As orga­ni­za­tions in all indus­tries shift toward the cloud and pur­sue dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion ini­tia­tives, busi­ness lead­ers are increas­ing­ly eval­u­at­ing how, when, and why they should move to SAP S/4HANA.

Since 2020, when SAP announced it would extend the end of main­stream main­te­nance for SAP Busi­ness Suite and SAP ERP Cen­tral Com­po­nent (ECC) to 2027, SAP cus­tomers have been ini­ti­at­ing tran­si­tion projects to SAP S/4HANA, with many orga­ni­za­tions opt­ing to com­bine this tran­si­tion with a move to the cloud and select­ing RISE with SAP to do so.

At last month’s ASUG Tech Con­nect, an inau­gur­al con­fer­ence for the SAP user com­mu­ni­ty, dia­logue around dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion flowed freely. One well-attend­ed ses­sion fea­tured lead­ers from three orga­ni­za­tions shar­ing their per­spec­tives on mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA, pro­mot­ing a clean core, and reimag­in­ing busi­ness operations. 

Mod­er­at­ed by Kris­ten Schef­fler, Vice Pres­i­dent of Cus­tomer Engage­ment for SAP North Amer­i­ca, the ses­sion includ­ed insights from Col­in Gesink, SAP Solu­tion Archi­tect at Steel­case, and George Grix, SAP Archi­tect at Steel­case; Tim Nguyen, an ASUG vol­un­teer assist­ing an SAP Util­i­ties cus­tomer on an SAP S/4HANA dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion; and Nick Cor­co­ran, IS Direc­tor, Trans­for­ma­tion Office at Rich Prod­ucts Corporation.

Sim­pli­fy, Stan­dard­ize, and Lever­age SAP

When SAP announced end of main­stream main­te­nance for SAP ECC, that 2027 dead­line served as a ​“jump-start” for Steel­case to pur­sue busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion through over­all SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion and adop­tion, accord­ing to Gesink, who’s already imple­ment­ed SAP S/4HANA Cloud, pri­vate edi­tion, in one busi­ness unit. 

A lead­ing man­u­fac­tur­er of fur­ni­ture for offices, hos­pi­tals, and class­rooms, Steel­case is cur­rent­ly run­ning three main ERP instances on SAP ERP Cen­tral Com­po­nent (ECC), all of which became high­ly cus­tomized across two decades of ABAP development. 

“While the 2027 date was the impe­tus, we’re real­ly look­ing at this project as a green­field trans­for­ma­tion, and as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to sim­pli­fy, stan­dard­ize, and take advan­tage of the tools SAP pro­vides,” Gesink said, not­ing that stronger gov­er­nance has become a pri­or­i­ty for the busi­ness through­out its transformation.

To that end, Gesink and Grix sit on a gov­er­nance board respon­si­ble for eval­u­at­ing every cus­tomiza­tion pro­posed at Steel­case in terms of cost and busi­ness val­ue. Inter­nal­ly, they describe cus­tomiza­tions using a RICE­FW (Reports, Inter­face, Con­ver­sion, Enhance­ments, Forms, and Work­flow) mod­el. ​“A lot of tasks and requests are com­ing our way,” said Gesink. ​“But a strong, even uncom­fort­able lev­el of gov­er­nance is key.” 

That’s not to say there’s no place for ABAP pro­gram­mers at Steel­case these days, added Grix. Though the IT team is upskilling its devel­op­ers to work in SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP), cer­tain ver­ti­cals still lever­age lim­it­ed quan­ti­ties of ABAP code in RISE and con­tin­ue to take advan­tage of busi­ness add-ins (BAdIs) to hook cus­tom enhance­ments to SAP functionality. 

Anoth­er nec­es­sary upskilling, Grix added, has involved shift­ing from Ora­cle-based lega­cy ECC sys­tems to the SAP HANA data­base. ​“In terms of expos­ing our data and cre­at­ing SAP Fiori tiles, that was a real­ly key com­po­nent: upskilling on HANA data­base, and learn­ing how to inter­act with it,” he said.

“We start­ed off think­ing we were going to go with [SAP S/4HANA] on-premis­es, and now we’re going with RISE,” explained Gesink. ​“It just seemed like the log­i­cal answer. All the new inno­va­tions from SAP seem to be mov­ing towards the cloud. We’re tak­ing this big oppor­tu­ni­ty to trans­form our busi­ness, so it seemed a lit­tle coun­ter­in­tu­itive to stay on an on-premis­es data center.”

Scru­ti­niz­ing Every Letter

At Rich Prod­ucts, one of the world’s largest fam­i­ly-owned food com­pa­nies, Cor­co­ran is cur­rent­ly help­ing to lead a glob­al ERP over­haul to re-plat­form nine region­al ERPs onto a uni­fied green­field imple­men­ta­tion of SAP S/4HANA. As part of that effort, he’s sim­i­lar­ly focused on reduc­ing cus­tomiza­tions at Rich Prod­ucts. ​“Any­thing we have to main­tain on an on-going basis is cus­tomiza­tion, in our mind,” he said. 

“We even put a lev­el of scruti­ny around reports,” added Cor­co­ran, who also makes use of a RICE­FW mod­el to eval­u­ate cus­tomiza­tions. ​“For our exist­ing sys­tem we just con­vert­ed, we took 1300 reports and dropped it down to 250 reports that we’re going to deliv­er; most of those we’ll deliv­er through a self-ser­vice ana­lyt­ics mod­el, so we don’t even have to main­tain that going for­ward. I would absolute­ly rec­om­mend you scru­ti­nize every let­ter of RICE­FW, in order to keep that core clean, as intend­ed by SAP.”

Of course, it’s unlike­ly for any orga­ni­za­tion to elim­i­nate cus­tomiza­tions and oper­ate with ful­ly stan­dard­ized tech­nol­o­gy and process­es. ​“The real­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion is, even if you are out-of-the-box and stan­dard in your capa­bil­i­ties with SAP, you’re inte­grat­ing with some oth­er sys­tems in your ecosys­tem,” Cor­co­ran said. ​“The key is to force those cus­tomiza­tions as close to zero as possible.” 

Cor­co­ran has approached busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion at Rich Prod­ucts as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to reimag­ine its busi­ness oper­a­tions, reduce its tech­ni­cal debt, and sim­pli­fy and stan­dard­ize its glob­al tech­nol­o­gy, process­es, and data. Cor­co­ran referred to the company’s approach as ​“RISE lite,” giv­en Rich Prod­ucts’ com­bi­na­tion of on-premis­es licens­es tak­en to its own cloud, cloud-native appli­ca­tions (where required by SAP), and RISE with SAP via the SAP Dig­i­tal Man­u­fac­tur­ing cloud solution. 

“There were mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ences in the capa­bil­i­ties between the on-prem ver­sion and the RISE deliv­ery of that dig­i­tal man­u­fac­tur­ing cloud, which led us to make that choice,” he said. ​“We’re as hybrid as you could pos­si­bly get in this ecosystem.”

Adopt­ing a Fit-to-Stan­dard Model

For Nguyen, cur­rent­ly assist­ing an SAP util­i­ties-indus­try cus­tomer with a brown­field SAP S/4HANA dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion that includes a state-of-the-art Active-Active Pri­vate Cloud sup­port­ing SAP S/4HANA Embed­ded Ana­lyt­ics and Intel­li­gent Asset Man­age­ment, it’s easy to see tech­nol­o­gy mod­ern­iza­tion as a ​“par­a­digm shift,” one that can trans­form an organization’s approach to inte­gra­tion, data man­age­ment, AI, and oth­er areas. 

One of the most sig­nif­i­cant shifts, in his view, has been away from cus­tomiza­tion with­in a company’s core SAP ERP sys­tem and toward devel­op­ment in SAP BTP. ​“Two years ago, I used to think of BTP as a tech­ni­cal plat­form, and it’s not,” remarked Nguyen. ​“That’s part of it, but it’s a full devel­op­ment plat­form, with appli­ca­tions that can talk S/4.”

Nguyen encour­aged atten­dees to ​“find a way to con­vince your busi­ness to adopt a fit-to-stan­dard mod­el,” stress­ing the impor­tance of reduc­ing cus­tomiza­tion with­in ERP sys­tems and instead devel­op­ing out­side the core. ​“What SAP pro­vides, use that, and adapt your busi­ness process­es to fit the stan­dard, so that you can go live successfully.”

Nguyen encour­aged busi­ness lead­ers to explore the SAP Enter­prise Sup­port port­fo­lio of asserts and ser­vices that are in place to help cus­tomers trans­form, adopt, inte­grate, and extend SAP solu­tions, as well as to con­sid­er sup­port plans such as SAP ActiveAt­ten­tion and SAP Max­At­ten­tion to facil­i­tate cloud migrations.

Peo­ple, Process­es, and Technology

All of the cus­tomer speak­ers offered advice to atten­dees on what they should keep in mind before embark­ing on their SAP S/4HANA transformations. 

• Build com­mon process­es: ​“Make sure your data is clean and accu­rate, and doc­u­ment your process­es,” advised Gesink. To dri­ve con­sis­ten­cy and stan­dard­iza­tion through­out Steelcase’s trans­for­ma­tion, the team instan­ti­at­ed glob­al process leads and glob­al process own­ers ear­ly on; giv­en dif­fer­ences in process­es across Steelcase’s three SAP ERP instances, this has been piv­otal, he added.
• Define data own­ers: Cor­co­ran told atten­dees to not only clear­ly define process­es but to also define process own­ers upfront. ​“Do not make those deci­sions on the fly, dur­ing design ses­sions that will wreak hav­oc on your orga­ni­za­tion,” he said. ​“In same vein, define data own­ers. Cre­at­ing new data struc­tures, peo­ple are going to have to make choic­es around what data looks like in a har­mo­nized state and make hard judg­ment calls on what we are leav­ing behind.”
• Invest in change man­age­ment: Nguyen stressed the impor­tance of change man­age­ment for orga­ni­za­tions explor­ing trans­for­ma­tion. ​“Change man­age­ment is not just about using the plat­form; it’s about sys­tem secu­ri­ty, and autho­riz­ing our users,” he said.
• Engage with busi­ness lead­ers: Final­ly, Cor­co­ran empha­sized the need to estab­lish a ​“pull” for the busi­ness to engage with tech­nol­o­gy trans­for­ma­tion. ​“If you make this an IT project, you’re going to fail, and you’re miss­ing a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty for your orga­ni­za­tion,” he said. ​“We have spent a lot of time with our exec­u­tive team, includ­ing senior lead­er­ship from finance and sup­ply chain, show­ing them the val­ue of SAP S/4HANA not only for today but for the future we’re creating.

For more from ASUG Tech Con­nect, read our cov­er­age of the day-one, day-two, and day-three keynotes, exclu­sive ASUG research on SAP BTP, reflec­tions from ASUG­’s Direc­tor of Con­tent Strat­e­gy, an inter­view with Jabil’s IT Direc­tor Cyn­thia Kendall on Jabil’s S/4HANA migra­tion, new columns by the Bor­ing Enter­prise Nerds and the SAP Cus­tomer Evo­lu­tion team, an inter­view with enter­prise archi­tect Syl­vain Gar­neau of Res­olute For­est Prod­ucts, and our pre-con­fer­ence inter­view with SAP CTO Juer­gen Mueller.