Beautiful, colorful S/4 migration

Migration to S/4 Hana is necessary for all SAP customers in the medium term, as SAP will end maintenance for the solution currently in use on December 31, 2025. Many companies have already started the migration or are in the preparatory stages.

All these companies have one thing in common: they talk about a "color" method. But although they talk about the same "color," the content is different for each company. A greenfield approach at company A is not necessarily identical to a greenfield approach at company B.

Confection often does not fit

In addition, only a few companies can be found in the SAP scenarios; the requirements and also the systems are too individual for that. This is proven by the following facts, which come from a joint survey by Datavard and West Trax.

Over 2,000 existing customers were surveyed: More than 47 percent of the applications in SAP systems are in-house developments. 70 percent of in-house developments are not used or are obsolete. 30 percent of in-house developments could be replaced by standard. 75 percent of the data has quality deficits or is unused. 60 percent of existing customizing is no longer actively used.

This means that over 90 percent of established business processes are not transparent to decision-makers, project managers, project staff and partners. Upcoming decisions are made based purely on a gut feeling and possible simplifications are not taken into account. (Source: West Trax Benchmark and Datavard database: 2000+ benchmark analyses in 15 industries).

System analysis helps define project scope

It is therefore recommended to perform a technical analysis in advance and define the project scope before deciding on an approach. This is solely a matter of defining the scope of the project. Five guiding questions help here:

1. To what extent is process reengineering to S/4 Hana desired? On the way to S/4, some process adjustments are necessary, such as the introduction of the Material Ledger for material valuation, the introduction of the Business Partners and the new asset accounting.

These adjustments are technically oriented, as they are required due to the new S/4 architecture. As long as no business processes need to be changed, we speak of a technically motivated project that is equivalent to an upgrade. As a rule, this starts with a lean system copy, which copies the repository and customizing without master and transaction data.

2. Do you want to migrate all or only part of your data? Based on our data quality analysis, we recommend migrating only the actively used data to S/4 Hana via a selective migration. The data left behind can then be retained for future audits using a decommissioning procedure (data decommissioning).

3. Do you want to run your system "on cloud" or "on premise" in the future? A switch to S/4 Hana raises a number of questions: Who will manage the hardware and operate the software in the future? Which software version should be used - on premise or cloud? This depends on the desired flexibility.

4. Are you planning a system landscape optimization as part of the changeover? If only a productive SAP system is used, this topic is not relevant.

However, at least two SAP systems should be used productively, and if merging the two systems makes sense from a cost and business perspective, we suggest answering this question in detail.

5. How have you planned your rollout strategy? The rollout strategy depends on how the company and IT are set up. Mini go-lives with only one or a maximum of three business units at a time are also possible.

Decide based on facts

In our experience, over 70 percent of SAP ERP legacy customers will answer one of the questions in such a way that a system upgrade (system conversion) is not a solution for them.

SAP customers are therefore well advised to perform a thorough system check and plan the migration based on this. Such a database allows a fact-based decision and tailored solutions.

Data cleansing, data quality enhancement, retention of inactive data and system landscape optimization should be considered as an essential service package.

By selectively moving only relevant data, customers report savings of up to 60 percent in project costs by eliminating upstream archiving projects or near-zero downtime solutions, as well as in hardware equipment due to smaller database sizes.