By 2025, SAP will no longer sup­port its exist­ing ERP busi­ness suite, which is dri­ving many orga­ni­za­tions to con­sid­er the move to the next-gen­er­a­tion SAP S/4HANA sys­tem. Yet these orga­ni­za­tions are con­cerned about the effort, time, and cost that it will require to make the move. And the SAP users with­in these orga­ni­za­tions have ques­tions about the what, how, and why.

ASUG sat down to ask the authors of Migrat­ing to SAP S/4HANA from SAP Press to share their insight about the migra­tion process and what it will mean for SAP cus­tomers. Whether you’re ready for a sys­tem con­ver­sion (lift and shift), new imple­men­ta­tion (green­field), or land­scape trans­for­ma­tion (hybrid of brown­field and lift and shift), Frank Dens­born (left) and Kim Math­äß (right) empha­sized that prepa­ra­tion is key for a suc­cess­ful migration.

Sharon: Can you sum­ma­rize the three typ­i­cal migra­tion scenarios?

Frank: The book dis­cuss­es each migra­tion sce­nario — sys­tem con­ver­sion, new imple­men­ta­tion, and land­scape trans­for­ma­tion. And there are pre-checks to help you decide which sce­nario is best for your organization.

Let’s start with the sys­tem con­ver­sion, where you con­vert a sin­gle SAP ERP sys­tem into an SAP S/4HANA, on-premise sys­tem. This sce­nario is also known as the brown­field approach. With this approach, we think about bring­ing exist­ing busi­ness process­es to the new plat­form. Any cus­tom code, sys­tem iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, and exist­ing data you have will still be avail­able after the implementation. 

The next sce­nario is re-engi­neer­ing your cur­rent sys­tem. This is a com­plete­ly new imple­men­ta­tion of SAP S/4HANA, also referred to as a green­field imple­men­ta­tion. So, that means you’re either com­ing from a non-SAP sys­tem or, if you’re from an exist­ing SAP ERP sys­tem, you’ll be start­ing fresh. With this sce­nario, you can choose either an on-premise or cloud implementation. 

And then we have the land­scape trans­for­ma­tion, which falls between the first two sce­nar­ios. This also requires re-engi­neer­ing, but it’s much more cus­tomer-tai­lored, where var­i­ous SAP ERP sys­tems are inte­grat­ed into a shared SAP S/4HANA sys­tem. You can per­form a sys­tem con­sol­i­da­tion, trans­fer an orga­ni­za­tion­al unit, or trans­fer a spe­cif­ic appli­ca­tion area. With this sce­nario, you also can choose either an on-premise or cloud implementation. 

Sharon: What sup­port tools and guide­lines are avail­able from SAP to help cus­tomers before, dur­ing, and after their implementation 

Kim: SAP has lots of tools for lots of dif­fer­ent use cas­es, some­times even var­i­ous tools for the same use case. We have ded­i­cat­ed tools for the three sce­nar­ios Frank just discussed.

One that I real­ly like is the SAP Trans­for­ma­tion Nav­i­ga­tor. Although it is not direct­ly relat­ed to any of the three sce­nar­ios, it gives you an idea of your cur­rent land­scape and pro­vides a frame­work for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. It ana­lyzes each indi­vid­ual com­po­nent, so you know what you have and what you need to do if you’re start­ing your path to SAP S/4HANA.

Once you have a clear vision of which sce­nario your orga­ni­za­tion will adopt, then the first tech­ni­cal tool you should use is the SAP Readi­ness Check. This tool scans your cur­rent sys­tem and tells you exact­ly what changes you need to make to go from an SAP ERP sys­tem to an SAP S/4HANA system. 

Anoth­er use­ful tool is the SAP Soft­ware Update Man­ag­er, Data­base Migra­tion Option (SUM/DMO). This tool has tra­di­tion­al­ly been used to bring ERP sys­tems to ERP on HANA, but it has been enhanced to now do a sys­tem con­ver­sion to SAP S/4HANA. The enhance­ment is known as the SAP S/4HANA Migra­tion Cock­pit, which is used for new imple­men­ta­tions and is avail­able in the cloud and on-premise.

If you’re doing a land­scape trans­for­ma­tion, you can use the SAP Land­scape Trans­for­ma­tion tool, which main­tains full data con­sis­ten­cy and integri­ty with­in migra­tions and conversions. 

Sharon: What should cus­tomers know about han­dling deploy­ments in the cloud ver­sus on-premise or in hybrid situations 

Kim: For an on-premise deploy­ment, you would down­load the soft­ware and run it on your com­put­er. With a deploy­ment on the cloud, you sim­ply use your brows­er to access it. That’s the sim­ple answer, but of course, there’s a lot more that goes into it. The Roadmap View­er tool offers dif­fer­ent imple­men­ta­tion road maps with more detail.

With an on-premise deploy­ment, you need to be aware of all the oth­er lines of busi­ness and their process­es and con­fig­u­ra­tions. When we think of on-premise, we think of an emp­ty sys­tem where you can pick and choose everything. 

For a cloud deploy­ment, how­ev­er, we give you pre­con­fig­ured busi­ness process­es. It doesn’t mean you have to adopt these exact­ly, but they give you a jump-start into the imple­men­ta­tion project. You can still change cer­tain pieces of the con­fig­u­ra­tion, but you don’t have to go through com­plete blue­print­ing, because most of what you’ll need is already there. 

Sharon: How can cus­tomers run their imple­men­ta­tions with­out dis­rupt­ing dai­ly business? 

Frank: One of the rea­sons we wrote this book was to address cus­tomers’ con­cerns about project exe­cu­tion. We want to help our cus­tomers keep dai­ly busi­ness dis­rup­tions as low as possible.

With that, I would say a dis­rup­tion in process­es is some­times what our cus­tomers want. This type of dis­rup­tion is not neg­a­tive, it’s more like get­ting new busi­ness process­es that include enhance­ments like arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine learning. 

In terms of dis­rup­tion of dai­ly work out­side of the sys­tem, we know that cus­tomers need their sys­tem up and run­ning ²⁴⁄₇ espe­cial­ly for man­u­fac­tur­ing and pro­duc­tion. When think­ing about steps to take, I’d start by say­ing be pre­pared. Have a good project plan, have your process­es in place, and test the migra­tion itself. 

If you’re doing a new imple­men­ta­tion, do so with a sand­box sys­tem. If you’re doing a sys­tem con­ver­sion, have a shad­ow sys­tem that you use to keep the busi­ness dis­rup­tion as low as possible. 

Sharon: How much time and effort are required for train­ing and test­ing when going through the imple­men­ta­tion process? What tips do you have for train­ing teams on the new system?

Kim: It depends. Let’s start with test­ing, because there are many vari­ables. You should always have three tests start­ing with a tech­ni­cal one to see what kind of issues you’ll find. Next, you should have one good func­tion­al test. For both of these tests, you should allow two to four weeks of test­ing time. And then the third test is a dry-run test, where you have a real run through of a real copy of the pro­duc­tion system.

For train­ing, I would rec­om­mend open­SAP. Com­pared with the tra­di­tion­al class­room-style train­ing from SAP Uni­ver­si­ty, which is still avail­able all over the world, open­SAP cours­es are typ­i­cal­ly two- to four-week long, top­ic-focused online sessions. 

They’re prob­a­bly not ide­al if you want to be an in-depth ABAP object-ori­ent­ed devel­op­er. But if you want to know as a project man­ag­er for exam­ple, every­thing about a new imple­men­ta­tion, the open­SAP cours­es are very helpful.

Sharon: What should cus­tomers expect when it comes to set­ting up their user inter­faces with SAP Fiori, as well as for oth­er reports and ana­lyt­ics? How hard is it to make report­ing and dash­boards self-serve for the organization? 

Frank: Our com­plete cloud SAP S/4HANA offer­ing is con­sum­able via the web, and it always includes SAP Fiori.

When you host a sys­tem using the on-premise ver­sion of SAP S/4HANA, you’ll need to set up a front-end serv­er. The SAP Fiori screens, based on UI5, can run in any brows­er and on any device, and they’re scalable.

So, the big ques­tion is, do you need SAP Fiori? We high­ly rec­om­mend it for some on-premise sce­nar­ios. It’s basi­cal­ly some­thing you must look at on the IT side. If you’re using SAP S/4HANA cloud, there is noth­ing you need to do because it’s already set up. 

As for the end-user side of SAP Fiori, we’ve made it so that it is eas­i­ly con­sum­able. You won’t need to down­load a man­u­al or under­go train­ing. All the func­tions of SAP Fiori, includ­ing ana­lyt­i­cal reports and trans­ac­tions in SAP S/4HANA, are very easy to use. 

Sharon: What should cus­tomers plan for when they are includ­ing inte­gra­tions between SAP S/4HANA and oth­er sys­tems includ­ing those for HR, sales and mar­ket­ing, pro­cure­ment, and accounting?

Kim: We tried to keep inte­gra­tion efforts to a min­i­mum, so you don’t real­ly need plan for any­thing. If you have mod­i­fied APIs, you’ll need to look at those of course. Oth­er­wise, the SAP inter­faces are kept stable. 

If you’re going for any of the new solu­tions, such as SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, that’s some­thing you’ll have to inte­grate. But the good news is that we also have ded­i­cat­ed chap­ters on how this works in the book. 

Most of the cloud prod­ucts are already inte­grat­ed out of the box, so you don’t need to plan for any­thing, unless you have a two-tier ERP and want to inte­grate it with on-premise. Then you’ll need to con­sid­er any mod­i­fi­ca­tions as well as how many satel­lite sys­tems you have. 

Sharon: What does the IT team need to do and what resources are avail­able to man­age cyber­se­cu­ri­ty dur­ing and after migration?

Frank: SAP has always treat­ed the secu­ri­ty of the sys­tems that we are run, as well as the data that we store as a very impor­tant thing. In terms of the migra­tion to SAP S/4HANA, the IT team doesn’t need to do any­thing oth­er than use the tools that we offer. We have safe­guards in place for the entire sys­tem, whether it’s on-prem or in the cloud. 

Sharon: In your opin­ion, what does it take to have a suc­cess­ful migration?

Kim: The most impor­tant thing is prepa­ra­tion. No mat­ter which sce­nario you choose, the more and the bet­ter you pre­pare, the eas­i­er it is. The sim­pler answer is to read our book.

Sharon: Can you sum­ma­rize the book in one or two sentences? 

Frank: This book serves every­one — our cus­tomers or part­ners in busi­ness, IT, or project man­age­ment — to make their migra­tion jour­ney suc­cess­ful. Whether you have to, or because you want to start your jour­ney to SAP S/4HANA, this book is a resource to learn about all of your options. 

Migrat­ing to SAP S/4HANA is avail­able now from SAP Press. ASUG mem­bers, please log into your account for dis­count details. If you want to devote more time to SAP S/4HANA, you can also catch the on-demand web­cast with the authors of the book, The Why and How of Migrat­ing to SAP S/4HANA.