SAP S/4 HANA arguably brings about one of the biggest changes to core authorisation concepts we have seen in years.  With a clear focus on the end-user experience, the intuitive Fiori apps are available through easy navigation paths which offer an improved view of business processes.

These navigation paths and Fiori applications must work in harmony with backend SAP access and therefore forms an important part of a customer’s SAP Access Design.

Whether SAP customers choose to approach S/4 HANA with a clean slate or leverage legacy designs, it is a huge opportunity to capture and refine an access design that will deliver on their business needs.

Customer’s primary objectives when moving to S/4 HANA are likely to include the protection of day-to-day business operations, maintaining control of transactional data, remaining compliant from an audit perspective and delivering the project on time and on budget.

How can this be achieved?

A.      Information Gathering

This initial phase is key to understanding the business, and is paramount to a successful access design and implementation. The steps for this are:

  • understanding the current Operating Model and Business Processes
  • understand the End-User’s roles and responsibilities
  • impact assess Business Processes that are likely to change with S/4 HANA.
  • engaging the correct stakeholders

This preparation phase is critical and often requires support from multiple groups of people such as Process Owners, Functional Consultants and Business End-Users to name a few.

B.      Capturing the Access Design

SAP provide an S/4 HANA Access Design Template which is known to be an attractive starting point for many customers undergoing the migration.  At JAMTEC we’ve converted and loaded the template into the JAM Toolkit to give our customers a head start in their migration journey.  The extensive reports available in the toolkit make detailed analysis easier and decision making faster, allowing for the Access Design to be refined and aligned to the business requirements.

Capturing custom operating model(s) within the JAM Toolkit supports the scoping and planning of the technical access requirements, which minimises risk of incomplete build during the S/4 HANA project and reduces the access number issues during a hyper-care period.

The JAM Toolkit provides a central repository that captures all the access design artifacts, for example, the customer’s operating model attributes (business units and entities) and business processes (Global or Local Legal/Fiscal), allowing for an efficient Access Design to be defined, maintained and implemented.

C.      End-User Mapping

The JAM Toolkit is not only a repository for your access design; it can also capture and store User Transaction Usage from SAP Systems.  This valuable data source is a huge benefit to understanding End-User’s roles and responsibilities and will accelerate End-User Mapping activities as cutover preparations begin.

JAMTEC have a full S/4 HANA deployment access design methodology which is supported by the use of the JAM Toolkit’s ability to manage and capture End-User (access) mapping, produce outputs to support SoD checks and identify associated training requirements by End-User.

Summary

The move to S/4 HANA provides customers with a unique opportunity to review and define an efficient Access Design that works for their business. The JAM Toolkit supports this opportunity by capturing and validating the design whilst delivering to End-Users with minimal disruption.