This is an ASUG mem­ber blog writ­ten by Vyom Gup­ta, the chief oper­at­ing offi­cer at smartShift. If you are inter­est­ed in sub­mit­ting your own blog, please email asugnews@​asug.​com. 

We live in an age where com­pa­nies are inno­vat­ing faster than ever and embrac­ing dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. A McK­in­sey survey pub­lished last Octo­ber found that com­pa­nies are now three times like­li­er than they were before the COVID cri­sis to con­duct at least 80% of their cus­tomer inter­ac­tions digitally.

IT mod­ern­iza­tion is espe­cial­ly chal­leng­ing in an ever-chang­ing envi­ron­ment due to his­tor­i­cal com­plex­i­ties, the risk of busi­ness dis­rup­tion, and reduced bud­gets. The road ahead can seem daunt­ing, but there is no choice. IT orga­ni­za­tions must respond quick­ly to evolv­ing busi­ness needs. Com­pa­nies must trans­form their ERP sys­tems from mono­lith­ic plat­forms into agile, cloud-native archi­tec­tures if they want to com­pete in a mar­ket where the rate of change is con­tin­u­ous­ly accelerating.

In the con­text of SAP, trans­for­ma­tion projects involve a long time to val­ue ratio, typ­i­cal­ly run­ning mul­ti­ple years. The key ques­tions to ask are:

• How hard is it to migrate my func­tion­al­i­ty and data to SAP S/4HANA?

• What is the path of least resis­tance for get­ting to SAP S/4HANA now?

• Is there a way to take advan­tage of mod­ern­ized enter­prise appli­ca­tions with­out putting your com­pa­ny through years of upheaval and huge costs?

Start­ing with a min­i­mum viable prod­uct (MVP) strat­e­gy reduces the ini­tial time and effort to adopt an SAP S/4HANA plat­form. Plus, a con­tin­u­ous mod­ern­iza­tion strat­e­gy takes care of fre­quent and rou­tine updates and breaks down the mono­lith merges the tra­di­tion­al ​“build and run” into a con­tin­u­ous deliv­ery approach sup­port­ed by DevOps teams. Those who use this approach are adopt­ing automa­tion to man­age change, there­by min­i­miz­ing human error and uti­liz­ing mod­ern, agile project man­age­ment approach­es and tech­niques to opti­mize the con­sump­tion of incre­men­tal changes. 

Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the MVP scope, a min­i­mum set of func­tion­al capa­bil­i­ties for a like-to-like trans­for­ma­tion (poten­tial­ly with some incre­men­tal changes), along with a move from on-premise sys­tems to cloud infra­struc­ture, can be keys to accel­er­at­ing time to val­ue for a trans­for­ma­tion project. It results in expe­dit­ed exe­cu­tion on the iden­ti­fied scope and cre­ates a sol­id foun­da­tion for unlock­ing addi­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ty over time.

In our expe­ri­ence, in nine out of 10 SAP S/4HANA con­ver­sion projects, 95 – 98% of the required changes to make exist­ing code func­tion­al and per­for­mant were pure­ly tech­ni­cal. Only 2 – 5% required func­tion­al re-archi­tec­ture. As it turns out, SAP S/4HANA con­ver­sion projects can be seen as tech­ni­cal trans­for­ma­tion projects, after all. A well-defined road map allows you to mod­ern­ize the sys­tem while unlock­ing the inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies offered by the SAP S/4HANA platform.

The real val­ue that SAP S/4HANA offers is to kick-start dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, mak­ing it eas­i­er to dri­ve future inno­va­tion. In this respect, mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA is not sim­ply an end itself, but is the begin­ning of the con­tin­ued expan­sion of dig­i­tal capa­bil­i­ties with increased automa­tion, with machine intel­li­gence enabling new and changed busi­ness process­es. Using automa­tion and a con­tin­u­ous mod­ern­iza­tion approach to enhance and accel­er­ate your dig­i­tal road map is the best way to main­tain momen­tum and stay ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion. Here are three ways automa­tion and mod­ern­iza­tion can help your company’s SAP S/4HANA journey: 

1. Automa­tion con­tin­ues to be the key to allow ongo­ing sys­tem and infra­struc­ture opti­miza­tion be as trans­par­ent as pos­si­ble to the end-user com­mu­ni­ty. Cus­tom devel­op­ment can be qual­i­ty-gat­ed with auto­mat­ed code health checks and reme­di­a­tion. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, infra­struc­ture can be proac­tive­ly man­aged and mon­i­tored to ensure that out­ages are avert­ed, and capac­i­ty is always scaled and archi­tect­ed to meet chang­ing needs while opti­miz­ing costs.
2. Because soft­ware ver­sion upgrades are a nor­mal part of own­ing and oper­at­ing an SAP plat­form, inno­v­a­tive man­aged ser­vices should always acknowl­edge this and plan for it. Real, con­tin­u­ous mod­ern­iza­tion accounts for ver­sion upgrades of your appli­ca­tions and data­bas­es so that they’re not sep­a­rate projects that need to be bud­get­ed, con­tract­ed, and sep­a­rate­ly imple­ment­ed. Instead, these nec­es­sary works should be man­aged by the same teams respon­si­ble for the day-to-day main­te­nance of the sys­tems, rely­ing on the same automa­tion frame­work to min­i­mize risk, ensure qual­i­ty, and reduce overhead.
3. Per­haps the most excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty pre­sent­ed by SAP S/4HANA is the increased flex­i­bil­i­ty to offload com­mod­i­ty func­tions from the core sys­tem and access them as con­tainer­ized exten­sions in the cloud. Here, automa­tion can once again help by enabling com­pre­hen­sive analy­sis and visu­al­iza­tion to build a microser­vices road map. Tru­ly advanced automa­tion can even gen­er­ate microser­vices based on under­stand­ing your lega­cy code and deploy­ing them to the cloud. A clean core sys­tem and robust, scal­able ser­vices archi­tec­ture allow IT resources to focus more on inno­va­tion and less on won­der­ing whether or not the sys­tem will sup­port their needs.

Get to SAP S/4HANA with MVP, and then inno­vate with the con­tin­u­ous mod­ern­iza­tion approach!

Want to hear about how Milliken’s SAP S/4HANA jour­ney? Reg­is­ter and watch the ASUG Exec­u­tive Exchange ses­sion. You will also hear more from smartShift dur­ing the upcom­ing ASUG Exec­u­tive Exchange Vir­tu­al Round­table on May 5, where the com­pa­ny will dis­cuss how it used automa­tion dur­ing South­West Water Company’s dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. Reg­is­ter to hear the story.