Welcome to the second blog in our series covering the ten most important things you should know before implementing S/4HANA Cloud Essentials Edition. In this series, you will learn about critical practical considerations that should be evaluated before purchasing or implementing S/4HANA Cloud. If you have not read our first blog in the 2-Tier Landscape series, you can find it here.

Our first blog is also a description of the S/4HANA Cloud Essential Edition and an explanation of the different terms used to describe the S/4 HANA Cloud Multi-Tenant edition. I will briefly summarize here for those of you who do not want to go back to the first blog. S/4 HANA Cloud Essential Edition is a version of S/4HANA in which customers share both the database and the codebase of a S/4HANA instance. This puts severe restrictions on not only the ability to customize the system but also the implementation methodology. This blog series will explain some of the more impactful restrictions.

S/4HANA Cloud Essential Edition & Country Scope Items

This blog series has been compiled through real work experience and interviews with customers, consultants, and end-users of S/4HANA Cloud Essential Edition. If you plan on purchasing or implementing S/4HANA Cloud ES, this is what you need to know.

Item #1 – Say Goodbye To Your Traditional 3 Tier Landscape 

We wrote a whole article about the new 2 tier landscape and what you should know about how it works. Read more about it here.

Item #2 – Country Scope Items: Don’t Assume Everything Is Available In All Countries.

One of the things most customers will do during the sales cycle is to work with your SAP sales rep to ensure that all of the countries in which your company operates are supported. If you have not done this yet, you can see the list of supported countries on the SAP Globalization page (https://support.sap.com/en/product/globalization.html).  The world map PDF document (currently updated only through the 1911 version) lists all currently available country versions. You can also view specific globalization information for future releases on the Interactive Roadmap.

While this is an essential step in your analysis, if you have several countries to support, there is something else you need to be aware of.  Each country must be activated separately.  Although activation times vary, SAP will tell you to plan for anywhere from 3-10 business days to activate a country.  During this time, although your Q or Starter system will be available, you will not be able to do any customizations in the Manage Your Solution section. This means you will be limited to training, testing, and documentation tasks.  If you have multi-country requirements, this can make project planning quite difficult and complicated.  SAP may even suggest a phased approach to country activations where you only go live with 1 or 2 countries at a time. The reality is that SAP S/4HANA Cloud ES does not lend itself well to Big Bang multi-country implementations. You will need to plan accordingly.

Additionally, just because a country is supported does not mean all scope items are available in that country. Scope items in S4HC are defined with a 3 digit, alphanumeric code. Most scope items are valid first in the US and Germany, and then they may or may not be rolled out to other countries. Of course, some scope items are built explicitly for only one country. Be sure to check every scope item in all of the countries where you will need it. Some scope items may not be ready yet in all your required countries. You can find this list in the SAP Roadmap Viewer. You can see how to find it and how it is organized below.

Check out the next Blog in the Series

Blog #3 in the Series is all about Data. Check it out to learn about CDS Views and more.