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Selec­tive data tran­si­tion — often referred to as blue­field — is more than a talk­ing point for Bill Piotrows­ki. As leader of SAP Con­sult­ing for the Amer­i­c­as at IBM, this has become the approach that Piotrows­ki and his teams return to again and again: reusing what works, stan­dard­iz­ing where it helps, and mod­ern­iz­ing data and code with­out los­ing con­trol of scope or timing.

Piotrows­ki over­sees solu­tion design, esti­mat­ing, and pro­gram exe­cu­tion across the Unit­ed States, Cana­da, Mex­i­co, and Latin Amer­i­ca. His teams have run dozens of selec­tive migra­tions, stepped in to res­cue projects mid­stream, and moved IBM itself to S/4HANA in just 18 months, using SNP for data move­ment and smartShift for code automa­tion and dual main­te­nance. The work begins with val­ue engi­neer­ing and KPI bench­marks, then car­ries through to end-to-end test­ing, repeat­able data loads, and cutover rehearsals.

Below, Piotri­ows­ki reflects on IBM’s jour­ney with its ​“Rapid Move” method­ol­o­gy for selec­tive data tran­si­tion, keys to suc­cess post-go-live, and the increas­ing impor­tance of val­ue engi­neers in the trans­for­ma­tion process.

This inter­view has been edit­ed and con­densed for length and clarity.

Q: In the SAP user ecosys­tem, the sub­ject of hybrid migra­tion trans­for­ma­tion has been top-of-mind, espe­cial­ly for those mov­ing their SAP sys­tems from on-premis­es to the cloud. Why is this the right method­ol­o­gy for so many cus­tomers, and what role does IBM play?

At IBM, we are see­ing a lot of pos­i­tive momen­tum with what we call hybrid migra­tion trans­for­ma­tion. For com­pa­nies that are cur­rent­ly run­ning SAP ECC work­loads, we are find­ing that the hybrid migra­tion trans­for­ma­tion, also known as what SNP calls blue­field, is very effec­tive. We have a method­ol­o­gy called Rapid Move. It is also called selec­tive data migra­tion. This hybrid approach is prov­ing to be the most effec­tive approach for our clients who have exist­ing ECC workloads.

Why is it the most effec­tive? Num­ber one, it gives our clients options around what their solu­tion will look like in the future, tak­ing advan­tage in a very pos­i­tive way of what they already have in their land­scape. A lot of com­pa­nies ben­e­fit from the hybrid approach because we are able to reuse ele­ments of the solu­tion that work fine for their busi­ness. Maybe it is the chart of accounts. Maybe the com­pa­ny codes match their legal enti­ty structure.

Num­ber two, it gives com­pa­nies the option to mod­i­fy ele­ments of their exist­ing solu­tion. As we found in one of our new life sci­ences clients, they were using SAP in a non-stan­dard way as it relat­ed to sales bills of mate­ri­als. It gave that client an oppor­tu­ni­ty to change the way the sales bill of mate­ri­als is used in a way that is more stan­dard from an S/4 perspective.

Third, the hybrid approach gives our clients an oppor­tu­ni­ty to trans­form, where they can dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves, either as they attract new cus­tomers or as they bring effi­cien­cy and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty into their oper­a­tions. That comes through the adop­tion of new S/4 inno­va­tions, process automa­tion, or busi­ness AI.

We like this approach because it can be deliv­ered in a rea­son­able dura­tion and at a rea­son­able lev­el of afford­abil­i­ty and risk. A lot of com­pa­nies have invest­ed sig­nif­i­cant CapEx and time into their ECC jour­neys. When they look at the daunt­ing task of migrat­ing to S/4HANA, it often does not have a strong busi­ness case. With this hybrid approach, because we reuse a big part of the solu­tion, we can go faster, with few­er resources, and more cost-effectively.

We have done more than 50 of these hybrid migra­tions, and we have a very suc­cess­ful track record. We are also com­plet­ing more pro­grams than we start. Think of envi­ron­ments where they start down a path, and we actu­al­ly pick up that project as part of a res­cue mis­sion. Adobe was work­ing with anoth­er part­ner, and we stepped in. We re-solu­tioned. We are now live. We have been live since April. We have com­plet­ed a cou­ple of month-end clos­es and a quar­ter-end close, and Adobe is now ful­ly on S/4HANA.

We feel very strong­ly that the hybrid approach makes sense for a lot of the exist­ing ECC install base. By def­i­n­i­tion, hybrid can be along a con­tin­u­um, from reuse and migrat­ing the exist­ing solu­tion to greater degrees of trans­for­ma­tion. These hybrid approach­es end up tai­lored and a lit­tle bespoke to each company’s sit­u­a­tion, because we like to meet clients where they are on their jour­ney and how their SAP solu­tion is giv­ing them the capa­bil­i­ties they need for their pri­or­i­ties around growth and efficiency.

Q: You men­tioned val­ue engi­neers. How can they review trans­for­ma­tion goals, iden­ti­fy addi­tion­al ways to add val­ue, and help with that first step of build­ing an effec­tive busi­ness case — espe­cial­ly in light of your com­ment about fin­ish­ing more projects than you start?

We find it incred­i­bly impor­tant that the return on the invest­ment and the indi­vid­ual val­ue pools that add up to those ben­e­fits are the best way to jus­ti­fy and get busi­ness and board sup­port for a migra­tion trans­for­ma­tion to S/4HANA.

With­out a busi­ness case, the migra­tion costs alone become less of a pri­or­i­ty for the CFO and oth­er deci­sion mak­ers. With a busi­ness case, you can get momen­tum around cost sav­ings as well as growth, both top line and bot­tom line. We start with iden­ti­fy­ing val­ue pools by look­ing at how a com­pa­ny is per­form­ing against peers on key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors in com­par­i­son to indus­try benchmarks.

Con­nect with Bill Piotrows­ki on LinkedIn.

As an exam­ple, we would look at a company’s days sales out­stand­ing. If DSO is high­er than the bench­mark — we are work­ing with a life sci­ences com­pa­ny whose DSO is 63 days, over two months — that will point to capa­bil­i­ties that can move the nee­dle on DSO. That could be invoice accu­ra­cy, the abil­i­ty to pur­sue col­lec­tion of past-due pay­ments, opti­miz­ing dis­pute man­age­ment, or hav­ing a more effec­tive cus­tomer ser­vice capa­bil­i­ty, so it is clear what cus­tomers owe and by when.

What this allows us to do is say: here is where you are on KPIs, and here is the oppor­tu­ni­ty set around the val­ue pool. It could be work­ing cap­i­tal, P&L, or prof­itabil­i­ty. We cal­cu­late and mea­sure those, and they point to busi­ness capa­bil­i­ties. Then we ask: what capa­bil­i­ties do you have today in your SAP and non-SAP sys­tems, and what do you need in new plat­forms? It could be S/4HANA, oth­er SAP cloud appli­ca­tions, or even non-SAP applications.

In our Rapid Dis­cov­ery, we build a matrix of val­ue pools, busi­ness capa­bil­i­ties, and tech­nol­o­gy solu­tion enablers. Then we put togeth­er an imple­men­ta­tion roadmap. Now it is a busi­ness-led trans­for­ma­tion rather than an IT project. IT projects are often not suc­cess­ful because they do not have the same senior lead­er­ship momen­tum. They can be myopi­cal­ly focused on imple­ment­ing a tech­nol­o­gy and only look­ing at cost, los­ing the per­spec­tive of why we are doing this from a busi­ness per­spec­tive. All of these pro­grams must be busi­ness-led. We do those with our own val­ue engi­neers, also in col­lab­o­ra­tion with SAP’s val­ue engineers.

Q: IBM has been lead­ing by exam­ple through its own inter­nal trans­for­ma­tion. You moved with a hybrid approach and made it a larg­er busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion, not just IT. Could you talk about the deci­sions you made around whether to go to RISE or not, and how that was struc­tured from the beginning?

IBM has been around for 114 years. We are accus­tomed to shift­ing the prod­ucts and ser­vices we bring to clients as waves of tech­no­log­i­cal change are upon us. Right now, we are focused on being the lead­ing hybrid cloud and AI com­pa­ny and part­ner for our clients. When we looked at our back-end appli­ca­tions and infra­struc­ture, we found that we need­ed to mod­ern­ize rapid­ly to sup­port where we are in the age of AI.

At the time, we were still deploy­ing ECC to dif­fer­ent parts of our orga­ni­za­tion. We want­ed to dri­ve a growth agen­da and a pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and effi­cien­cy agen­da with an ambi­tious cost take­out that start­ed around a bil­lion and a half and has grown to almost three bil­lion dol­lars. Start­ing with val­ue, then look­ing at capa­bil­i­ties, we said we need to mod­ern­ize our core, move that core to the cloud, and do it quick­ly. That way, we could acti­vate process automa­tion and new inno­va­tions on a mod­ern plat­form like SAP S/4HANA and busi­ness AI.

We asked what we could get done in an 18-month hori­zon, because we did not have a long dura­tion to run an exten­sive, long pro­gram. We want­ed top- and bot­tom-line impact quick­ly. We had been doing this hybrid migra­tion trans­for­ma­tion approach for clients with a lot of suc­cess, and we decid­ed to do it for ourselves.

We launched a phased dis­cus­sion of new capa­bil­i­ties we want­ed and a roadmap to get there. We focused on improve­ments and new capa­bil­i­ties in quote­to- cash and record-to-report. We set an 18-month pro­gram to migrate and trans­form using the Rapid Move method­ol­o­gy and tools with our part­ners SNP and smartShift.

We launched in ear­ly 2023 and went live with all coun­tries and busi­ness units that were on our old SAP ECC. We brought them live on S/4HANA with this hybrid migra­tion trans­for­ma­tion approach in mid-July 2024. Since then, we have con­tin­ued to bring on new inno­va­tions, new process automa­tion, and AI. We also com­plet­ed the first Rebound Field­glass imple­men­ta­tion on NS2 for FedRAMP, designed for com­pa­nies and agen­cies with spe­cif­ic data sov­er­eign­ty require­ments. Addi­tion­al­ly, we moved our HR func­tion glob­al­ly from Work­day to Suc­cess­Fac­tors with a go-live in Jan­u­ary 2025. We have con­tin­ued to add capa­bil­i­ties in com­merce and con­fig­ure-price­quote to bring to life recent soft­ware acqui­si­tions with recur­ring sub­scrip­tion billing requirements.

Today, we are all about the ecosys­tem. We find that bring­ing the best of the ecosys­tem for­ward yields the best out­comes for clients. We used SNP for selec­tive data tran­si­tion. SNP plays an impor­tant role with a strong plat­form in Kiano that allows us to eval­u­ate, reuse, mod­i­fy, and trans­form. It also auto­mates mov­ing mas­ter, trans­ac­tion, and his­tor­i­cal data from ECC to S/4.

SmartShift has a cou­ple of prod­ucts we used. We used smartShift to auto­mate a large degree of cus­tom devel­op­ments in our ECC that we need­ed going for­ward in S/4. We auto­mat­ed 94% of our cus­tom code. In effect, we mon­e­tized the cus­tom code so it would work in S/4. That allowed us to move much faster and saved months off the pro­gram. We also used smartShift for man­ag­ing a typ­i­cal chal­lenge around dual main­te­nance, where you retro­fit enhance­ments from pro­duc­tion into the devel­op­ment land­scape for S/4. That way, when you go live, you have every­thing you had in ECC plus recent enhance­ments, as well as the new capa­bil­i­ties S/4 brings to bear.

Main point: we are doing it for our com­mer­cial clients around the world in mul­ti­ple indus­tries, and we believed in it enough to do it for IBM itself. We con­tin­ue to opti­mize per­for­mance using AI and the lat­est capa­bil­i­ties SAP offers with S/4 and oth­er platforms.

Q: From your lead­er­ship posi­tion, what were the major keys to suc­cess — gov­er­nance, roles, pro­gram struc­ture — that proved most instru­men­tal after go-live?

A lot of com­pa­nies run­ning a sin­gle instance of ECC ask how to deploy using the hybrid approach. Should it be big bang or phased? Start­ing from a sin­gle instance, we are find­ing in all cas­es the right approach, the most risk-mit­i­gat­ed, that main­tains the integri­ty of inte­grat­ed busi­ness process­es at the right pace and bud­get, is big bang. Clients often think phased is better.

How do you have con­fi­dence that a big-bang go-live makes sense? We run a very rig­or­ous process dur­ing the pro­gram. It focus­es on three main things, maybe four.

Num­ber one: incred­i­bly robust test­ing of end-to-end busi­ness process­es. In effect, it is a regres­sion test of every­thing you do today, plus test­ing any new capa­bil­i­ties you choose to move for­ward with.

Num­ber two: repet­i­tive, rig­or­ous exe­cu­tion of data con­ver­sions. That includes data extract, trans­for­ma­tion, load, and ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Both auto­mat­ed ver­i­fi­ca­tion and ver­i­fi­ca­tion by the busi­ness are done very repet­i­tive­ly. We did this at Pfiz­er, IBM, and Adobe, with mul­ti­ple mock loads before pro­duc­tion loads.

Num­ber three: mak­ing sure you prac­tice the cutover. We know all activ­i­ties and their sequence, and that they fit into the down­time win­dow the busi­ness can afford from the moment we take down ECC to the moment we stand up S/4. As we do more hybrid migra­tions, we con­vert larg­er work­loads in short­er time peri­ods by apply­ing lessons learned from pri­or go-lives — tech­ni­cal, peo­ple, and process opti­miza­tion. For exam­ple, we now move a lot more sta­t­ic data dur­ing uptime, so that in down­time we are mov­ing less data and need less time.

Vis­it the IBM web­site.

Num­ber four: what­ev­er you are doing is anchored back to busi­ness val­ue and the capa­bil­i­ties that deliv­er that val­ue. Use that as a mech­a­nism for scope man­age­ment. Resist the temp­ta­tion to bring new capa­bil­i­ties into the hybrid migra­tion trans­for­ma­tion win­dow. If you iden­ti­fy new capa­bil­i­ties you want, have the dis­ci­pline to say they were not part of the orig­i­nal busi­ness case and val­ue. Put them post-go-live as deferred items in ongo­ing release man­age­ment and con­tin­u­ous improve­ment waves.

That allows a very suc­cess­ful hybrid migra­tion: val­ue-anchored, scal­able for the future, deliv­ered on time and on bud­get, with a release valve for the busi­ness to get new capa­bil­i­ties after go-live.