S/4 implementation in turbo speed: It's the data, stupid!

In 2022, the migration and transformation wave to SAP S/4 Hana will really get rolling. While investments in modernization and innovation have been held back in recent months due to the pandemic, existing SAP customers have tried - most of them probably in vain - to increase the capacities of their product development and hire new employees for this purpose. In this way, they wanted to prepare themselves for what appears to them to be a mammoth project.

Depending on the scope of the S/4 implementation, such a migration process is not a matter of months, but rather a matter of years. In 2020, for example, according to the PWC study "SAP S/4 Hana - Experiences of companies in the DACH region", 45 percent of the companies surveyed expected the project to take between one and three years, while 35 percent expected it to take between three and five years.

Tying up valuable resources, which should actually be used to further develop the company and promote innovation, for such a long period of time makes no economic sense at all. All the more so in the midst of the digital transformation, where innovation and speed are everything.

Scarce resources

Experienced SAP users are currently experiencing déjà vu. When the migration wave from R/2 to R/3 rolled around, the market for new employees with SAP knowledge was virtually empty and the daily rates for external SAP consultants soared to astronomical heights. And those who couldn't or didn't want to keep up in this bidding war had to wait longer than planned for the new system. This is precisely the situation that threatens to repeat itself starting next year. Worse still, such a scenario would come completely at an inopportune time. The pressure on companies to digitize is greater than ever, and any delay could pose a threat to their very existence in the face of international competition.

The upcoming migration and transformation actually offer a perfect opportunity to tidy up and cut out old habits. Many existing SAP customers quickly discover during the project-preparatory inventory that at least 50 percent of the previous company codes and document types are superfluous and have no place in the new S/4 world.

Added to this is a historical data stock, which in the online databases of SAP environments is in the higher and high double-digit terabyte range for many customers and even reaches triple-digit values for some. To this mass of data must be added the stocks in the ADK archives in a similar order of magnitude, whereby their volume must be multiplied by a factor of ten after decompression.

But even that is not all. It is true that the heart of IT beats in SAP for the vast majority of customers. But you can't do without peripheral systems. This is just as true for S/4 environments. In order to handle business processes without media discontinuities and to obtain a global view of them, the peripheral systems and their data also play a decisive role in the new S/4 world. This requires new interfaces as well as the complex transformation of non-SAP data - or does it?

What many existing SAP customers don't know is that historical data doesn't even need to be transferred to the new world and therefore doesn't need to be transformed - either from SAP or non-SAP systems. The only thing that matters after migration is access to it. What many existing SAP customers also don't know is that they don't have to continue operating their legacy systems, whether from SAP or third-party vendors, for this ongoing access, but can shut them down completely. Because what matters is preserving the business context in which the historical information was created, not the legacy systems.

Data including context

I can hear the message, but I don't believe it," the reader may now think. It is precisely because the business context is important that legacy systems are still necessary, if only for legal reasons. Neither tax officials nor auditors recognize data without a business context as conclusive. And to continue to be useful in the new environment, historical information must be transformed, whether it is SAP or non-SAP data.

Compliance and business value from historical data - after all, this is exactly where the time-consuming, cost-driving and innovation-delaying transformation projects come from! And even if it were possible to extract all historical data from legacy systems along with its business context, this would take a year or more in large SAP environments alone. So where would the advantage lie?

It is precisely because of this disbelief that most SAP legacy customers design their tenders for transformation projects to SAP S/4 Hana incorrectly. They are looking for human and technical resources that are lacking in the market. They are looking for solutions to scale back legacy systems as much as possible instead of decommissioning them. They are looking for methods to transform the historical data, at least to a large extent, and migrate it to the new system world, even though they only need to ensure unhindered access to it, including its business context. And they limit the projects to SAP data alone, instead of also considering the historical information from non-SAP systems from the very beginning.

If you want to win the battle for scarce resources and the race against time, you have to think bigger and, above all, think new. What we're looking for is the X factor. Not, of course, the U.S. mystery series from the 1990s or music casting show from the past decade. That's all in the past. Rather, what is wanted is the future, a solution that can help historical information from legacy SAP and third-party systems take on a new life in the new S/4 world - i.e., decommissioning legacy systems completely and thereby saving 80 percent of the IT operating costs required to run them.

So that data migration becomes a purely technical project, because the business departments no longer have to decide which data should be transferred and which should not. As well as the data being extracted together with its business context and stored in an audit-proof manner, and legal security being ensured throughout the entire lifecycle of the historical information until its legally secure deletion at the level of the individual data record. Ultimately, even the largest data sets can be migrated within days or weeks instead of months and years, and the historical data can be separated from the operational data and only the operational data can be transformed to SAP S/4 Hana so that historical SAP data is displayed in S/4 as if it originated there. Then the path to the cloud, but also back again, becomes possible at any time.

Data migration in turbo speed

A solution designed for intelligent data migration from SAP and non-SAP systems is the JiVS IMP platform, the Java-based and thus system-independent platform for information management from Swiss Data Migration International. The platform transfers all data and documents from online databases from a wide range of manufacturers as well as from ADK archives, thereby enabling complete and legally compliant access to historical information in read-only mode.

Thanks to a newly developed turbo process for extracting data and its business context, it is possible, at the push of a button, to extract even quantities of tens, hundreds and more terabytes of information from legacy systems in a very short time in a completely automated manner, transfer them to the platform and, as certified by auditors, store them there in a legally secure manner until they are deleted.

JiVS IMP consistently decouples the application level from the data level in the case of historical information. This allows the formerly separate worlds of operational and historical data to be combined and even united from the user's point of view. This is because users can access historical information from SAP and non-SAP systems from the interface of their choice - SAP GUI or web browser - as if the data and documents were still located in the original systems.

In addition, the platform offers the possibility to halve the overall effort for the changeover to the new software generation S/4 Hana. Because less data volume means up to 80 percent less need for transformation and migration. In addition, thanks to seamless integration, JiVS IMP contributes to a permanent reduction in the total cost of ownership of SAP S/4, whether the new software generation from Walldorf is implemented and operated in the cloud or in the company's own data center. Savings in total cost of ownership of 25 percent are realistic.

Intelligent information management à la JiVS IMP is the right approach to winning the battle against resource scarcity and the race against time in digitization. Because when switching to S/4, the following applies: It's the data and the economy, stupid!