Merry Christmas and a good start to the NEW YEAR 2021

2020 is a year that we will all remember for a long time. Familiar habits and human closeness were suddenly no longer a matter of course. Everyone has experienced some kind of restriction. And everyone is looking to the future with a certain degree of uncertainty. The year has taken many of us, personally and professionally, to our limits. We know that the past year was a challenging one for us all. Even more, we would like to thank you for the good cooperation. We have great respect for what you have achieved in this special situation. 

Christmas parties also look different this year. We would like to share with you how we celebrated Xmas at bpExperts under these special circumstances.  Like many others, we opted for a virtual party to give this year a nice ending.   

Love always, Secret Santa!

To spread a little Christmas joy Russell had the great idea of having a Secret Santa. We would like to express a special thank you to our colleague Christina who coordinated everything and randomly assigned every team member a Secret Santa. At the virtual party, the challenge was to guess who sent which gift. Like the motto: "How well do you know your colleagues?" The best guesses were made.

Everyone received a small personal gift. After the Secret Santa and get-together, everyone had the opportunity to split up into breakout rooms, play games together and compete against each other. It was a very delightful and funny Christmas party and a successful end of the year with my colleagues. Have fun looking at the photos.

I sincerely hope that next year everything will get back into a good flow and we will again find time to meet in person. Let us hope for the best... Let us tackle it together again after the holidays.  

The bpExperts team wishes you and your family a peaceful and merry Christmas and a good start to the New Year 2021.  

With best thanks and kindest regards 

Gülsüm  

Business Readiness and Change Management

How Business Readiness and Change Management guide the transformation of systems, processes, and people.

Fig. 1 Transformation of systems, processes and people

On November 26th 2020, bpExperts hosted a virtual Release Party presenting our new product, “Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP”.

The meeting was organized in two breakout sessions. The first breakout session covered the SAP Activate Phases ‘Discover’ and ‘Prepare’ and focused on the top-down E2E design as well as the bottom-up analysis of existing SAP Landscape (technical redocumentation). The second breakout session covered the phases ‘Explore’, ‘Realize’ and ‘Deploy’ and focused on “Business Readiness and Change Management”: how Business Readiness and Change Management guide the Transformation of Systems, Processes, and People. We discussed with the participants in this session how this transformation journey can be aided by individual packages in business flows, packages which build on each other in many phases of this methodology.

One question raised by our guests was related to Business Roles: “How can Business Roles and related authorizations be defined in order to meet this variety of local requirements?”

Business Roles are a key link of the process and solution design with Change Management activities. Business Roles differ from user roles and job descriptions, as they are based on the nature of the performed activities and do not refer to any department structure or HR relevant specifications of jobs. Many companies are operating in various countries and with entities of different sizes. So it is important finding the right balance in the number of business roles.

In Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP we now provide a Business Roles Library you can use as a reference. The included roles are a ‘best-of’ compilation suiting the purpose and scope of a typical SAP-related Business Transformation.

Business Roles and their related Business Processes form the basis and common terminology for change impact, training, authorization, segregation of duty (SoD) throughout the whole transformation lifecycle.

Change Impact Analysis reveals the requirements when deploying to local sites. Taking into consideration the operating models, scope of deployed processes as well as the local site structures the required Business Roles are mapped against the local situation (resources and skills) to generate the future operating model. The results need to be further processed (e.g. business readiness and training plans, authorizations) and identified issues (such as Segregation of Duty, lack of skills, re-organisational requirements) need to be addressed.

Another question raised was: “How to successfully prepare End-User training?”

One participant asked us how to avoid surprises in End User training on missing functionality, non-matching processes and poor acceptance of the solution.
We understand and emphasize that communication and expectation management need to be an integral part of any transformation initiative (all scales of projects: from process change, via tool change to large Business Transformation projects). Fundamentally we believe that the process-driven approach as represented in Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP with early and active involvement of Process Experts and/or End Users is the key to success because it helps to set the context of requirements and expectations to the overarching strategy, transformation objectives and design principles. Early involvement helps buy-in and creating a sense of ownership.

Fig. 2 Individual work packages building on each other in Explore, Realize and Deploy Phases

The common success factor to all the above mentioned is to start with Business Readiness and Change Management activities very early. During project initiation and planning phases latest in early design stages. Identification of stakeholders, Process Owners and Process Experts not just with decision power, but also with good contacts and influence within the community of affected employees is vital. The involvement of selected key players, both supportive and critical thinking is the next step. Only then, all transformation activities can be supported and lead towards successful change.

In case you want to know more about our methodology, specifically how we have woven in the aspects of Business Readiness and Change Management, please reach out to us.

Best regards

Your bpExperts Team

Top-down meets Bottom-up - How Business Flows and msgFIT helps prepare for your SAP HANA initiative

How Business Flows and msgFIT helps prepare your SAP HANA initiative

In our release party last week (Business Flows 4 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 4 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.

If you are interested in getting to know more about this unique offering please reach out to us. We’ll gladly walk you through the approach and content we offer.

Kind Regards

Russell

RELEASE PARTY - Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP - Updates

SAVE THE DATE - 26th November at 09:30 AM CET

Key Note Updates - Release Party

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"Release Party - Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP ahead!"

Finally! We have now set the agenda for our “Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP” Release Party. We will have 2 breakout sessions held via Zoom.

Breakout Room 1: Discover & Prepare

“How does a Process Driven approach help align transformation objectives with the Scope and Design of your SAP initiative?”

Breakout Room 2: Explore, Realize & Deploy

“Business Readiness and Change Management. A guided transformation of systems, processes and people.”

Due to the positive feedback we had from our Open BPM House Party we will avoid the ‘frontal-webinar’ approach but rather focus on key notes and dialog. This leaves room for an honest, practice-oriented discussion and direct exchange of experiences. So, pick a room and join the conversation which interests you most or switch anytime you feel like it!

Guest speaker at the Release Party will be Mr. Christian Reiter, from msg treorbis, our longstanding partner, friend and the best man for the job to get you FIT for your S/4HANA Transformation.

Face your Challenges! Find Inspiration!

The doors to the breakout rooms will open on 26th November 2020 at 09:30 AM CET.

What you only have to do is:

Register today to reserve your virtual place and receive all the exciting updates!

Come along and join in the discussion with all of us.  

I am looking forward to seeing familiar and new faces.

Sincerely,

Gülsüm Ucuran

Source: https://www.bpexperts.de/release-party-bf4...

RELEASE PARTY - Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP

SAVE THE DATE - 26th November at 9:30 AM CET

"Release Party - Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP ahead!"

Face your Challenges! Find Inspiration! It's time to swing into Action. Step up your SAP related Business Transformations. Starting right here. Right now.

We are thrilled to announce the Release of "Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP". We created Business Flows for Process Driven SAP as a Business Transformation methodology aligned with SAP Activate, but with the addition that it sets a more consistent context to Business Processes across the whole transformation lifecycle.

We open the doors again (virtually) and give you the chance to participate in an honest , practice-oriented discussion with like minded people who experienced the same hurdles as you.

There is something for everyone, for now, this much I can reveal.

To join, please add yourself to the guest list.

Further event details to follow.

Sincerely,

Gülsüm Ucuran