Blog by Ray Gardner
Focusing on your core business capabilities and knowing when to invest in true business differentiation is often the guiding principle behind successful business transformation programs. An essential component of this is simplifying your business processes with the goal of adopting common and efficient processes consistently across the enterprise.
The majority of these simplified processes should to be met by standard software, yet still be able to be refined or flexed over time to meet evolving business needs. Indeed, even processes that offer a company its unique competitive advantage must be efficient and well-designed. During transformations, a process simplification approach enables you to eliminate unnecessary steps and build a common core, which will create a foundation on which to build effective business solutions.
Sounds simple, right?
However, when starting projects companies are often unclear on how to really approach and achieve process simplification, including where this fits into a Best Practices or a Clean Core approach.
This blog will explore two key aspects of the process simplification approach for companies preparing to deploy or upgrade to SAP S/4HANA. Failure to complete these basic steps at the start of the project can fundamentally compromise the long-term viability of a clean core approach and negatively impact any project’s long-term success.
Step 1 - Understand your processes
Understanding your processes does not mean you need to embark on a large as-is analysis, detailed process decomposition exercises or in-depth requirements led design work. The essential task here is to record what your main business capabilities are and to identify the top twenty to thirty high-level integrated processes present within your company.
Process simplification includes a classic “people, process and system” focus, yet new tools enable greater, often AI led, insights into your own real business processes. Tools such SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX can support this automated discovery and provide both a framework and visualization of these processes, enabling both presentation and review of the findings by business and technical users. HCLTech also has a proven approach to process simplification used on many projects, which is constantly being refined as this is a rapidly developing area of both project work and tooling.
A short blog cannot do justice to what can be achieved today. However, we recommend using a proven approach and these newer, automated tools to rapidly gain a comprehensive overview based on your specific business context and your systems use.
Step 2 - Maximise how you use best practice process flows
SAP’s Best Practices have clear and detailed process flows, with lanes that align to typical business users’ roles. Identifying your high-level integrated processes helps to show how these fit across SAP’s Best Practices and the company’s own core business process and bring this to life for your users. Adding in your own business context is also essential, to show for example how other surrounding systems are integrated for supporting processing steps.
These SAP processes can then be demonstrated from a working SAP S/4HANA system so the business can understand and confirm adoption of the newly proposed simplified process. The business should be encouraged to only raise critical issues (as possible gaps) from this fit-to-standard review.
SAP’s Readiness Check reports will help in this area, as they highlight process simplifications and recommendations on adoption of new processes or features. At HCLTech we include this, and more, into our early SAP S/4HANA readiness approach (called HCLTech Elevate SAP Vision-to-Value Framework), our extended project Activate methodology (in our Activate+ approach) and also in our Best Practices Demonstration systems with industry variants (called Base90 since they provide a 90% ready solution to run early fit-to-standard workshops on).
Which brings us back to the differentiated processes. These can still be based on supplied Best Practices, with attention focused only on a smaller group of truly differentiating sub-steps. Additionally, HCLTech Base90 solutions include common industry-specific solutions to address specialized and differentiating business requirements.
In conclusion
Getting process simplification right is a critical early project task, HCLTech can help guide companies through SAP’s solutions, using proven tools, accelerators and techniques (including AI) to all help realize efficiencies and secure your long-term value and benefits from investing in SAP solutions.
If you are specifically interested new innovations around SAP delivery such Generative AI then please check out my other blogs . Feel free to contact HCLTech to see how we can assist you and specifically if we can help via our GenAI Labs or Innovation Labs.
