Our best practices at PwC for a successful global roll-out of S/4HANA templates

In recent years, many companies have embarked on the transformation of their existing SAP ERP systems to the new S/4HANA platform or have already successfully completed this process. These solutions typically support part of or all of a company’s business operations.

The next step for many ongoing S/4HANA transformations: global roll-out

Initially, transformations are often started by designing and implementing a so-called template for a pilot company to test changes within the new process model, the new S/4HANA functionalities or the standardisation of the new process and data architecture in practice.

Many companies are now facing the next step of their S/4HANA transformation journey: the global roll-out of their S/4HANA template across the entire corporate network. These global deployment initiatives focus on rolling out the created ERP template to all companies within a group.

Global S/4HANA roll-outs succeed when treated as a transformation system – not a sequence of projects

Organisations that achieve predictable, fast, and scalable deployments share five strategic characteristics:

For C‑level leaders, global S/4HANA roll-outs are a strategic lever

The most successful organisations treat roll-outs as a core enterprise capability – supported by a clear operating model, strong governance, and disciplined execution – rather than a one-off transformation effort. They use the global roll-out of their digital backbone

• to harmonise processes without sacrificing local requirements
• to realise value faster across regions
• to reduce long-term complexity and operating costs

Our approach for global S/4HANA roll-outs

For this purpose, the PwC network has developed an established approach, specific organisational structures and suitable tools that ensure a cost-optimised, efficient, and quality-assured global roll-out. These services are provided centrally and seamlessly complement the local roll-out activities that are essential for every legal entity within the company.

Key components of our playbook for efficient S/4HANA roll-out management include:

1. Industrialised roll-out using delivery factories for testing, migration and training
2. Roll-out governance with delivery hub structures and responsibilities
3. Integrated program planning to manage the critical implementation path

1. Component: Roll-out delivery factories

Introduction of the industrialised delivery factory model to increase efficiency during a global S/4HANA template roll-out and ensure optimal scalability of activities and capacities throughout the entire program. In particular, repetitive, mostly cross-functional activities within the roll-out – such as solution testing, data migration or user training – are bundled into delivery factories and made available to the respective roll-outs as support services.

This factory model can be outsourced to external consultancies based on a clear Statement of Work (SoW) with defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which enables the commercial planning of S/4HANA template and roll-out budgets, as well as the needs-based scalability of capacity requirements throughout the roll-out period.

Delivery factories can be embedded and integrated into program governance, thereby providing a significant efficiency lever in the execution of large-scale S/4HANA transformations.

2. Component: Governance with delivery hub structures

A program organisation for the efficient and orderly execution of global roll-outs requires a coordinated and tiered governance structure. This should not only include central units for program control and integration management, as well as local units for managing the roll-out at the site but also provide for a so-called ‘intermediate layer’ at regional level.

These roll-out hub structures should assume coordinating tasks in the respective time zones, such as PAC, EMEA and ASIA, from the perspective of corporate functions, PMO services or change management support, thereby enabling the local roll-out teams to be relieved of some of the burden, whilst maintaining greater proximity to local operations.

This reduces roll-out costs through economies of scale, opens potential for scaling roll-out capacities and ensures consistent, sustainable management in line with the agreed roll-out methodology.

3. Component: Integrated program planning

To plan and manage complex and highly integrated S/4HANA programs effectively throughout their entire duration, comprehensive and integrated planning is required, which is typically fed consistently from various operational plans relating to the template, roll-outs and other relevant areas. In addition to the key phases, areas and work packages, this must, in particular, map out the milestones, key deliverables and mutual dependencies in terms of both content and timing.

Furthermore, taking critical resource pools into account is essential for planning that meets both time and quality requirements, in order to ensure a comprehensive assessment of the relevant control dimensions. Through timely monitoring of the aforementioned planning elements in line with the actual degree of completion, valid transparency and a forward-looking view of the actual critical implementation path within the program can be achieved.

In this context, customers often use collaboration tools to map this out system-supported and to ensure collaboration between the respective program teams along the defined dependencies. This ensures that, in large and complex S/4HANA programs, potential deviations or bottlenecks are identified at an early stage and appropriate mitigation measures can be initiated to reduce delays or similar issues.