SAP Best Practices Approach

SAP Best Practices are packages provided by SAP. They encompass SAP's 35+ years of experience, design, and input from companies of all sizes and development contributions from over 36 SAP Partners. Best Practices can help customers control costs, reduce risks and drive more value from their SAP Solutions. While it is important to use SAP Best Practices for its obvious advantages, it is all the more important to select the right approach for its implementation. This blog explains what SAP Best Practices are and roadmap to select, download and implement the same.

SAP Best Practices is an offering by SAP as part of SAP Business All-in-One Solution. It leverages SAP's vast implementation expertise across various industry verticals and geographies. It provides: Pre-configured solution for SAP modules across various industry verticals Comprehensive documentation Implementation approach Ready-to-deploy integrated business solutions Let us try to understand what SAP Best Practices are? SAP Best Practices consists of three layers: Baseline Package Country Localization Industry content Baseline Package: It comprises of an approach which supports the business needs of an organization. It is a pre-configured package integrating all the SAP modules for the Core end to end business scenarios like 'Purchase to Pay', 'Order to Cash', 'Plan to Produce' etc. Country Localization: It consists of country specific scenarios and regulatory, compliance, taxes and other country specific requirements; country localization sits on the Baseline package and is seamlessly integrated Industry Content: It consists of best of Business Scenarios specific to an industry vertical to support its business functions and is seamlessly integrated with baseline package and country localization. Typically an ASAP based methodology is assumed for best practice implementation. During implementation, we need to select the appropriate building blocks from the baseline package, relevant to a country for an industry vertical. For example, we can have: Org Structure, SD, MM, FI building blocks from the Baseline Package layer US building block from the Country Localization layer Building block for wholesale industry from the Industry content layer Thus a business solution meeting the specific requirements of the company can be configured using the three Best Practices layers. Now let us explore why we need SAP Best Practices: Implementing SAP Best Practices for a Business Transformation Program results in: Significant benefits by way of time and cost savings Convenient and easy access to valuable repository of Industry Best Practices and Processes Reduction of as much as 32% in implementation time* Reduction in consulting and in-house resources of up to 50%* Lower Total Cost of Ownership (11% decrease on average over a 3-year period) * Lower maintenance costs (up to 22%)* Reduced project risks (average of 71%)*

SAP Best Practices contents Include: 1. Documentation: 2. Scenario overviews 3. Business process documentation 4. Quick Guide for prerequisites and guided activation of settings 5. Configuration Guide 6. Training material Pre-configuration: 1. Pre-configuration settings 2. Sample master data 3. Configuration documentation 4. Automation tools 5. Print forms

6. Use roles to leverage new SAP Net-Weaver Business client

*Source: www.help.sap.com Now that we have understood what SAP Best Practices are let us see the steps that need to be taken to implement the same: 1. Download: Select the appropriate deployment scenario from the SAP Best Practices documentation and download the relevant package 2. Installation: Install SAP Best Practices form the DVD along with the required country packs 3. Activation: Activate and test the pre-configured scenarios of SAP Best Practices 4. Enhance: Enhance the SAP Best Practices pre-configured scenarios with additional requirements 5. Adapt the Refine: Refine the system to meet the business requirements There could be several approached for implementing the SAP Best Practices. Based on the project requirement, any of the following four approaches for SAP Best Practices implementation can be selected. Approach A: Deploy a rapid prototype to preview and understand SAP applications and processes Approach B: Use Best Practice as a reference system to accelerate blueprinting and solution scope definition Approach C: Use Best Practice as a starting point for implementation project; 30 - 70% of business needs are met, and the rest can be flexibly added during the project Approach D: Use Best Practice for accelerated rollout of SAP to subsidiaries in different regions or industries from the parent company

So till now, we discussed about what are SAP Best Practices, why do we need SAP Best Practices and various approaches to use SAP Best Practices. Let s discuss now about -> pros and cons of each of them.

Approach A: Deploy a rapid prototype to preview and understand SAP applications and processes In this approach, all the scenarios for the Best Practice will be installed on an SAP instance and this will act as a prototype environment. The prototype environment will be used to: Determine the scope of the requirements Select the relevant scenarios Refer Best Practices master data Train the project team Study the processes Once the prototype scope is identified, it is frozen and only the selected scenarios in scope will be installed on the Development instance using the Building Block approach. Pros: 1. Rapid Prototype deployment will help the customer evaluate how the Best Practices will work in the live system before making a commitment 2. Prototype will have all the preconfigured scenarios and implementation content thus enabling the business process owners, analysts, SMEs and users to evaluate their relevance 3. Rapid prototype will enable us to expand the scope further to other process areas in the organization during realization phase Cons: 1. Prototype development and deployment before realization calls for additional effort as Best Practice scenarios need to be installed in a sandbox environment for prototype and then on the development environment for realization 2. An additional step will need to be accommodated in the implementation roadmap and may result in a minor extension to the overall timeline and added cost 3. A certain amount of discipline will need to be enforced on the user community's desire to extend the scope of the prototype to other scenarios Approach B: Use Best Practice as a reference system to accelerate blueprinting and solution scope definition In this approach, all the scenarios available for the Best Practice will be installed on a sandbox environment, which will act as a reference system. This reference environment will provide comprehensive details about how the various scenarios mapped by SAP as part of Best Practices. They will act as a reference during blueprinting and realization phase. Configurations / documentation available will be referred while doing blueprinting / realization by the implementation partner. No Best Practices will be installed on Development and subsequent environments. Pros: 1. Since this will serve as a reference system, the scenarios from the Best Practices can be emulated during actual blueprinting / realization phase 2. Only the applicable scenarios from the best practices can be picked and chosen for implementation, avoiding an overkill 3. Best Practice scenarios / configurations can be duplicated and then tweaked to accommodate customer specific Business Requirements Cons:

1. SAP Best Practices need to be installed on a sandbox initially so as to make them available for evaluation, leading to additional cost of hardware and installation. 2. Best Practices will not be directly used in solution definition however they will serve as a reference system

Approach C: Use Best Practice as a starting point for implementation project; 30 - 70% of business needs are met, and the rest can be flexibly added during the project In this approach, blueprint phase will start with Best Practices installation. Implementation partner, in consultation with business process owners will try to align most of the customer business processes to the processes defined in SAP Best Practices. Wherever there is no alignment possible, the preconfigured scenarios will be re-configured to address the customer business requirements. Pros: 1. Considerable decrease in implementation timeframe and costs, as most of the business requirements will be covered by the Best Practices 2. Most of the delivered content in Best practices, like documentation, configurations etc can be utilized significantly reducing the cost and efforts. Cons: 1. Customer Business needs to align its processes to the SAP Best practices offering little flexibility to save cost and time 2. In cases where is a misalignment, this approach may involve Business process Reengineering to align processes to Best Practices resulting in additional change management exercise. Works best in cases where the setup is new and business processes are yet to be defined 3. If misalignment is big huge efforts are involved in realignment, not to mention the wasted initial configuration effort, which may not be used, Approach D: Use Best Practice for accelerated rollout of SAP to subsidiaries in different regions or industries from the parent company This approach is relevant in the case where the subsidiaries have more or less identical business processes, so that it is possible to have an accelerated roll-out in different regions using the available SAP Best Practices. This approach will not be relevant in the case where there is Global Solution definition which will be implemented across all its subsidiaries. Pros: 1. Considerable decrease in rollouts timeframe as most of the business requirements will be covered by the Best Practices itself 2. Most of the readymade content in form of documentation, configurations etc can be utilized Cons: 1. Subsidiaries need to have more or less similar type of business processes 2. This type of situation is highly improbable in case of customers where the subsidiaries belong to different countries and have different set to statutory / business / legal requirements