SAP Delivery Agility

Applying Essential SAFe to Large-Scale SAP Implementations and Operations


Note: This article is part of the Community Contributions series, which provides additional points of view and guidance based on the experiences and opinions of the extended SAFe community of experts.


Accenture white paper - SAP Delivery AgilityFor decades now, proponents of Agile have had to contend with the myth that “you can’t use Agile for X”, where X is high assurance systems, systems subject to rigorous regulatory requirements, cyber-physical systems, systems for national defense, big data systems, and so on.

Perhaps one of the last of these larger myths is that “you can’t do Agile on large scale ERP implementations”. Well now we have help from a source who can put that myth to bed, and one who has ‘been there and done it’ in hundreds of Agile SAP implementations. In this attached white paper, Accenture’s Malte Kumlehn, Lean-Agile SAP Coach and Head of SAP Delivery Agility Excellence at Accenture, describes how applying the ten Essential SAFe elements has given them the tools they need to successfully implement large scale SAP applications in an Agile manner. And it surely works. Benefits experienced in one case study included:

  • Implementation defects found in functional testing: 326; introduced into production: 0
  • 92 potential security defects found and fixed
  • 80% automated product and regression tests saving 12,000 manual hours
  • 50% reduction in following FY testing budget

This is an important read for everyone anticipating a large-scale SAP S/4HANA implementation. SAP has set an end to maintenance support for SAP ERP or SAP ECC software that runs on traditional relational databases like Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server in 2025. At that time, all firms running SAP ERP software will be mandated to migrate to SAP S/4HANA, the newest SAP ERP Suite.

It is critical that business leaders, specifically CFOs and CIOs who are involved in future ERP strategies, plan appropriately for this critical migration. This white paper will help those on that journey.

Thanks to Malte Kumlehn and the team at Accenture!

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