Imple­ment­ing SAP S/4HANA is a com­plex, mul­ti­lay­ered expe­ri­ence. To help stream­line and sim­pli­fy this process for orga­ni­za­tions, SAP devel­oped SAP Acti­vate, a method­ol­o­gy designed to help guide cus­tomers through their imple­men­ta­tions of SAP S/4HANA.

ASUG inter­viewed the authors of ​“SAP Acti­vate: Project Man­age­ment for SAP S/4HANA.” We spoke with Sven Deneck­en, SVP of prod­uct suc­cess and co-inno­va­tion at SAP S/4HANA at SAP SE; Jan Musil, chief prod­uct own­er of the SAP Acti­vate Method­ol­o­gy at SAP; and Sri­vat­san San­thanam, a senior direc­tor and chief prod­uct own­er at SAP. The three authors dis­cussed the method­ol­o­gy, how it can help cus­tomers, and where com­pa­nies can apply it when man­ag­ing their SAP S/4HANA implementations.

Jim: What are the key func­tion­al­i­ties and tech­nolo­gies in SAP S/4HANA that sep­a­rate the plat­form from oth­er ERP software?

Sven: There are three things I would like to men­tion out of the many val­ues we see in SAP S/4HANA. First is the real-time per­for­mance this prod­uct pro­vides. You can process trans­ac­tion­al ana­lyt­ics with­out the tra­di­tion­al way of push­ing data back and forth and look­ing at his­tor­i­cal data. Data is con­sis­tent across all plat­forms, regard­less if you are run­ning the plat­form in the cloud, any-premise, or in between with a hybrid sys­tem. And giv­en the plat­form that is under­neath SAP S/4HANA — SAP HANA — you have no laten­cy or dupli­ca­tion. You see what you get. That sim­pli­fied data mod­el and data­base for real-time per­for­mance helps opti­mize the TCO for our clients.