Second edition of SAP Activate Book now available!

I want to thank on behalf of my co-authors and contributors to all SAP Activate users and fans that purchased SAP Activate book from SAPPRESS over since its publication in 2020. It has contributed to a great cause at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital that I wrote about in the blog last year – you can find it here.

Today I’m happy to announce release of second edition of the SAP Activate book that we worked on over the past 6 months. This new edition has several improvements and new content I want to outline in this blog post. Just like the first edition, you can get a copy in e-book format, print or both at SAPPRESS. Use code SAPACT15 for 15% off.

First change that you will find in the book, aside from the change in color schema on the cover is the re-fresh of the entire text with the latest innovations SAP delivered for SAP S/4HANA in the past two years since the first edition came out. Here is a summary of what you can expect to find in each chapter:

1. SAP S/4HANA Fundamentals – this chapter introduces the key technologies and functionality that SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides to organizations. We discuss the deployment strategies and briefly outline the transition paths that organizations take to bring their ERP in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. This text establishes the foundation for the rest of the book as chapters 7, 8 and 9 are providing more details on each transition path for new implementation, system conversion, selective data transition and hybrid landscape deployment.
2. Introduction to SAP Activate – in the second chapter we introduce reader to SAP Activate and take them on a journey through each phase in the project lifecycle using SAP Activate. We also introduce this community to the readers and how to use the functions to share their expertise with blogs or leverage the questions to get answers from the community.
3. Accessing SAP Activate – this text discusses the tooling that SAP customers use to access the ready-to-run business processes, methodology and capabilities for application lifecycle management in the project. We introduce SAP Cloud ALM, Roadmap Viewer, Best Practices Explorer and for customers with hybrid landscapes discuss the capabilities of SAP Solution Manager. This chapter has significant updates, especially for the SAP Cloud ALM section where the capabilities available in the product grew since we first introduced it.
4. Starting with a Working System – this chapter dives deeper into the ready-to-run business process content. We introduce the SAP Best Practices and the enterprise management layer for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The text walks you through the available business content and accelerators that SAP delivers with these packages for public cloud, private cloud and on-premise deployments.
5. Configuration, Data Migration, Extensibility, Integration, and Testing – in this chapter the authors take you through the key capabilities in SAP S/4HANA Cloud for configuration, data migration, extensibility, integration, and testing. The goal is to introduce the tools that are later referenced in the individual chapters detailing the process for specific version of SAP S/4HANA Cloud (chapters 7 and 8).
6. Agile Project Delivery – in this chapter we cover the use of agile techniques inside the SAP project. We cover the roles, governance, ceremonies that the project team follows to establish a true agile approach in your SAP S/4HANA deployment. We also discuss how organizations using Scaled Agile Framework benefit from using SAP Activate in their environment. I have also discussed this topic in this blog post.
7. New Implementation of SAP S/4HANA – this chapter is the largest of the entire book as it covers the details of deploying SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA using the new implementation approach. It covers deployment of public cloud, private cloud and on-premise solution using SAP Activate. We recommend that you review the sub-chapter relevant for your project and use this chapter on an on-going basis as a reference.
8. System Conversion and Selective Data Transition to SAP S/4HANA – system conversion is gaining popularity with customers transitioning into SAP S/4HANA Cloud and is covered along the phases of SAP Activate in this chapter. We also briefly discuss the selective data transition and provide pointers to consider while planning and executing your transition journey.
9. Deploying Hybrid System Landscapes – this text has been enhanced with the coverage for new scenarios available for hybrid deployments using Two-Tier deployment scenarios. The chapter covers scenarios across finance, sales, procurement, manufacturing, and analytics. We also recommend you review the white paper for Two-Tier deployment published here.
10. Organizational Change Management – driving solution adoption and change is critical for any transformation project to be successful and to realize customer value. This chapter provides a play-by-play walk through the project and details steps and best practices that successful project teams take to actively drive successful change process.
11. SAP Activate for Other SAP Products – in this chapter we briefly discuss the other versions of SAP Activate for other SAP products and solutions.

Additionally, to the text above, the Appendix A has an updated practice questions and answers to get you ready for SAP Activate certification exam. You can also review this blog post from Brice on how he prepared for his certification exam.

Appendix B with all the authors and contributors to the book. Here is a list of colleagues that have contributed to the SAP Activate edition 2 and also have SAP Community profile. You can easily follow them to stay up to date on their new blogs in the SAP Community.

You can explore more SAP Activate resources in SAP Community using tag  #sapactivate, we also encourage you to consider following our sister communities SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Cloud ALM. Let us know your thoughts in the comments to this blog post or via questions in the SAP Activate community.

As always, I would like to encourage you to subscribe to our podcast “Inside SAP S/4HANA” and follow the SAP Activate tagon SAP Community. The podcast leverages the unique knowledge and expertise of SAP S/4HANA product experts, partners and customers to address your needs by sharing product insights and project best practice. There is no customer success without product success and project success; we help you get to the next level and make your SAP S/4HANA projects a success. Subscribe now and benefit from the shared knowledge.

Follow us via our SAP Community tag and page #sapactivate or myself directly via Jan Musil.