SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition gets more and more recognized in the SAP Ecosystem as an ERP quick to implement in less than 5 months, that optimizes time to value for SAP customers investment in business running software – and real-life proves this is absolutely true.

This knowledge sharing I am providing in this article comes, from my 7 full years experience in customer-facing roles (lastly as SAP Product Expert), supporting sucessful implementation of S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition.

How can we consider large implementation projects? Well when series of several points of references are identified in the project scope, I propose to call this a project implementation large:

• +1,000 end users
• +20 countries
• +100 scope items
• Couple or handflul hundreds of legal entities, likely Group Reporting usage
• Some integration scenarios with other SAP or non SAP Solutions (for instance and not limited to SAP Employee Central, SAP Analytics Cloud)
• Implementation project run as a program, across a time frame of more than 5 months with several go-live waves

In addition to stick to guidance from SAP Activate Cloud methodology that should be done for any project by the way, your considering the program management practices I will present, really works well as these practices enable to drastically reduce program roll out complexity:

a- Stick to standard SAP scope across all your program scope and make this a keystone of your implementation. As early as possible in the definition of your roll-out program you should perform a mapping between customer must have requirements and current SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition functional coverage per country, which can be found in the SAP Roadmap Viewer SAP Roadmap Viewer, in availability and dependencies of scope items by country.

Another great way to vizualize functional coverage and to date SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition is the SAP Signavio Process Navigator

This mapping granularity must be country and scope item

From these investigation and from the mapping, you might come to following conclusions: one the one hand, some scope items are not available for some SAP localized countries yet, and on the other hand some countries to be implemented are not localized by SAP in S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition.

In both cases you should address found localization gaps to your SAP Representative to support you to:

• • Check SAP Public roadmap for scope items addition per country, and adjust the country roll out plan to the SAP Public roadmap, links: SAP Roadmaps ; S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition Roadmap
  • Consider using SAP possibilities for customers to create their own country solutions, for countries not localized by SAP. Currently this feature is in Early Adoption (EA) phase and named the SAP CBC Configuration Localization Tool. As this feature is still in EA and as an implementation partner, you will need to get approval by SAP to use these features, currently known conditions for approval are:
    • implementation partner has own Partner Demo System,
    • list of features and scope item list is known and accepted by the customer, please refer to SAP Note 3107866 – SAP Central Business Configuration : Configuration Localization Tool restrictions and limitations
    • an intensive investigation was performed by the implementer, on local countries requirement feasibility. Please note this is a customer local version

In this way you will optimize the roll out program scope to existing scope in the solution and to the planned additional scopes from SAP Roadmap – and by the way it is possible and easy to go live with a country, and add some functionalities some months after whenever avialable – scope item activation being done automatically by SAP

Please note that some scope items request specific licenses to be purchased, so they can be activated

b- Act locally

For SAP localized countries in scope, you will certainly implement the standard SAP solution, that will allow to run your business in these countries in a local compliant way, taking benefit of SAP localized pre-delivered content.

In cases where the country solution is tricky, consider including local advisory or local IT solution providers into the implementation program resources. In this way you will benefit of their proven expertise of local requirementes and adapted solutions. Often central implementation team doesn’t have all knowledge about local requirement of all countries in scope, especially these where the fiscal local requirements are very complex for instance.

Please review this link with SAP Certified Solution Providers by country

c- Implementation discipline

Start a go-live wave configuration (in other words Realize phase of a given set of countries to go-live at the same planned date) when the previous live countries are stabilized, meaning hyper care period is completed and there is little or no configuration in the backlog for live countries. When observed, this drastically reduces the size of configuration transports backlog, and the level of complexity of configuration transports dependencies, for customers with a 3 systems landscape

Keep the opened config transports backlog as lean as possible meaning keep the transport requests opened (not imported yet) during a short time frame. For customers with a 3 systems landscape, please review carefully this SAP Documentation 3-System Landscape and Transport Management and Transport Dependencies in order to optimize your configuration transports management during your rollout program, and take all benefit of new configuration transport manaement tool in S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition