The choice has been made: you want to move to S/4HANA Cloud. But then come the questions: How do I handle this? How do I make sure business just keeps going? That sales don’t suffer? Change is resistance, but how do I minimize my employees’ resistance and actually encourage them to accept and move with the change? To answer these questions, we distinguish 3 phases when moving to S/4HANA Cloud: Discovering, Moving Smart and Walking Ahead. Each phase occupies an essential place in achieving successful digitization and standardization of your business processes using S/4HANA Cloud. In this blog, we dive deeper into these phases.
Phase 1: Discovering your smart move
Without Discovering phase no success. That is our belief. Once the decision of transforming to S/4HANA Cloud is made, many organizations want to get started quickly. They see the transition as an IT project, make the IT department responsible and wait until they get the signal that the new system is live so that everyone can start working with it and the benefits can be reaped immediately. If only it were that easy.
S/4HANA Cloud works from more than 800 best practices, offers a lot of functionality and is one of the most intelligent systems ever. This makes it invaluable to an organization, but the corollary is also that moving to this system, requires more than a technological approach.
For the implementation to be successful, it is essential to have thought carefully about the implementation route. What are the results you expect to achieve by moving to S/4HANA Cloud? How will you set up the implementation? Which processes of the 800 best practices are relevant to your organization? What exceptions do you want to make to that? Above all, take the time to work with employees to formulate answers to these and other questions.
For this purpose, we from Quinso developed the Quinso Digital Discovery Assessment, in which everything comes together and from which an improvement recommendation emerges for the entire supply chain of your organization, from purchasing to sales and from topfloor to shopfloor.
Phase 2: Moving Smart to SAP S/4HANA
The Moving Smart phase involves the actual implementation of the software. Both from the technology and the people side. To get this phase right, we developed the Quinso Activate Methodology. A methodology with elaborated “accelerators” (accelerators) that ensure accelerated implementation. In which work is done in short-term sprints, achieving results each week and making continual adjustments until the end result is in place. Change management also gets a lot of attention during the Moving Smart phase. In practice, we have found that many organizations often think too easily about this. They expect to do this themselves in between. But it is crucial to successful implementation to continually engage and think with people in the process. So as to turn “old thinking” into “new thinking.
Phase 3: Walking Ahead with SAP S/4HANA
After the software goes live, the Walking Ahead phase begins. The phase where you as an organization will increasingly benefit from the advantages of S/4HANA Cloud. After a rather strenuous implementation time, the system is live and you work according to the chosen best practices. From day one, you will reap the benefits of this as an organization. But there is more. Much more. S/4HANA Cloud offers many features that you won’t use right away. Go step-by-step to discover what else is going to help you grow your business.
3 phases and 9 golden rules
Within each phase, we have identified golden rules that lead to successful transition to S/4HANA Cloud. Rogier Leijsen, S/4HANA Cloud Project Manager and Joris Sikking, S/4HANA Cloud Solution Architect, are happy to share these 9 golden rules with you. By following the rules, you are guaranteed to successfully transition your organization to S/4HANA and maximize the benefits of this powerful system.
Want to discover what the 9 golden rules of a successful SAP S/4HANA Cloud implementation are? Then download the expert paper. This document is a valuable guide for anyone considering making the switch.
