It’s a beautiful thing to see that “cloud” is becoming recognized as the preferred deployment option for businesses around the world. Some of these businesses are adopting ERP for the first time and some of them are long-time veterans in the space. Regardless of the level of experience that these businesses have with ERP, SAP has made it a point to adjust to the needs of any business by providing a standardized, out-of-the-box solution known as SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

While this is all great news, it doesn’t make much of a difference if a business is not in a position to implement and adopt the software in a way that is useful for them. We all know that in software implementations things can get hectic and projects can feel overwhelming at times… with all the work that needs to be done not only from a functional and technical point of view, but also from strategic and change management perspectives.

Baseline Activation Service for SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a service that provides a pre-configured explore environment within weeks, personalized to the customer and enriched with customer sample data, which helps the customer visualize and consume the SAP leading practices. When starting their journey with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the customer will be provided with a foundation for future solution expansion and an iterative implementation approach.

The service has been built as part of SAP’s desire to facilitate the process to:

• introduce the public cloud to net new names and small/mid-sized businesses
• represent a rock solid foundation for SAP S/4HANA Cloud at a low cost
• set the stage for future phases of delivery and offer easy to consume innovations

View the following video to learn more…

Now that we’ve outlined the basics of the service, let’s dive a bit deeper.

The implementation approach for Baseline Activation Service is divided into four phases. In order to achieve the deployment timelines, a number of components have been developed to support this:

• Onboarding: A simplified onboarding process between our existing tools
• System Activation: Pre-delivered technical bundles to support efficient scope deployment
• Business Configuration: Automated mass business configuration upload, leveraging the SAP Business Transformation Platform (BTP) and intelligent Robotic Process Automation (iRPA) bots
• Data Migration: Increased automation with the Data Migration Cockpit and iRPA bots

While the scope of this service is designed to act as a starting point, customers will have the capability to configure additional functional and geographic requirements on top of the delivered system landscape. Baseline Activation Service encompasses the core business processes, independent of business size and industry structure.

In summary, the service provides you with a predictable scope and duration when starting your journey with SAP. Most of all, it provides best practices, processes and content delivered ‘out-of-the-box’ that allows for standardization and optimization of business processes in an environment that you recognize.

Want to learn more? Keep an eye out for the upcoming blog series, “How can We Accelerate SAP Cloud Implementations?”. It will be a multi-part series that focuses on topics such as Cloud Mindset, Prepackaged Content, Onboarding Tools, Automation Accelerators and Future-Proofing Your Investment. You may even find more information included about how to build and establish a “baseline” or a foundation on which you will want to build your deployment, which I’m sure is already starting to sound familiar

You can find more information about Baseline Activation Service in the SAP Store at this link.