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Implementing an SAP system is a major undertaking that requires careful planning and preparation to ensure success. At the core of this critical upfront work is the creation of a detailed SAP business blueprint.
In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn what an SAP business blueprint is, why it’s vitally important, how to create one for your project, common pitfalls to avoid, and much more. Let‘s get started.
What Exactly is an SAP Business Blueprint?
An SAP business blueprint, also referred to as BBP, is a high-level, detailed documentation of a company’s key business processes, system requirements, and configurations required to adapt the SAP software solution to the organization’s needs.
In other words, the blueprint serves as the master plan that captures how the company intends to run SAP to best support their business. It connects the business requirements with the technical SAP system setup.
According to SAP experts, a well-defined blueprint is the foundation for success when implementing SAP solutions. It outlines the scope, objectives, specifications, activities, milestones, timelines, resources, risks and more involved in the implementation project to guide all teams and stakeholders.
The Critical Importance of Creating a Solid SAP Blueprint
You’re likely anxious to dive into configuring and testing the exciting possibilities of your new SAP system. Creating what seems like project documentation busywork may feel tedious and unimportant.
However, it’s critically important to invest sufficient time upfront fully detailing and planning out your business processes, requirements, customization needs and rollout approach in an SAP blueprint before configuration work begins.
Why is the blueprint so vital? Consider these key benefits:
Avoids Costly Re-Work: Rushing into SAP setup without a detailed blueprint often results in misconfigurations that don’t support the business, leading to frustrating and expensive rework down the road. Invest now, save later.
Supports Lasting Change: The blueprint process examines where business changes are needed, enabling leadership to plan effective change management programs and training to support new processes.
Reduces Risk: Careful blueprinting uncovers gaps, risks and dependencies early so they can be addressed proactively, avoiding business disruption.
Optimizes SAP: Mapping processes and requirements ensures you configure the optimal SAP solution to maximize business value vs. forcing adoption of less suitable out-of-box functionality.
Drives Adoption: Involving stakeholders in blueprinting builds support and adoption for process changes. They help shape solutions instead of having unfamiliar systems forced upon them.
Achieves Goals: The scope, guiding parameters, objectives and success metrics captured in the blueprint keep the project on track to deliver real business outcomes vs. just implementing software.
Saves Money: Studies show companies that invest in detailed blueprints reduce overall implementation costs by up to 30% and see faster payback on their SAP investment.
In one cautionary tale, Australia’s Northern Territory government rushed their $7.2 million asset management SAP project, only to have costs balloon to $70 million and still only achieve an 11% fit to business needs. Don’t let this happen to you!
The Optimal Makeup of a Blueprinting Team
Creating an effective blueprint requires a diverse project team combining strong process prowess, subject matter expertise, technical know-how, leadership engagement and change management skills.
Some key roles include:
Process Architects: Model processes, moderate sessions, document flows
Requirements Analysts: Detail feature needs, data touches
Change Advocates: Assess change impacts, guide adaptations
Subject Matter Experts: Provide detailed process understanding
Enterprise Architects: Take holistic view to needs and strategy
Executive Sponsors: Set vision, clear roadblocks strategically
Under-resourcing blueprinting risks overlooking requirements or building specs based on inaccurate process data that derails downstream efforts. The costs of backtracking are high.
However, finding the right skills balance is also key – deep process purity without broader perspective risks defining requirements supporting inefficient legacy processes vs. envisioning transformed approaches SAP enables.
How to Create an Effective SAP Business Blueprint
Now that you appreciate the importance of blueprinting for SAP success, let’s explore the recommended process for creating a complete, accurate blueprint.
The steps below don‘t have to be strictly sequential and many activities can occur in parallel, but these represent the major elements you’ll want to cover.
Step 1: Map Current Business Processes
Conduct discovery sessions, interviews and workshops with stakeholders across business units to fully understand and document how business processes currently work – and don’t work – with your legacy systems.
Identify customer and regulatory requirements and constraints. Call out pain points users experience today to target with process improvements during implementation.
Tools like swim lane diagrams and flowcharts are useful for visually mapping processes end-to-end. Capture this content in a process inventory catalogue you can reference throughout the project.
For example, leading footwear manufacturer DELGADO recently underwent an SAP implementation. Their process architects mapped over 200 as-is processes – many with inefficiencies tied to the limitations of their aging, highly customized manufacturing software.
This detailed process inventory highlighted automation opportunities with SAP to reduce manual efforts. It also revealed process variation across DELGADO’s global plants – informing their regional vs global process standardization strategy.
Step 2: Define the Future Vision
Next, define the overall business goals you want to achieve with the new SAP platform and map the optimized business processes that will get you there.
Compare legacy processes vs. proposed future state flows to identify process changes, training needs and business change impacts required to support the transformations SAP will enable.
Step 3: Detail System Requirements
With future state processes defined, detail out the functionality, data flows, security rules, reporting needs, integrations, and configurations you’ll require in your SAP system to support those business processes and business change efforts.
Note any gaps where you may need to build custom solutions like extensions, forms, or workflows to achieve the desired functionality. This becomes the basis for your configuration and development workstreams.
Step 4: Establish Guiding Parameters
To steer decisions throughout implementation, establish the key principles, success metrics, constraints, assumptions and risk factors that will guide the teams.
For example, you may set guiding principles like leveraging SAP best practices over customizations where possible or taking an agile, iterative implementation approach.
Or you may set risk tolerance thresholds – such as defining any project timeline delays over 2 weeks as high severity risks to trigger mitigation meetings.
Step 5: Develop Project Plan
With a clear picture of future state processes, system capabilities required, and guiding parameters, map out the detailed project plan including workstreams, activities, timeframes, resource needs, costs, milestones, quality gates and interdependencies.
Build in plenty of user review cycles and testing milestones to ensure you end up with a well-vetted design and configuration. Assign owners to address identified risk factors and create contingency plans if needed.
According to expert benchmarks, teams spend 5-11% of total SAP implementation costs on blueprinting for small projects, 7-15% for midsize implementations and 10-20% enterprise-wide programs. Factoring these investments in upfront provides substantial savings and accelerated ROI later.
Step 6: Review and Validate with Stakeholders
Conduct collaborative review sessions with both the SAP implementation team AND key user representatives from all business units to validate that the documented processes, requirements, plans and priorities fully meet diverse needs.
Incorporate feedback into an updated blueprint and secure sign-off from both the technical and business sides to lock-in agreement and buy-in to proceed.
Step 7: Use as Implementation Guide
With the formalized SAP blueprint signed off, it now serves as THE guide governing all downstream implementation work.
Set up a structured change control process for submitting, reviewing and approving any changes to the blueprint with representation from both technical and business stakeholders.
Use the blueprint actively in solution design sessions, system configuration, testing, training development, go-live planning and even post-implementation optimization. It’s your map to success.