download all cards in the release assessment and scope dependency tool as spreadsheets. These spreadsheets then can be uploaded to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to view the list in the news feed.
- Release Calendar: Shows important release- and upgrade-related dates for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
Activating SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition are delivered ready to be activated in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition solution. Customers will use SAP Central Business Configuration to set up a project and activate the best practices content in the starter system. After the fit-to-standard workshops, as the project team enters the realize phase, the SAP Best Practices content will be activated in the development system, and transports will be used to move the activated processes into the test and production systems.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book SAP Activate: Project Management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA by Sven Denecken, Jan Musil, and Srivatsan Santhanam.
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