I have just wrapped up managing the SAP S/4 HANA greenfield ERP implementation at Mizuho OSI. I believe this was my 16th SAP implementation and it has been been a great experience. We actually went live a day early and completed the project within budget. I would like to thank Lindsay Neill, Director of IT Applications at Mizuho OSI, for giving me this opportunity. I would also like to acknowledge the excellent job that KPIT did on this project as the implementation partner led by Bimal Brahmbhatt.
No matter how many times I implement SAP, I always come out of it with some lessons learned. This being my first SAP S/4 HANA greenfield implementation, was no exception.
Below are a few of these lessons learned.
1) I have heard that it would be difficult dealing with SAP HEC (HANA Enterprise Cloud) hosting service. Thankfully this was not the case. As with most hosting partners as long as you submit tickets, the work gets done quickly. HEC also dedicated a representative to help guide us through the proper ticket coding.
2) The BP (Business Partner) transaction is a one-stop-shop for maintaining all business partners (customers, vendors, etc,). At first I thought this was great, because it shows that the module silos at SAP actually got together an agreed on something. But, we soon found that does not have sufficient authorization objects to properly segregate the maintenance of customer, vendors, contacts, and employees (as vendors for paying expenses). SAP recommends having centralized master data maintenance model rather than a distributed model. This may work for some companies, but many companies will have to either change their model or live with a monitoring / detective control rather than a preventative control.
3) I always recommend starting data migration efforts early in the project. In this project, there was a lot of data transformation even though the company was migrating from ECC to S/4 HANA. I hate to admit that we were caught off guard on this project partly due to the data structure changes and partly due to the data cleansing effort. We were able to go-live on time, but there was added effort and stress that could have been avoided if we had dedicated resources to data migration activities.
4) The security roles had to be re-developed mostly because the company wanted to tighter security than they had in ECC. We should have started on the effort sooner and had the users test it more thoroughly during UAT. Most of the post go-live issues were access issues, but they were resolved quickly during hyper care.
We managed this project using an agile-like project management methodology. It was similar to SAP Activate, but I added some things I picked up working on Salesforce ERP implementations and luckily KPIT also wanted to use an Agile-like approach. We completed the project in 6 sprints followed by 2 mock cut-overs which each led into UAT (user acceptance testing) sessions.
Over all, I am very happy with this successful SAP S/4 HANA implementation and I am proud to have been a part of this project.
Dan Raven
Raven Business Practice, LLC.
dan.raven@ravenbp.com
http://www.ravenbp.com
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