Key Takeaways

• Leverage SAP Best Practices to accelerate implementation, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge over companies that build everything from scratch.
• Structure your SAP implementation in smaller, phased work packages that deliver tangible business value while systematically reducing risk and preventing budget overruns.
• Invest in comprehensive training programs that empower employees to confidently use the new system, reducing frustration and building self-sufficiency across your organization.
• Break free from rigid implementations by creating adaptable, future-proof customizations that can evolve with your business needs without requiring costly rebuilds.

Conduct Thorough Planning

The first step of a SAP application services implementation project is planning. Usually, when you are rushing into an SAP rollout, you have not taken the time to plan upfront, so you end up with budget overruns, project delays and substandard performance. Organizations should invest adequate time and resources into the planning phase to set their SAP program up for success.

During planning, key activities should include:

• Defining clear business goals, objectives and requirements for the SAP solution
• Documenting current business processes and identifying process improvements
• Performing a gap analysis between desired processes and SAP capabilities
• Developing a detailed project plan and realistic timeline
• Establishing governance processes and structures
• Creating a training strategy and end-user education plan
• Budgeting adequately for software, hardware, consulting and internal resources

Taking the time to thoroughly plan all aspects of an SAP implementation results in smoother rollouts, better adoption, and increased return on investment from the software.

Manage Organizational Change

Implementing an enterprise-wide software solution like SAP requires significant organizational change across people, processes and technology. Many SAP projects fail because companies underestimate the disruptive nature of these changes.

To drive the adoption and acceptance of the new SAP systems, organizations should focus on effective organizational change management. This involves:

• Gaining executive sponsorship and appointing a senior-level project sponsor
• Establishing robust governance and project management protocols
• Communicating early and often about the coming changes
• Identifying change agents throughout the business to promote engagement
• Providing comprehensive end-user training on new processes
• Developing incentives and reinforcement mechanisms for adopting the system
• Creating feedback channels for addressing employee questions and concerns

By proactively managing the human aspects of an SAP rollout, companies can mitigate resistance and smooth the transition.

Leverage SAP Best Practices

SAP Best Practices are pre-configured templates and documentation to speed up implementations by providing tested standards and processes. Using SAP Best Practices allows organizations to save tremendous time and effort that would otherwise be spent developing custom solutions from scratch.

The Best Practice content is available for many common business scenarios across industries and lines of business. Best Practices do not cover all unique business requirements, but they are a good place to start, which can be further customized as necessary.

Key benefits from leveraging SAP Best Practices include:

• Accelerated implementation based on proven configurations
• Reduced risk and minimized disruption to business operations
• The lower total cost of implementation
• Improved application consistency and stability
• On-going enhancement and optimization by SAP

Organizations should always review SAP Best Practices first when implementing new capabilities and only build custom when there is a unique business need.

Take an Agile, Phased Approach

Given the scope and complexity of most SAP projects, tackling everything in a single, massive rollout is often unrealistic and extremely risky. Organizations are much more likely to succeed with an agile, phased implementation approach.

With phasing, SAP capabilities are broken down into discrete work packages that deliver tangible business value. Each phase focuses on a specific functional area, line of business or site and has its own budget, timeline and resources. Shorter, successive deployments allow the organization to absorb smaller doses of change.

A phased approach provides many advantages, including:

• Realizing rapid wins and return on investment from early phases
• Testing integration and user adoption on smaller scales
• Identifying process and data issues earlier before they propagate
• Adjusting training and communications to meet emerging needs
• Maintaining flexibility to respond to shifting business priorities
• Controlling costs and minimizing sunk expenses if future phases are canceled

While the overall project may take longer, phased SAP implementations significantly reduce risk and are much more likely to achieve success.

Invest in Training and Knowledge Transfer

Lack of training is one of the most common reasons SAP projects fail to achieve their expected benefits. Employees across the organization must learn new processes, applications, and technologies. Without proper training, they will struggle to use the system effectively to perform their daily responsibilities.

Organizations must invest in comprehensive SAP training initiatives covering:

• Basic system navigation and transaction skills
• Role-based process and task-level training
• Post-go-live proficiency development and support
• Ongoing learning opportunities as enhancements are made

End-user training is equally important as knowledge transfer from external consultants to internal staff. Organizations should concentrate on effective knowledge sharing and retention during an SAP program to build self-sufficiency. The hands-on experience of operating and enhancing the SAP landscape is absorbed by internal teams as they take in external experts to transfer SAP and industry best practices.

To sustain their SAP investments over the long run, organizations must make proper resourcing for training and knowledge transfer. These initiatives cement adoption and business process transformation.

Manage Data Migration Carefully

For most SAP projects, large volumes of data must be moved from legacy systems into the new SAP solutions. How this complex data migration is managed can make or break implementation success. Without clean, accurate data properly converted and loaded, business processes can grind to a halt.

From planning through execution, disciplined processes and governance should guide the data migration workstream. Key success factors include:

• Analyzing data and cleansing issues early in legacy systems
• Mapping data elements from source to target structures
• Developing standardized data-loading templates and procedures
• Performing incremental data mock migrations to test procedures
• Establishing rigorous validation protocols to ensure data quality
• Developing fallback processes and plans to address errors
• Carefully scheduling final data conversions during go-live to minimize downtime

Master data elements like customers, materials, and suppliers require special attention, as corrupt records can block critical business processes. With careful planning and execution, organizations can migrate their data to SAP without major disruptions.

Define Support Processes & Sustainment Plans

Once an SAP solution is live, the job is not done. Organizations must develop strong support structures and sustainment plans to ensure long-term user adoption and maximize return on investment.

When problems arise, there should be IT support teams to assist with technical assistance and application troubleshooting. During transactions, business process experts should address questions about new workflows or exceptions. A growing pain that a company may face is filling knowledge gaps through refresher training and how-to guides.

It should be clear how user issues are routed to the appropriate domain experts. Support teams can continually survey and have feedback channels to identify recurring problems and opportunities to simplify or simplify processes.

From a system perspective, organizations must actively maintain the health of SAP environments through activities like patch management, infrastructure maintenance, and periodic upgrades. Activating newer capabilities or optimizing configurations should also facilitate continuous process improvements.

By proactively managing and enhancing SAP solutions over time, organizations can increase adoption, business agility, and, ultimately, value.

Key SAP Customization Best Practices

While SAP systems are highly configurable to address unique business needs, customizations increase overall project complexity and long-term TCO. Organizations should always carefully weigh custom builds vs. standard SAP functionality. When customization is necessary, following best practices is critical.

Limit Customizations through Effective Requirements Management

The first step is gathering comprehensive yet realistic business requirements and properly setting executive expectations of what is configurable vs. custom-built in SAP. By detailing essential vs. nice-to-have capabilities upfront, organizations can determine if out-of-the-box SAP can address core needs before exploring customizations. Cross-functional workshops help align stakeholders on required functionality while balancing complex tradeoffs.

Create Design Specifications and Prototypes

Prior to any configuration or development work, organizations should invest time upfront in designing and prototyping solutions. This involves defining technical and functional specifications, data structures, UI designs, workflows, and integration touchpoints. Blueprints, mockups and sandboxes can simulate custom solutions prior to actual build. Walkthroughs with business users gather feedback to refine approaches. The detailed design prevents unnecessary and costly rework down the road.

Establish Customization Governance Procedures

Formal governance processes should manage the approval and prioritization of customization requests. A business case analysis should document what standard functionality does not address the needed capability and why configuration changes are not sufficient. Cross-functional teams should then assess the request based on feasibility, costs, resources, security impacts and other considerations before approving. This ensures that customizations align with real business needs and goals.

Develop in Isolated Custom Code Environments

Development teams should create custom objects, fields, code and workflows in isolated “sandboxes” separate from core SAP environments. This prevents experimental programming activities from corrupting baseline configurations that impact end users. Unit and integration testing in dedicated environments provides quality assurance before implementing changes in production systems.

Extensive Testing is Crucial

Customizations, even the smallest or most contained, can have great reach on integrated processes and data in large, complex SAP environments. Defects easily slip into production unless they are tested properly. Consequently, organizations have to go through comprehensive testing, such as individual unit tests, end-to-end process tests, touch system integration testing, scale performance testing, user acceptance testing, and data validation. To fully simulate live usage conditions, the testing should occur in replicas of real-world production environments.

Maintain Clear Documentation

All aspects of the custom solutions must have technical documentation that is updated as changes happen. This includes functional specifications, technical designs, configuration/code, workflows, interfaces, data mappings, testing protocols, operational procedures, support processes and so on. By virtue of personnel turnover, custom solutions knowledge dissipates without further documentation, which in turn raises maintenance costs and the threat of system instability (unavailability) in the medium through long term.

Manage Dependencies and Integration Touchpoints

Even the simplest customization can impact numerous upstream or downstream processes and systems. Development teams must maintain a complete inventory of integration touchpoints and dependencies related to a change. Thorough regression testing identifies problems early before amplified impacts downstream. Reference documentation should also detail external systems or business processes relying on custom solutions to inform future initiatives.

Build Future Extensibility into Designs

While addressing current business requirements, development teams should engineer adaptability and extensibility into custom solutions. It helps to avoid the rework down the road if enhancements are needed. Some examples are isolating key parameters/rules into external tables for easy changes, adding extra unused fields in data structures, ensuring the schema extensions follow conventions, building APIs/services with versioning capabilities, and oversizing the infrastructure capacity. Outages and costs are reduced over time as business needs change when thinking beyond today’s requirements.

Conclusion

Implementing SAP solutions offers huge value but comes with great complexity. With the help of the best practices described in this article, organizations can successfully roll out SAP, promote the adoption of new capabilities by users, and optimize the return on investment. Planning discipline, phased delivery, extensive training, and careful customization development have to be there in order for SAP to be successful in the long run. While each initiative has its own considerations, using proven guidance can help organizations overcome the many challenges of starting up an enterprise-wide SAP program.