Configuring SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition – An Overview

Introduction
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition is a ready-to-run cloud solution. It enables customers with ready-to-work
processes, built on proven industry best practices. Beginning in the year 2022, SAP S/4HANA Cloud moved from a
quarterly release cycle to a semi-annual release cycle.

In the cloud model, customers pay a regular subscription fee to consume certain services from a third-party provider.
The service provider is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure. With a cloud computing model, we can
subscribe to only the computing resources we need and access them. Based on the deployment mode – Public Cloud,
Private Cloud or Hybrid Cloud – services are made available to customers.

What are the Deployment Models?

There are three deployment models:
1. Public Cloud
2. Private Cloud
3. Hybrid Cloud

Public Cloud
Public cloud software runs in a multi-tenant server. Multiple customers share the resources of the server. In public
cloud the data of one customer is not shown to other customers (it is hidden). Public cloud is an affordable and
efficient solution.

Private Cloud
Private cloud software runs in a single tenant server. Only one customer uses the resources of the server. It is the
most similar to an on-premises system. For on premise, a customer purchases the server and is responsible for
maintenance. For private cloud, a third-party provider owns the server and is responsible for maintenance. A
customer pays a subscription fee to access the server over the internet and install software.

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, SAP is responsible for maintaining the business software but the
customer can choose hyperscaler partners. In this case, the hyperscaler partner is responsible for maintaining the
server. Private clouds offer more flexibility and customisation than public cloud.

Hybrid Cloud
A hybrid cloud includes both cloud and on-premise solutions. Customers may have diverse landscapes consisting of
a combination of different solutions. They use SAP Business Technology Platform to develop and host cloud-native
integrations and applications to connect their solutions.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition

This public cloud solution has comprehensive scope and is designed to support a customer’s transition to the cloud.
This multitenant server resides in an SAP data centre and SAP is responsible for maintaining the technical backend
of your system. It has the fastest innovation. With pre-delivered end-to-end business processes, your implementation
will be very easy. This is a ready-to-run cloud ERP with ready-to-work business processes built on proven industry
best practices.

How to Prepare for Digital Transformation (How to do Scoping for your S/4HANA Cloud)?
During sales cycle, discovery phase or planning phase, the Digital Discovery Assessment is used to assess a
customer’s requirements and match them with the best SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution to fit their needs. The
completed assessment will be reviewed by an SAP Brand Guardian. If the Brand Guardian determines the automated
recommendation is incorrect, they will change the solution proposal to ensure the customer receives the right
solution to best fit their needs. This report can be exported to a PDF and will be used to define the project scope.

https://www.sap.com/germany/documents/2020/07/f66536ad-a67d-0010-87a3-c30de2ffd8ff.html
Instructions to Request Access
1. Go to www.sap.com/s4hanacloud-discovery
2. If you have an I/D/S/P user, log in on the right side of the dialogue
3. If you don’t have an S/P user, register yourself
4. Accept the terms
5. Now (for GPDR reasons) SAP need to approve your user to access the tool.
If you have a query about the status or want to speed up approval, send an email to digitaldiscovery@sap.com
Registration Link for Prospects/Customers/Partners:
www.sap.com/s4hanacloud-discovery
SAP Best Practices
SAP Best Practices Explorer enables customer to find the package of content specific to the scope of the solution:
https://rapid.sap.com/bp/
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Implementation Tool:
Application Lifecycle Management Tools for the SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It is the tool for cloud-centric customers. It
has implementation and operations capabilities for cloud solutions. It enables customers to better understand best
practices for implementing cloud solutions.

SAP Cloud ALM for Operations enables the customer IT organisation to monitor processes and be alerted to
potential issues. It supports customers in proactively addressing potential issues and empowers them to more fully
understand how their cloud solutions run.

SAP Solution Manager

This is an application lifecycle management solution that can be used to manage an implementation of SAP
S/4HANA Cloud, private edition. SAP Solution Manager has an additional license fee and is not relevant for the
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition solution.
The new implementation – SAP S/4HANA Cloud – How to Configure?
Configuration with SAP Central Business Configuration
It is a new tool for configuring business processes spanning multiple SAP cloud solutions from one central place.
SAP Central Business Configuration currently supports the system provisioning and configuration of SAP S/4HANA
Cloud, public edition.

SAP Central Business Configuration provides flexible access to the whole portfolio in terms of end-to-end processes.
Customers can choose the business capabilities they want to use to serve their business process needs. It helps reduce
the time to value the investment that customers need to spend. This helps with an easy start and follow-up activities.
The key solution characteristics of SAP Central Business Configuration start with the selection and the capability of
choosing and selecting the business functions that customers want to use in order to serve their business process
needs.

• SAP Central Business Configuration is accessed using project experience. It is the central cockpit, which guides
you through the implementation step by step, in a sequential manner.

• The first step in the project experience is selecting the business capabilities based on the business adaptation
catalogue. This is called scoping of your solution. This has to be done after identifying the needs of your business
process.

• Then later we have to define the org structure. So you define the plants, sales organisations, company codes, etc.

• The business configuration workspace allows you to manage multiple projects in parallel.

SAP Central Business Configuration is the tool to carry out the configuration-related tasks of the proven SAP
Activate implementation methodology for SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
https://go.support.sap.com/roadmapviewer/
During implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, we will use SAP Central Business Configuration Tool to design,
build and to develop. SAP Central Business Configuration allows you to manage configurations for SAP Cloud
Implementations and ongoing operations centrally via the Project Experience. SAP Central Business Configuration is
a tool that we use centrally for configuration-related tasks for SAP Cloud implementation.

The Project Experience allows us to create and manage starter on implementation projects. It guides you through the
different phases. The Project Experience also allows us to access the different applications.

Project Experience
The Project Experience app acts as a gateway to all other applications. Project Experience allows customers to
manage their configurations for SAP cloud implementations centrally. The other apps are scoping app, organisational
structure app, configuration settings.

We can see three sections:

1. Open section
2. In Progress section
3. Completed section.
This provides an overview of the status of the project and its activities.

Open section:
Used in the beginning stage. When we access applications and activities, we will change the status to in progress
section. Similarly, activities completed can be seen in third section.

We can go back to the scoping phase and add additional scope items as needed during the project implementation.
This can also be done after your implementation as needed, even though you are live on S/4HANA Cloud. Once we
create a project, we will be able to start scoping and choose countries or regions depending on business scope.

On the top left of this screen, you’ll see the name of your project. This can be changed.

Project Type
As we just created a starter project, it is showing as such. It will let us know which kind of project we are currently
working on.

The starter project is completely independent from the actual implementation project.

As we just created the project it is showing scope and no milestones met. Once all scoping-related activities are
completed, then the relevant milestone will show green. It provides an understanding of where we are. That means it
shows in which phase and which activity.

Switch Project button

When we do an actual implementation project, we can switch to it. Beside that, you can see Initiate Change button.
As of now it is greyed out because we haven’t done anything at this point to change it. Once we have completed the
starter project, and are done testing and evaluating your business processes, you can choose Switch Project to create
the actual implementation project. We can do this at any time (and not necessarily after completion of the starter
project). Even after completion of the milestone, it is possible to change by clicking the initiate change button.
Organisational structure
The organisational structure helps us to set up organisational entities that are needed as per scope. Pre-defined
organisational units and checks will guide us to complete the organisational units based on the scope we have
selected. With the completion of this phase, the activation of the content and the deployment to your assigned target
system takes place.

Then we can do the configuration that is needed based on business processes. Transport requests release happens
here.

As with other implementation projects, once the QAS (quality system) has been deployed, we test in QAS and then
configuration settings will be be transported to PRD (production system).
The Project Experience app guides you step by step through the whole implementation process using project phases,
project activities and milestones.

Configuration activities are displayed and grouped by business areas and are labelled as mandatory, recommended or
optional configuration activities. Configuration activities in the product-specific configuration phase cover detailed
settings of the solution process.

After completing all mandatory configuration activities and other required project activities, such as migrate, legacy,
and execute business process unit tests, you can confirm product specific configuration is completed.

What is Starter system?

Customers can create a starter project (evaluation project) and they can assign to a starter system. This will be
helpful in exploring customer’s business processes with a pre-selected scope and example data before beginning their
implementation project anytime.

What is Scoping?
Scoping allows customers to scope SAP cloud implementations centrally.

Organisational structure management

The Set Up organisational structure app allows you to easily create and adapt your company’s organisational
structure (org structure).

How do we get User assistance for SAP Central Business Configuration?

https://help.sap.com/sapcentralbusinessconfiguration/SAP_Central_Business_Configuration_Overview.pdf
https://help.sap.com/docs/CENTRAL_BUSINESS_CONFIGURATION
SAP Central Business Configuration offers the following functions:

• Project setup: Assignment of team members to a project

• Scoping of the required business scenarios
• Execution of guided project activities
• Organisational structure management
• Execution of configuration activities
• Lifecycle management, including update process management
Scoping – Scope phase activities
The Scope phase in SAP Central Business Configuration consists of:
1. Scoping-related project activities,
2. Assign Deployment Target activity,
3. Confirm Scoping is Completed milestone

When doing scoping there are:

1. Mandatory Selections
2. Optional Selections
3. Optional Selections (via ticket)
Mandatory Selections
It is mandatory to select the countries/regions

Customers can select one or multiple countries/regions based on their scope of the project.

You will be able to choose from pre delivered countries that have a country version in the S/4HANA Cloud. When
you save countries, that will be added to scope. This is a mandatory selection.
We have the optional selections, which are additional scenarios that you can select in addition to mandatory scope
items.

For the country USA, the Public Sector Management bundle is available. As this bundle is not available for other
countries we cannot put any other country alongside USA. Generally, we can choose multiple countries but this is an
exception when you choose Public sector Management.

Optional scenarios can be directly chosen by the customer. In the above screen you can see the boxes that do not
have lock symbols. Those scope items can directly be added.

The items that show lock symbol are optional scenarios which are initially displayed as locked, and they can only be
added to scope via a ticket to the indicated component. When we log a ticket, the SAP support team do the needful to
add this scope.

Assign Deployment Target activity

Once scoping is done, we will assign the deployment target.

Deployment target is a dedicated system of the solution to be implemented. It is provisioned by SAP. If you move
out from the scope phase this system cannot be removed.

Organisational Structure Management

Organisational Structure app is a tool available in CBC to help us to define and visualise enterprise structures in a
graphical way. Some settings are mandatory, and they are prerequisites. E.g. Finance settings, like fiscal year variant,
Currency.
We can choose company codes and create plants, storage locations, sales organizations, etc.
We can confirm by choosing individual org units, or whole hierarchy.

Once we confirm it, the confirmation of this data is final, and shall later be put to the deployment target. Then we can
put it to complete.

And then the next step should be to confirm the scope and organisational structure milestone. And upon the
completion of this milestone, we will see a green colour.

Configuration Activities
Configuration content is a complex network of data. Data is stored in tables that belong to one or more configuration
objects. Customising objects associated with IMG activities make an IMG application. Content goes through
different lifecycle processes before getting deployed in the connected S/4 tenant.
List of configuration activities will be shown in the Configuration Activity tab. Each configuration activity is of type
URL. When we click on activity, the application is launched outside of Central Business Configuration. All activities
are launched in the deployment target.

When the activity is launched, we can start to perform changes as needed. After making the changes, they click on
save. Changed content is saved in two places:

1. Underlying tables of the application.

2 Staging area in S/4.

The staging area is to have a log of all the configuration changes. A job running in will pick up the content from the
staging area and push it to Central Business Configuration.