An S/4HANA transformation ties up years and substantial budgets. Nevertheless, two crucial answers are missing from many decision-making templates:

• Which processes are actually lived today, how intensively, and by whom?

• Do future processes truly work with your own business transactions and data?

Usually, the answers only emerge months later, when changes have become expensive. Yet both questions can be answered before the decision is made: the first after one day, the second after one week.

From the actual process to a reliable decision

This is precisely what our expert article “One day. One week. A reliable decision.” is about, which I co-authored with Bernhard Lang from LeapGreat.

The article was published in the special edition of E3 Magazine for Manager Magazin and is now also available online.

The real leverage lies in the fact that measured usage directly feeds into the design of the target system. What gets built is what the company actually uses, not a generic process catalog.

This also shifts the discussion: away from the general question “What do we need?” and towards “How do we do it better?”

The crucial question comes before the start

For me, one sentence from the article sums up the core of it:

The question is not whether a transformation will succeed. It is whether it was decidable before it began.

Because a successful transformation does not begin with implementation. It begins with a well-founded basis for decision-making that shows how the company actually works and whether the planned processes fit its own reality.

Many thanks to Bernhard Lang for the really great collaboration, and to Peter M. Färbinger and the E3 Magazine team for providing the platform.