Schott AG is considering its SAP S/4HANA transformation from all aspects, from code and processes, down to authorizations for its SAP S/4HANA migration.
In this interview, Thomas Frey (SAP Authorizations Consultant, SAST SOLUTIONS) explains the requirements you need to keep track of when rolling out SAP S/4HANA – and what you must avoid at all costs.
Takeda, Japan’s largest pharmaceuticals company, manages its business processes in a global, heterogeneous IT landscape. From SAP ERP to SAP Cloud applications, employees work at a variety of levels, depending on their involvement in processes, and therefore need access to a number of systems. As a result, the company has to constantly review conflicting authorizations to meet strict compliance requirements, such as segregation of duties (SoD). Most standard software solutions on the market only monitor SoD conflicts and risks in a single system, however, which led the company to search for an end-to-end solution.
Technical SAP users that have extensive authorizations like SAP_ALL pose a heightened security risk. Vulnerabilities can endanger interfaces and paralyze processes. As such, external auditors are intensifying their focus on authorization management. One of our customers – a company in the energy sector – recently faced the challenge of having to restrict the authorizations of its technical users (batch processing/RFC interfaces).
One of our long-standing customers, the largest forklift manufacturer in Europe, uses the SAST SUITE for its SAP authorization management alongside a variety of IT services from akquinet AG. As part of a compliance project, the SAST Consulting team was commissioned to redesign and re-engineer all SAP authorizations for nearly 900 users in Germany. In this guest commentary from Sascha Heckmann, together with external SAP consultant Bernhard Radermacher, he tells how the “Ticket Monitor” a custom-developed add-on for the tried and tested SAST Safe Go-Live Management helped the project become a full success.
A municipal utility company recently implemented a new authorization concept to optimize maintenance, transparency, and user access. The implementation process included an assessment of whether all the existing user master records were really necessary. A major project like implementing a new authorization concept often pays for itself when inactive user master records are classified and restricted, reducing license fees as a result.
The upgrade from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA also involves a changeover to a new technology. This offers new possibilities thanks, to the increased speed of the SAP HANA in-memory database, as well as an improved user experience through the new FIORI UI. At the same time, however, the implementation of SAP S/4HANA also presents many enterprises with the difficult challenge of planning and executing their migration projects correctly: existing processes and role concepts have to be reconsidered.
The SAP S/4HANA software suite represents a cutting-edge cornerstone for the digitalization of enterprises and is increasingly being used by both SMEs and large corporations. However, the implementation of and migration to SAP S/4HANA also entail increasing complexity in system administration and management. Our specialized software tools enable you to master this project successfully.
When setting up an SAP S/4HANA system landscape, you have the option of establishing a front-end system as the central, superordinate system that accesses different back-end systems. To do this, you have to consider and logically design many factors in advance. In addition to the technical prerequisites, the role and authorization concepts have to be revised. But how can you adapt authorization management in an SAP S/4HANA system with little effort?
Companies that use SAP are required to describe controls and procedures in documents that reflect the current status of the system and the general compliance guidelines. The concepts for framework and application authorizations are essential elements of this documentation, for both internal requirements and annual reviews by external auditors. Good documentation templates can help get you where you need to go much more quickly.
With the economic restrictions and challenges these are creating, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be the determining factor in both business and our personal lives. And as far as we currently know, this situation will continue for quite some time. What companies need now is adjusted SAP authorization management for times of crisis, to ensure that employees can take over important tasks from colleagues as quickly as possible and without constraints on day-to-day business.
