The promise of migrating to SAP S/4HANA is tantalizing, with streamlined processes, real-time insights, and a foundation for future innovation. However, beneath the myriad benefits of digital transformation lies a potential pitfall that can create costly headaches: unclean and too much data.
There is No Clean Core Without Clean Data
SAP’s vision for a Clean Core and Composable Enterprise promises agility, lower total cost of operation (TCO), faster upgrades, and innovation-readiness. But here’s the reality: There’s no Clean Core without clean data.
A Clean Core requires SAP S/4HANA to run on a lean, standardized digital foundation—free of unnecessary customizations and bloated legacy structures. However, companies often migrate massive volumes of outdated, redundant, or poor-quality data during their digital transformation, sabotaging the very foundation they’re trying to build.
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On the other hand, Composable Enterprise relies on modular, interoperable components like standardized business objects and APIs to create adaptable business processes. However, fragmented or inconsistent data undermines this vision from the start. Organizations can’t build flexible, future-ready systems if their information blocks don’t fit.
Clean Data with JiVS IMP
This is where Data Migration International (DMI) and its platform JiVS IMP help. With over 3,000 pre-configured SAP and non-SAP business objects, JiVS supports true data modularity. It aligns perfectly with SAP’s Clean Core and Composable Enterprise strategies by ensuring only relevant and high-quality data enters S/4HANA—while the rest is securely archived, easily accessible, and fully compliant.
Moreover, JiVS IMP’s capabilities help organizations create a simplified, cloud-ready architecture that empowers companies to innovate faster, reduce costs, stay compliant, and tap into the full value of analytics and AI.
JiVS IMP’s comprehensive suite of data quality, master data management, and data governance capabilities enables businesses to:
Discover and Profile Data: JiVS allows organizations to gain a comprehensive understanding of their existing data landscape, identifying inconsistencies, duplicates, and missing values.
Standardize and Harmonize Data: The platform facilitates data cleansing, standardization, and harmonization, ensuring data consistency across the organization.
Establish Data Governance: JiVS enables the implementation of robust data governance policies and procedures, ensuring data quality and compliance throughout the data lifecycle.
Automate Data Migration: By automating data cleansing and transformation processes, JiVS streamlines the migration process, minimizing errors and reducing project timelines.
Maintain Data Integrity: JiVS continuously monitors data quality, ensuring ongoing data integrity and preventing data decay.
Data Historization: Companies can move legacy or inactive data from live systems into a structured, accessible, and cost-effective archive so that only relevant data remains in the operational system.
Organizations leveraging JiVS can proactively address data challenges, ensuring a smooth and successful S/4HANA migration. This translates to a cleaner core, reduced implementation costs, and faster time-to-value. Furthermore, the platform helps organizations to:
- Separate operational from historical data
- Reduce data volume by up to 90%
- Clean, enrich, and standardize what gets migrated
- Maintain 100% audit-proof access to legacy data
- Shut down legacy systems safely and compliantly
Finally, you can’t have a Clean Core without clean data, as clean, structured, and intelligent data is the cornerstone of SAP’s future-ready enterprise vision.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Legacy systems and customizations lead to high technical debt. Many companies view migrating to SAP S/4HANA as an expensive proposition due to their existing complex and costly IT landscape. Additionally, factors like data overload and efficiency due to excess or legacy data, slow innovation, and a lack of agility as companies struggle to balance operational continuity with innovation and regulatory compliance challenges further hamper the migration process. Moreover, customizations and complex data landscapes increase long-term costs and reduce ROI.
Achieving a clean core is impossible when burdened with legacy data. The clean core principle, a cornerstone of S/4HANA implementation, emphasizes minimizing customizations and leveraging standard functionalities. This approach fosters agility, reduces maintenance costs, and ensures seamless integration with future updates. However, the “data baggage” from unclean data compromises the integrity of the new system and leads to operational inefficiencies and inflated project costs.
Information management platforms like JiVS are crucial to ensure clean data. The transition to S/4HANA often exposes the hidden complexities of existing data landscapes. Organizations grapple with fragmented data silos, inconsistent master data, and a lack of standardized data governance. Without addressing these issues upfront, the migration process becomes a Herculean task, prone to delays, errors, and budget overruns.
