S/4HANA Maturity Assessment – The Essential Framework for Measuring Readiness Before Your Transformation Decision

For most businesses, determining to migrate to S/4HANA is a strategic must, but failure to assess organisational readiness can prove expensive. Disassociated processes, legacy technical landscapes and company-wide adoption strategies tend to result in budget overruns, delay or no realization of business benefits.

This is where an S/4HANA Maturity Assessment stakes its claim as a necessity! It doesn’t just check boxes; furthermore, it is a strategic framework to assess whether your company is ready for the next stage and enable leaders to make informed decisions about timing, scope and investment.

But without an organized review, groups could be:

• Wrong type of deployment chosen (greenfield, brownfield or hybrid)
• Failure to plan for the necessary resources or the level of change management required
• Mismatching of the SAP features and business needs

For CIOs and transformation leads, maturity assessment delivers visibility, conviction and an action plan.

What Is an S/4HANA Maturity Assessment

A “special for ERP Investment Expert, November 2018-Interview” by Kumar Abishek (ABAPer/Blogger): “SAP S/4HANA” and “digitalization” are no longer just a general idea, but one that all current market players should give some serious thoughts on.

An S/4HANA Maturity Assessment assesses the readiness of a company in various aspects to determine if it is ready for an operational transformation to S/4HANA.

Core focus areas include:

• Business Process Preparedness: Are there standardized workflows and processes in place?
• Technical Landscape Readiness: Are my systems, interfaces and developments ready for S/4HANA?
• Readiness for Change: Are your people, roles and governance models prepared for transformation?
• Data Readiness: Is master and transaction data clean, correct, and compliant?
• Readiness for Change and Adoption: Is the organisation ready to accept new processes and technologies?

Business leaders gain value from an S/4HANA Maturity Assessment by understanding the scope of required modifications based on a single source of truth, leading to educated decisions regarding scope, investment and timing.

The Foundational Building Blocks of an S/4HANA Maturity Assessment

To be actionable, a maturity assessment needs to consider more than one aspect:

Business Process Maturity

Moreover, review current processes to understand opportunities for simplification, optimization and alignment with S/4HANA best practice:

• Identify redundant or fragmented processes
• Compare the existing processes to the capabilities of S/4HANA
• Focus on processes that are redesigned before conversion

Use case: A manufacturing company discovered it had heterogeneous procurement processes across regions. Closing those gaps before migration minimized post go-live drama.

Technical Landscape Readiness

Review your existing SAP systems, integrations and customisations:

• Take stock of any ECC modules, 3rd-party integrations and custom code
• Assess technical debt and the feasibility of upgrading
• Look for chances to consolidate or simplify systems

Due diligence test on the technical level to guarantee a smooth and future-proof S/4HANA transition.

Organizational and Governance Readiness

Change cannot happen too soon. However, transformation needs clear roles, responsibilities and decision-making mechanisms:

• Evaluate if the SAP Centre of Excellence (CoE) or governance model is ready for S/4HANA
• Assess leadership sponsorship and cross-functional cooperation
• Determine skills deficiency and learning needs

Institutional readiness guarantees the uptake of an innovation and its sustainable use.

Data Readiness

S/4HANA success begins and ends with clean, accurate data:

• Evaluate master data for quality, integrity, and resolution of business rules and standards
• Uncover holes in your data governance, reconciliation, and archiving
• Plan for data migration and cleanup efforts

Executives gain assurance that reporting, analytics and operational processes will work properly after go-live.

Change Management and Adoption Readiness

Success in transformation is about the people and process:

• Assess stakeholder engagement and readiness
• Assess change management models and methods for communication
• Map out resistance points and where adoption may be low

Early emphasis on adoption decreases the cost of training and speeds value.

Step-by-Step S/4HANA Maturity Assessment Framework

This will help provide structure and clarity, as well as insights that you can act on:

1. Scope Assessment: Identify the devices, sites, and activities to be assessed.
2. Collect Data: Collect literature, system-level metrics and adoption information.
3. Assess Maturity on Different Dimensions: Business processes, technical landscape, governance, data and adoption.
4. Scoring and Benchmark: Apply a scoring model structure to quantify readiness.
5. Assess Gaps and Risks: Outline flaws that will need addressing before migration.
6. Develop an Action Plan: Prioritise what needs to be done to fill the gaps and maximise preparedness.
7. Executive Reporting: Provide a brief and actionable readiness, risk and recommendation report.

This framework provides leaders with a logical decision-making gateway for the allocation of strategic investments and resources. For more insights, read our blog on SAP Solution Design

In the Real World:

How Maturity Assessment Helped Avoid Transformation Pitfalls

A retail company with multi-country operations was gearing up for migration to S/4HANA. If maturity was not assessed, they would have rolled out:

• Fragmented inventory processes
• Outdated custom code in ECC
• Incomplete data cleansing

After an S/4HANA Maturity Assessment is Conducted:

• Gaps and standardisations of business processes were found
• Technical debt is measured and fixed before migration
• A detailed training/ change management approach was deployed

Outcome: The migration was executed on schedule, under budget and with minimal disruption, showing the benefits of evaluating readiness before making transformational decisions.

Executive Insights:

Getting Strategic Value From a Maturity Assessment

In brief, S/4HANA Maturity Assessment provides:

1. Clarity of Strategy: Know the readiness and risk in the organization before you invest resources
2. Cost: Avoid costly post-go-live rework
3. Risk Assessment & Risk Mitigation: Determining impediments in processes, systems and data
4. Quicker Adoption: The sooner you plan for the change in management, the quicker users will adapt to new processes
5. Decision Trust: Use of quantitative analysis to inform investment, scope and schedule confidence

Consequently, companies that incorporate maturity assessments as a part of their transformation strategy achieve higher levels of S/4HANA adoption and ROI.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Sometimes, even when we mean well, we can miss it if:

• It’s not rated on critical modules or zones
• Data is not fully collected, or anecdotal
• Assessment output is not connected with action plans
• Lack of executive sponsorship leads to lower organisation-wide commitment

By steering clear of these potential issues, you can ensure your maturity assessment provides actionable intelligence instead of simply a set of reports.

Conclusion: Before You Transform, Measure Readiness

Overall, the key to a successful S/4HANA transformation is understanding how prepared your organisation is. A Well-Structured S/4HANA Maturity Assessment offers executives visibility into:

• Business process readiness
• Technical landscape readiness
• Governance readiness
• Data readiness
• Adoption readiness

It is therefore critical that businesses can effectively identify gaps, quantify risk and prioritise corrective action to make informed decisions, moreover, optimise investment (in time and cost) and maximise successful transformation.

Take a maturity assessment, compare yourself against where the best companies are and develop a remediation roadmap to ensure your S/4HANA journey is based on a sound strategy yet low risk and high value.

FAQs: S/4HANA Maturity Assessment

Q1: What is an S/4HANA Maturity Assessment?
It’s a systematic analysis to determine an organisation’s readiness across processes, systems, governance, data and adoption for S/4HANA transformation.

Q2: Importance of maturity assessment before S/4HANA migration?
It identifies gaps, risk centers investment and post-go-live disruption while maximising value.

Q3: Which dimensions are usually measured?
Business process preparedness, technical landscape, governance, data quality and change/adoption readiness.

Q4: Who Needs to be Included in the Maturity?
CIOs, IT Leadership, Business Process Owners, SAP CoE Teams and Key Stakeholders in affected functions.

Q5: How frequently should one assess maturity factors?
Before any major changes, at least once in advance if possible, and optionally during regular readiness reviews of ongoing SAP projects.

Resources

S/4HANA Maturity Assessment

SAP Transformation Guide