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In my recent YouTube video, I spoke about how to drive SAP customization discussions with business stakeholders. My video is below:

SAP Customization: How To Run SAP Customization Conversations With Business

Customization means changing the behavior of the system to meet a specific business process need that the system otherwise did not support earlier. Here are four key aspects that, in my opinion, SAP consultants should lead with during their discussion with businesses about customization.

When a customization request comes in, the first response is to find out if the system's current capability supports what the business is looking for. Many times, organizations do not have clear visibility into the full scope of features SAP S/4 HANA or SAP Ariba solutions offer. As IT flag bearers, it is imperative for us to keep ourselves and others updated about the whole stack of options that these systems provide. The SAP roadmap viewer (https://go.support.sap.com/roadmapviewer/#) and/or upcoming release documents provide guidance to verify whether the specific business need will be incorporated as part of the standard product offering in the next few weeks or months.

System extensibility is a key capability in SAP S/4HANA and Ariba systems and can play a pivotal role in customization discussions. While ABAP programming-based system extensibility played a huge role in the ECC environment in the past, S/4HANA, especially in its cloud avatars, has an extensibility approach that clearly separates SAP code and extensions using public SAP APIs and SAP extension points. I will touch upon SAP extensibility in my future content, however, here are some helpful materials

The goal here is to assess how the business process compares in terms of maturity to the present system. There are two alternatives here.

Possibility A: The business process is not mature enough to reach a level where it can make use of the system's capabilities. And that is why customization is required. In that instance, the process is behind the system on the maturity curve.

Possibility B: The business process has advanced to the point where the system capacity is no longer enough to support it. That is why there is an urgent need for system improvements. In this situation, the process outperformed the system.

Finding who's ahead (system vs. process) is a critical yet often overlooked task. Consistently classifying customization requests based on the maturity curve analogy over a period of time provides reliable insights about the company's appetite for system adoption and user behaviors, two of the top KPIs in SAP transformation projects.

A compelling business case is required before any SAP system customization can begin. A constructive debate between IT and business about system enhancements, in which both sides question each other on merit, suggests that there is a solid foundation for creating commercial value. The business case should clearly demonstrate the commercial value. It is critical to assess and obtain approval from the regional and global process owners. If there are ongoing upgrades and regional implementations, it must be verified that the suggested modification will not cause unexpected issues. This point must be considered in the scope of testing following the customization in a lower environment.

It is critical that businesses understand the governance process for system customization. So, starting with entering the request in a tracking system (SNOW, Jira, Microsoft ADO, etc.), all relevant approvals, transport management, testing procedures, documentation, and, if necessary, user trainings. Spelling out the full procedure upfront to the business instills a lot of faith in the process.

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