S/4 conversion

Beyond a variety of technical requirements and issues, the benefits for the department only emerge once the conversion is complete in terms of content.

In the area of finance and controlling, two essential prerequisites must be met in order to complete the transformation to S/4 and thus take advantage of S/4's innovations: The new general ledger must be designed and the conversion carried out.

This can be done before the entire technical conversion as a precursor project or in the course of the conversion itself. If the changeover is realized together with the conversion, the complexity of the step decreases, but only basic functionalities of the new general ledger are activated.

The change of accounts payable and receivable to business partners is a mandatory part of the conversion. Here the effort depends on the previous way of implementation of the accounts payable and receivable and can vary over a wide range.

It is important to know whether third-party systems are supplied with accounts payable and receivable by the central SAP ERP - in this case, the changeover may also affect these systems. The technical aspect of cleansing aggregate and index tables is transparent for the business side in many places.

Here it is to be examined whether own developments write access to these tables, because this is no longer possible in the future. A reading access is further given by virtual views.

For the business side, the transactions that change are important in the consideration. For example, these can only be used with WebDynpro or Fiori. A usage analysis, e.g., using Alegri's Optimization Services, should be performed beforehand and suitable training measures planned.

For the changeover, it is essential that capacity is considered among key users. This can be reduced by a good test concept and documented test cases.