Upgrading to SAP’s latest product generation not only makes sense, but there’s no way around it in most cases. Yet, the process is a complex one. It’s vital to make the right decisions in advance, whether you’re developing the migration strategy or selecting the data you want to migrate. To ensure your transformation journey is efficient, secure and cost-effective, it pays to use a consistent software-based approach to achieve maximum flexibility and transparency.
Paving the way for the digital future
Moving to SAP S/4HANA is crucial to safeguard your company’s digital processes and ensure competitiveness going forward. Recent international crises have shown that it’s essential for companies to remain agile, making the transition more important than ever. Besides ensuring a faster transformation and a quicker return to business as usual, the new SAP ERP business suite provides the basis for adapting business models more effectively and responding to the new requirements of international markets.
The advantages of end-to-end software
An end-to-end software platform makes this complex task easy by establishing a standardized, repetitive and industrialized procedure. Paired with clearly defined responsibilities, the platform provides the means to use the methodology, software and resources efficiently using a factory approach. By parallelizing the export, import and validation phases, you can greatly accelerate the migration to the new system while significantly reducing the system downtime.
This approach offers undeniable added value throughout the entire journey to SAP S/4HANA – from analysis to go-live.
Analysis
Before the project starts, a detailed software-based analysis of the existing systems allows you to gain an overview of the status quo, custom code and existing interfaces. The findings reveal how your systems are used, helping you to decide how to approach the transformation and accelerating the subsequent planning phase.
Planning
During the planning phase, the project scope is estimated and various transformation scenarios are evaluated. The resulting blueprint forms the basis of a tailored SAP S/4HANA roadmap that accurately forecasts the time, materials and costs involved so that you can choose the most suitable scenario.
Implementation
Using an end-to-end software platform provides process integration during the implementation phase. The platform’s flexibility allows for adjustments between migration phases, while continuous testing minimizes the downtime.
Brownfield and greenfield: The color dilemma
SAP customers are looking for alternatives to the conventional implementation scenarios of brownfield and greenfield. The BLUEFIELD approach for selective data migration helps you to determine which data to include and how much automation you want to use. End-to-end software can cover the requirements of brownfield and greenfield seamlessly and offers a range of implementation approaches.
Make the move to the cloud
You can combine the move to SAP S/4HANA with a cloud move to avoid additional overheads and time investment. For the future target system architecture, you have the choice between on-premise, public cloud and SAP RISE private cloud. Before starting the transformation, you should also consider archiving, data tiering and housekeeping activities to streamline your source systems and their data, to reduce the migration runtime and cut hardware costs.
Innovate new business models more quickly
From analysis to go-live, an end-to-end software platform helps you rise to the challenges associated with an SAP S/4HANA migration, reducing runtimes by up to 50 percent. This enables you to take advantage of the real-time ERP suite much faster while expanding your business models to cover cutting-edge technologies like machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT) and robotic process automation (RPA).
In this recent whitepaper, titled How to make your move to SAP S/4HANA a success, find more practical tips for your journey to SAP S/4HANA, as well as the specific dos and don’ts for SAP S/4HANA migrations.
