I wanted to follow up my introduction to our S/4HANA Digital UX offerings with some detailed steps on how we have been successful with our customers in this space. There’s 4 steps that I see as key to deploying any S/4HANA project successfully. Spoiler – it revolves around people and UX ;)
Step 1: Your S/4HANA Digital UX Strategy
It all starts with a well defined Digital UX strategy. Having a user experience professional engaged in the planning phases of a net new S/4 project is key. What’s in scope? What users are impacted? Is there a step by step deployment plan or Big Bang delivery approach to S/4 being considered? Is there a business change also happening? What business processes are impacted and/or changed in S/4HANA? What are the companies digital transformation goals and how can SAP functionality impact these? A Mindset SAP S/4 UX Strategy engagement will help answer these questions and more.
Each S/4HANA deployment customer may have different answers to many of the questions above, but if they’re not asked early on the success of the program will be at risk. The answers rely on the detailed analysis that needs to be done during a Mindset SAP S/4HANA UX Strategy engagement. This engagement will look and analyze the many different areas of your business that will run on S/4 and create a plan to deliver engaging UX experiences within those areas. This engagement would typically start during the planning phases of a S/4HANA project so that all of the outputs can be put to use during the initial scoping and process workshops that will occur and is usually completed within 4 weeks.
We can tailor the delivery of this advisory to what matters most to you. Perhaps it is architecture, end user involvement, use cases & best practices, decision trees, and/or where do we start!?
Step 2: A UX Implementation Team
Knowing what’s available within SAP Fiori and how to turn it on is only the tip of the iceberg when looking at how you will implement an entirely new User Experience to your end users. During a S/4HANA implementation, functional workshops are key to knowing what is possible, what is needed, when it is needed, and what might happen if I can’t do this in the future. We’ve come up with a proven process to discover, document, and deliver this. Taking pieces from the SAP Activate Methodology, Design Thinking, and just what simply makes sense, this process aims to see how much of your business can/should run on standard SAP S/4HANA and what gaps/needs there are outside of that. We all know that the optimal business process doesn’t always = SAP Process. We take a very functional area/user role focused approach to this. Real end user experience is exactly that. It happens at the individual user’s level. The experience is different for transactional processing, to function management, and the system/tools used need to be designed and implemented as such.
Sidenote: This is an area I have a lot of personal passion about. Prior to re-joining the consulting side of SAP, I was a full time internal SAP IT employee going through a few SAP RDS deployments. (Fun fact, there was nothing rapid about it back then :) ) Functional workshops were the least favorite part for anyone on the team. Business or IT, we all had a great disdain for the dreaded “Functional Workshop”. I’m here to say that I learned a ton from that time in my career, and I promised myself that any future workshop led by myself or a team I was involved in, would be one of collaboration and fun for all! Please contact me more about this area. I have a ton to share that doesn’t fit in this blog post, and in fact it will perhaps be a blog post in the future on its own.
Step 3: Configuring SAP Fiori Launchpad
In SAP S/4HANA, we recommend using the SAP Fiori Launchpad if your end users are very involved in the SAP Landscape during their day to day jobs. Users should no longer need to know what transaction codes, z-tables, programs, etc.. they need to run to get their work done. The Fiori Launchpad and end user navigation experience is meant to eliminate the hassle of this non-value add activity. This activity may seem a bit mundane on the surface, however strategically designing, configuring, customizing, and branding your SAP Fiori Launchpad is not a task to be overlooked. The launchpad is the first thing users will see when they try to use the system. If there’s a place you want to make a good impression out of the gate, it’s here!
Our SAP S/4HANA Fiori Launchpad configuration offering takes all of these areas into account. We find that most of the time, SAP implementations come with a certain level of job/role changes. There are usually organizational effectiveness experts involved in helping SAP program project teams structure who will be responsible for what work in the future. It’s working closely with this team and a SAP security team that helps us be able to deliver a successful SAP Fiori Launchpad to our customers. Not only this, but one of the most overlooked areas of Fiori Launchpad is consistent branding and design. If you’ve learned nothing about Mindset so far, take this away. Mindset is design-led from start to finish. Always have been and always will be. It’s our core. We speak about it…a lot! :) When it comes to Fiori Launchpad, the launchpad defines your company’s SAP experience in S/4. If it’s haphazardly put together, what does that say about the applications and processes that are in place underneath it? During this phase of the project, Mindset designers will create SAP Fiori themes that help to enforce your internal company branding. We want employees to come to work and enjoy logging into SAP, seeing the right information at the right time at their fingertips. That’s not something I could’ve said was even a possibility 5 years ago!
Step 4: Agile Development and Delivery
Now that we’ve identified what standard applications we can use out of the box, what extensions need to be made, and what custom applications need to be developed, it’s time to deliver them. This is exactly what we’ve been doing longer than almost anyone else. Before there was a Fiori, SMP, SAP Cloud anything…I could go on…we were developing applications in an agile fashion for fortune 500’s in the Twin Cities. Our design thinking to agile development model has been successful for us for the past 5+ years, which is why we’re now expanding it to include even more. Click here to check out our new DevOps offering.
Within our S/4HANA development and delivery offering, we use the artifacts created by the UX implementation team, turn those into user stories with detailed acceptance criteria, prioritize with a product owner, and deliver in iterative 2 week sprints of UI/Backend development. You see deploy-able features every 2 weeks that can move directly into production.
As always, please share your thoughts, opinions, and any other comments below! And, if you want to talk more about UX in S/4, please book time with me at Sapphire next week and visit our Mindset IoT with S/4 experience at booth 1642!
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