5 steps to governing a global process template in SAP

We've had a fantastic Accenture resource on site for the past few days, helping us develop an SAP Solution Manager deployment roadmap for our organization. For those of you who have heard of Solution Manager (or Solman, as it's lovingly nicknamed) you know it's a huge collection of many different capabilities, and can be overwhelming to those organizations first dipping their toes in the tool. One of our key learnings was the list of 5 (easy?) steps to creating and governing a global process template.

1. Create a Global Template project in Solution Manager and populate it with your favorite business process framework. (SAP provides one, if your company doesn't already have one established.)
2. For us, we use ARIS as our business process modeling tool. So once we have our business process framework in Solman, we'll export the template to ARIS to align our global business processes and detail with the business.
   
3. Once the business processes are complete and validated, they are exported back out of ARIS into Solution Manager. Ta da! Global template! It's now ready to populate with globally-relevant documentation, like configuration rationale.
4. Once the global process template is complete, it's realized through Implementation projects. These projects are set up to put the necessary SAP technologies in place. When an Implementation project is created, it automatically utilizes the processes within the Global Template.
   
5. After an Implementation project is complete, a Maintenance project is created for break / fix, enhancement, and other support purposes.

Of course, the hardest part is aligning on your company's global business processes in steps 1 and 2, which is the whole point of creating and governing a global template in the first place.