S/4 Hana beyond Technology

Less out of pure ignorance or stubbornness, but more because the operational business or ongoing projects take up all internal and external resources and perhaps even the (honor) fear of an S/4 Hana consolidation project is too great.

Heterogeneity and media breaks

It is not uncommon for companies to use grown, very heterogeneous system landscapes, that even production or sales companies of a company run on different systems.

The collation of data and the associated media discontinuities from the individual systems are error-prone weak points. In addition, inefficiency, redundancy and obsolete ways of thinking in systems rather than processes do not form a basis for profound growth.

SAP is counteracting this and, with a switch to S/4 Hana, promises a path for companies that want to be securely positioned for the future. However, the fact that the step to S/4 not only means a new field technically, but also has cultural implications, is not an obstacle, but a great advantage. Disruption is therefore actually more than just a buzzword, namely also an opportunity.

With S/4 Hana, companies are laying the foundation for leveraging new analytical capabilities. For example, S/4 provides users with real-time operational reporting that is used for optimal decision support in the system without having to transfer the data to a separate data warehouse or BI tool.

It is also important to note that with S/4 Hana, companies no longer have to think in terms of systems, but rather in terms of processes and, consequently, in terms of cross-departmental services.

End-to-end

Lead to Cash, for example, includes the potential customer's first touch point in a marketing system, lead nurturing in CRM, and downstream financial processes.

Everything will be end-to-end: Heterogeneous system landscapes can hardly keep up here due to the high effort of master data maintenance and its reconciliation as well as the maintenance-intensive nature of the interfaces. But this also means that workflows will change and employees from different departments will work more closely together in the future.

The switch to S/4 Hana is inevitable. So is the fact that it will be an immense IT project. GAP analyses and realistic cost estimates are obvious technical basics:

However, just as important, if not more so, is the company's commitment to S/4 and Hana, trust in the partner, and well thought-out change management.

The way is the goal

The guarantors of project success are the employees. Employees who may have been working on R/3 for many years and need to be actively accompanied on the way to S/4.

After all, it is not immediately clear to everyone what the added value of new interfaces can be, why processes are being set up anew, and why the company decided on S/4 and Hana in the first place.

That's why clear areas of responsibility are needed, a partner who knows what he's talking about, and employees who are not afraid of the project and their new jobs but are relaxed about them.

Platform idea and early adopters

S/4 and the Hana platform aim to meet high expectations and, with the new technology, SAP will offer customers and users a platform on which subsequent innovation projects can be mapped and functional opportunities exploited through the use of IoT scenarios or Big Data.

S/4 and Hana offer a lot of potential and, realistically speaking, taking the leap of faith as an early adopter still involves a lot of manual effort and the prerequisite that everything is very well planned - however, innovations do not take place in a linear fashion, but exponentially.

In this respect, SAP CEO Bill McDermott is absolutely right when he says: "change has never moved this fast, and it will never move this slowly again" - and companies that switch to S/4 and Hana earlier are not simply X amount of time ahead of their market competitors, but also the innovative power that they fully exploit with S/4.