SAP Activate: All About This Methodology

You have probably heard of SAP Activate. It is SAP's current methodology for implementing, upgrading, or migrating to an S/4HANA environment, and it offers three main pillars so your company can make the most of SAP tools: Best Practices, Guided Configuration, and Methodology.

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SAP Activate builds on SAP's accumulated experience to provide a detailed roadmap to S/4HANA, from defining the project scope all the way to go-live. The methodology also guides your team through integration with third-party software and cloud solutions, training, project management, and other needs that come with this journey.

Want to understand in detail how SAP Activate works? Read on.

What is SAP Activate?

SAP Activate can be seen as something that goes beyond a simple methodology. It is closer to a kit (Best Practices, Guided Configuration, and Methodology) for building an SAP S/4HANA landscape.

It guides project managers and technical and functional teams through a six-phase methodology to implement and run any SAP S/4HANA scenario on premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid hosting environment. A range of SAP tools and optional third-party tools simplify the process, save time, and reduce the risk of human error.

Each phase has its own deliverables, which are tied to workstreams, making it easy to track the project. There are also quality checks throughout the process and extensive resources attached to each deliverable (“accelerators” in SAP terminology).

These accelerators provide clear guidance and best practices for every step of the SAP implementation, reducing project risk and making quality control easier. They also make it possible to handle an almost unlimited variety of scenarios, deployment options, integrations, and other factors.

In practice, these are some of the main benefits you can expect from SAP Activate:

• Speed. Differentiated technologies with fast innovation cycles, delivering results for your business in shorter delivery cycles (agile methodology).
• Productivity. Self-service tools designed to reduce the complexity of your business operations.
• Scalability. Efficiency with transparency and guidance for building an end-to-end process.
• Business impact. Optimize the efficiency of your company's operations with intelligent practices and processes.

History of SAP methodology

SAP Activate is not SAP's first methodology. The company has gone through a number of methodologies as its software evolved, including Accelerated SAP (ASAP), Run SAP, and SAP Launch.

Over SAP's nearly half-century history, the company's approach to installing software and guiding partners and customers has changed radically, just like its system.

Modern SAP methodology began to take shape in the 1990s with SAP R/3, which moved ERP from mainframes to a client-server computing model. Technologically, this was a major step forward, but it also caused some serious problems, because SAP lacked a solid software implementation methodology that could be accessed and applied.

At the time, each consulting firm simply developed its own methodology, tools, and standards. This was not ideal for companies adopting R/3, since they wanted to be sure they were taking the safest and most cost-effective path.

To address this, SAP created ASAP, which evolved from a basic implementation framework for installing SAP ERP into a more sophisticated approach to managing SAP projects. That evolution led to new methodologies that accounted for product changes as well as advances in project management and IT best practices.

Although many see it as a modern version of ASAP, SAP Activate goes beyond ASAP to provide a complete program for SAP implementation. It is far more comprehensive and sophisticated, combining step-by-step guidance, an in-depth project management framework, and a toolset that goes well beyond any previous SAP methodology.

In other words, SAP Activate is more than a guide for your current upgrade. It is a roadmap for the era of agility and easy adoption that organizations are looking for today.

SAP Activate phases

SAP Activate structures the implementation into several phases to keep you in control of your systems. The process is designed to separate the strategic decision to move to SAP S/4HANA from the implementation itself, so you can focus on what matters most: how to best address your business challenges with innovative solutions.

These are the SAP Activate implementation phases:

• Discover. Explore the innovations available in SAP S/4HANA and define the implementation strategy, with a roadmap for project execution.
• Prepare. This is the project planning phase, when the team is assigned and the kickoff is prepared.
• Explore. Drive adoption of the SAP standard with a Fit-to-Standard approach and identify the requirements for implementing your business practices.
• Realize. Run agile sprints to configure, build, and test an integrated environment, load data, and start enabling users.
• Deploy. Prepare the integration scenarios and the data migration, and cut business operations over to the new system.
• Run. Drive efficient adoption of the new solution across the company, meeting business needs with SAP.

What does a partner add to SAP Activate?

The partner ecosystem has always been a crucial part of SAP operations. SAP partners provide tools, methods, experience, and innovation, and SAP gives these partners room to innovate while ensuring quality. This means you have a wide range of SAP and third-party tools for the different steps of the implementation process.

The early phases of a project involve a lot of analysis that has traditionally been done manually. When these processes are automated, you can save a lot of time, speed up the project, and cut costs, while reducing the risk of human error.

An SAP partner also helps you get the most out of SAP solutions over the long term by providing support and driving innovation and continuous process improvement.

Intellevo, for example, is ready to support your company's SAP projects with an optimized use of SAP Activate. Get in touch with our team of consultants and find out how we can help!