HANA migration - On the procrastination of getting your business involved

Dr. Russell Gomersall

While talking to customers preparing for their HANA journey, I often hear a commitment from the IT departments to involve the business. To a point, everyone agrees that it is inevitable. However, the question of when and how to involve the business is disputed. It is obvious that the business will have many questions, while the project management will not be ready to give answers, yet. Open points during the project inception will involve aspects such as brown vs. greenfield, budgets, duration, and approach. 

 

This often leads to procrastinating to involve the business. Sometimes, there is a 'shadow project' for preparation. This neglect of open communication frequently results in duplicate efforts with business and IT initiating parallel investigations that are hard to merge later on. 

 I suggest involving the business as early as possible. 

 Open communication is key, and identifying and involving key stakeholders from both sides will work better the earlier you join forces with them. 

 

It is advisable to set up your own 'business readiness' stream with clear objectives to gather relevant information on current strategic guidelines, operating models, and an inventory of related end-to-end scenarios and their business processes. 

 

As the basis for decisions on brown vs. greenfield, an analysis of pain points and key requirements is essential to effectively challenge the status quo and identify value drivers for the HANA initiative. 

 

Besides gathering crucial information as input for planning and early decisions, timely activation of the business will have a fundamental, positive impact on change management during your project. 

 

So, if you haven't involved your business yet, I suggest you start tomorrow and set up your first alignment. 

 

As bpExperts, this is what we focus on. Using Business Process Management as a true management methodology, we help introduce a process-centric approach, bridging the gap between business and IT, as well as between strategy and operations. 

 

We care, we act, we deliver. 

 

 

Dr. Russell Gomersall

Partner

E-Mail: russell.gomersall@bpexperts.de

Phone: +49 151 222 344 96

bpexperts.de

Why is it important to assess process maturity prior to S/4 HANA transformation?

Dr. Ikemefuna Allen

Building a good business case before embarking on an S/4 HANA transformation is crucial for several reasons. It helps ensure that the transformation aligns with the organization's broader strategic goals and objectives. It also allows you to clearly articulate how the S/4 HANA implementation will support and enhance these goals. A robust business case helps in estimating and justifying resource allocations, as well as assessing risks and quantifying expected improvements in efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. 

 

In building a business case, knowing where your operations stand in terms of maturity will give you a clear baseline against which you can measure desired improvements made through the S/4 HANA transformation. The maturity assessment will help you identify gaps in your current processes that need to be addressed. These gaps could be in data quality, process efficiency, compliance, or technology usage. The maturity assessment will reveal how well current processes are integrated with existing technology, providing a roadmap for what needs to be updated or changed in the S/4 HANA transformation. 

 

A thorough assessment that shows gaps and areas for improvement in processes can help in securing stakeholder buy-in, a critical factor in the success of any transformation project. The insights from the assessment provide concrete data and context that justify the investment. Moreover, knowing the maturity level of your processes will help you better estimate the effort and cost involved in the transformation, as gaps are identified and prioritized to focus on areas that need the most attention. 

 

The maturity assessment can highlight dependencies between processes and other business functions. Understanding these can help mitigate risks during the HANA transformation. The assessment can reveal areas where additional training or change management efforts will be required, helping you prepare your team for the upcoming changes. 

In summary, assessing process maturity is a necessity for aligning goals, mitigating risks, optimizing resource allocation, and ensuring the success of your S/4 HANA transformation. It provides a strategic and operational roadmap aligning your processes with organizational objectives. 

 

We at bpExperts can guide you through all the steps for performing a process maturity assessment by providing: 

  1. A Process Maturity survey 

  2. Advisory and support for survey respondents 

  3. Evaluation of survey results and diagnosis of process maturity 

  4. Detailing of action items and the roadmap required to achieve desired process maturity 

For inquiries on the maturity survey and how to conduct an assessment for your organization, please feel free to contact me. 

 

Dr. Ikemefuna Allen

Senior Manager

E-Mail: ikemefuna.allen@bpexperts.de

Phone: +49 162 28705 38

bpexperts.de

Insights - Business Transformation Day 2022 - Schloss Krickenbeck

Gülsüm Ucuran

On November 10, 2022, the Business Transformation Day with top Key Note speakers, insightful customer presentations, as well as interesting short presentations by selected partners (SAP SE, Software AG, msg services GmbH) took place in the beautiful premises of Schloss Krickenbeck.

This year, Mr. Russell Gomersall, one of the managing partners of bpExperts, moderated the Business Transformation Day. After a short welcome to the participants, he presented the highlights of the last 10 years of bpExperts annual events. Getting customers to network and talk together has a long tradition at bpExperts. Openly discussing each other’s business transformation journey, which methodologies and tools were applied, and most of all, how the participants have ‘managed change’ within their organization in order to sustain the ‘process driven way’. For many participants also a comfortable feeling, that they are not alone with their day-to-day struggles. Over the years many Use Cases have been the same. But the challenges and pressure that today’s business transformation initiatives are confronted with are higher than ever. The complexity of new operating models, expectations towards digitalization, the complexity of hybrid application landscapes, the growing relevance of compliance, all under time and budget constraints have a great impact on all aspects of the business transformation initiatives. The Key Notes clearly show how over the years the participants have grown to an astonishing maturity with these challenges.


Key Notes

During the morning session, the following practical presentations and insights were contributed by

  • Mr. Caspar Jans, (Software AG)
    “How does an Enterprise Management System help you steer through these challenging times?”

  • Mrs. Corinna Frank, (PHOENIX CONTACT GmbH & Co. KG),
    “ARIS in a hybrid setup. The best of both worlds?”

  • Mr. Thomas Göbel, (Evonik Superabsorber GmbH)
    “Carve-Out readiness based on an End-To-End Process house.”

  • Mr. Michael Becker, Vaillant GmbH
    “Enterprise Process Model Development within a Digital Transformation Program.”

Round Table

After the lunch break we organized a Knights of the Round Table get-together: In Schloss Krickenbeck’s infamous ‘Rittersaal’ (see pictures below), we offered multitude roundtable topics, and facilitated the subsequent discussions around the Key Notes, and additional presentations from our partners Software AG, SAP SE and msg services GmbH.

The Knights of the Round Table covered the following topics :

Many thanks therefore to all guest which made this event special by sharing their experience and thoughts and last but not least a special thanks to our great customers and partners.

Hope to meet you soon again!

Business Transformation Day - Schloss Krickenbeck

After such a great event and exclusive presentations, there was no shortage of celebrating our 10th anniversary of bpExperts. Here is a small excerpt but do not worry the rest of the photos are well sealed ;)

Process-driven Business Transformation: Achieving process, system, data, and people readiness with one methodology

Markus Wolf

A holistic readiness for transformation requires structures weaving together the areas for readiness of processes, systems, data, and people. Tying it all together into one methodology allows for project specific customization of the approach by program and project management while ensuring consistency and transparency.

The readiness idea and process focus

Processes are at the center of every business transformation. They facilitate well-structured discussions and decision making, as well as training and communication. The aim is to link the company strategy, operating models, and targets of the transformation to the to-be design, as well as required system support, and data. The intended future state and necessary adjustments are made easy to understand for various stakeholders.

Getting people to understand processes, systems and data in their daily context creates business readiness. That is what we do as Business Integrator. 

Our methodology ensures senior stakeholder buy-in and process understanding early in the transformation by covering the business drivers and operating models of their business and linking those to harmonized standard core processes. 

The readiness idea and system focus

Having established clear strategic targets broken down per process area allows process owners and experts to determine requirements and changes both on business, as well as system perspectives. Requirements can be translated directly into solution design in context with the envisioned future state of business operations.

Offering guidance along standard processes, best practice, and system expertise protects the integrity of the solution design. The amount of system customization can be limited to where it is required to achieve the targeted strategic benefits.

Early contributions and decision-making responsibilities of process owners and experts lead to in-depth understanding of targets and design, to intensive knowledge build-up within the customer organization and fosters later acceptance of changes.

The readiness idea and data focus

Data, and especially master data represent the link between the various business cases and the applicable business processes, and consequently processing within the solution design in a highly automated and digitalized world. It is hence pivotal to establish already throughout the design and transition a widely shared understanding of how data steers processes and functionality.

The readiness idea and people focus

Discussing and elaborating on business processes naturally leads to identification of impacted organizational areas, and to an early assessment of change impacts on the daily operations and on core business KPIs. It also allows for a clear location of changes, thus providing a sound basis for planning and preparation of the actual implementation of adjustments. Furthermore, the structured and interlinked documentation of change impacts enables identification of essential business and design decisions.

Over time objectives might change and adjustments to the design must be made for several reasons on all levels. We enable the orchestration of changes by efficiently documenting all transformation aspects, including business and design decisions in an interlinked and comprehensive manner.

We believe in these re-enforcing factors of our process-driven business transformation methodology.

Example – business-relevant testing

When using our process-driven business transformation methodology, test cases and test scenarios can be derived directly from the respective flows or underlying operating models, from the related business cases and further connected to the defined End-to-End processes. This already contributes to identifying the relevancy of test cases in combination with pertinent data for the users’ future daily lives. It allows testers, like business key users, to generate valuable insights both for training preparation, but also as feedback for small improvement ideas which can boost acceptance of the solution amongst affected user groups. The reporting on test status can be tailored to the needs of various stakeholder groups. The respective process owners can receive a status for their area of responsibility, like Pl2P, O2C or A2R. Business managers can be provided with details on testing progress for their relevant operating models and core business activities. Reported errors from testing, as well as improvement ideas can be reported directly to the relevant stakeholders. This makes testing results and related information more tangible.

Key messages:

The fully interconnected process-driven business transformation methodology improves understanding of relevancy of the planned transformation on individual level of all stakeholders. As a result, decision making can be accelerated and the quality of decisions can be increased, while fostering an identification with and acceptance of the transformation.

  • It is not sufficient to adress all those aspects individually; you need to tackle them in an orchestrated approach across all stakeholders and throughout the whole transition period

  • Your business transformation vision requires a managed and transparent break-down, and a translation to manifest in people, processes, systems, and data

  • The key for agility and sustainability of your transformation is the capability to coherently reciprocate along the path of intention, decision, and implementation

Call for Action

A special occasion to learn more is our Business Transformation Day on the 10th Nov. 2022. Alternatively request a free demo anytime.