As IT lead­ers across the SAP ecosys­tem work to pre­pare their orga­ni­za­tions to make the jump from lega­cy ERP solu­tions to SAP S/4HANA and the cloud, the ques­tion of how to suc­cess­ful­ly facil­i­tate dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion still looms large for many customers. 

Migrat­ing to a new ERP is no easy task, requir­ing buy-in from many orga­ni­za­tion­al stake­hold­ers. Addi­tion­al­ly, enter­pris­es often work for months on the cutover, migrat­ing nec­es­sary data and prepar­ing the ground to go live on SAP S/4HANA with­out dis­rup­tion. When SAP first announced RISE with SAP, the offer­ing seemed poised not only to help SAP cus­tomers with their SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tions but also to jump­start their migra­tions to the cloud. How­ev­er, as many SAP cus­tomers con­sid­er the com­plex­i­ty of their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion projects, they must also eval­u­ate whether RISE with SAP is the right path for­ward for their orga­ni­za­tion and IT infrastructure.

ASUG recent­ly sat down with Jonathan Jakub, Man­ag­er, Enter­prise Solu­tions at Lin­coln Elec­tric Sys­tem (LES); and Patrick Gans, LES Busi­ness Solu­tions team leader. LES is in the midst of eval­u­at­ing RISE with SAP ahead of a tran­si­tion from SAP ERP Cen­tral Com­po­nent (ECC) 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA. Jakub and Gans will dis­cuss their expe­ri­ence eval­u­at­ing RISE dur­ing the upcom­ing SAP for Util­i­ties, Pre­sent­ed by ASUG con­fer­ence (Oct. 9 – 11 in Chica­go; reg­is­ter here). 

Set­ting the Scope

A ver­ti­cal­ly inte­grat­ed util­i­ties com­pa­ny serv­ing 150,000 cus­tomers in Lin­coln, Nebras­ka, Lin­coln Elec­tric Sys­tem (LES) cov­ers around 200 square miles of urban ser­vice ter­ri­to­ry. With 500 employ­ees, the com­pa­ny is a long-time SAP cus­tomer, hav­ing first imple­ment­ed SAP solu­tions in 2000. ​“We use SAP across all the dif­fer­ent areas of our orga­ni­za­tion,” Jakub said.

Cur­rent­ly LES is run­ning SAP ECC 6.0 with the lat­est enhance­ment pack, lean­ing on the util­i­ties mod­ule for billing capa­bil­i­ties. Else­where in the orga­ni­za­tion, LES also uses SAP Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) for front-office oper­a­tions and SAP Work Man­ag­er to over­see con­struc­tion and asset replace­ment projects. LES is cur­rent­ly in the eval­u­a­tion stage of RISE with SAP and expects a deci­sion on that front in 2024.

“We knew this was more than just an SAP ECC 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA move,” Gans said, under­lin­ing that LES even­tu­al­ly decid­ed to pur­sue their migra­tion project via RISE with SAP after research­ing the offer­ing and speak­ing to SAP account exec­u­tives. As LES con­tin­ues its imple­men­ta­tion project, Jakub empha­sized that the team is focused on the cus­tomer impact of this migra­tion. ​“We didn’t look at this as an SAP S/4HANA migra­tion,” Gans said. ​“Rather, this is an enter­prise migration.” 

As LES weighed its dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion options, one of the first tasks the com­pa­ny need­ed to com­plete was set­ting the scope of the project and decid­ing where to start. ​“We start­ed with the things that we absolute­ly must do, so we con­cen­trat­ed on solu­tions that were either incom­pat­i­ble or at their end-of-life stage,” Gans said.

LES then moved to exam­ine what ben­e­fits it could attain in the future with a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. While the com­pa­ny would even­tu­al­ly work toward these goals, Jakub and Gans empha­sized that the imme­di­ate focus of the project was the imple­men­ta­tion of an updat­ed ERP. ​“For our approach, we focused on migra­tion and not a lot on new inno­va­tions or migra­tions,” Jakub said. 

Eval­u­at­ing RISE with SAP 

LES did­n’t con­sid­er RISE with SAP imme­di­ate­ly; its choice to eval­u­ate the offer­ing came after ​“years of evo­lu­tion,” accord­ing to Jakub. One of the biggest con­cerns was how RISE with SAP would impact the way LES inter­acts with — and serves — its cus­tomers. The orga­ni­za­tion want­ed to over­see this trans­for­ma­tion with lim­it­ed impact on cus­tomer ser­vice. This migra­tion was set to be a sig­nif­i­cant move for LES, impact­ing oper­a­tions across the entire enterprise. 

“We need­ed to focus on the cus­tomer impact of a migra­tion to RISE with SAP,” Jakub said. ​“Func­tion­al­ly, how would this work?” Jakub said his team also exam­ined what things would change as part of the trans­for­ma­tion project and how that would affect cus­tomer service. 

“We were look­ing at what is the one-to-one rela­tion­ship [with our cur­rent IT infra­struc­ture] and what things did not trans­late,” Jakub said. Part of this process involved LES exam­in­ing their cur­rent land­scape and deter­min­ing what work was need­ed to suc­cess­ful­ly make the migra­tion to SAP S/4HANA as well. 

“We real­ly start­ed look­ing at this from a holis­tic tech­nol­o­gy per­spec­tive,” Jakub said. ​“What do we need to do to actu­al­ly move to SAP S/4HANA?”

Man­ag­ing the Migration’s Tech­ni­cal Aspects 

Thanks in part to that ini­tial work, LES under­stood the work need­ed to begin the migra­tion. Gans touched on how LES over­saw the tech­ni­cal parts of the imple­men­ta­tion, not­ing that the orga­ni­za­tion had to include mul­ti­ple stake­hold­ers from dif­fer­ent parts of the busi­ness. For exam­ple, Jakub and Gans brought in mem­bers of the LES finance team and edu­cat­ed them on the RISE with SAP process. 

“We got dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives on con­cerns and atten­tion that must be paid to cer­tain aspects of the migra­tion,” Jakub said. There were a few areas of focus for LES dur­ing the imple­men­ta­tion. First, since LES is an SAP CRM user, the team want­ed to under­stand how the migra­tion would affect their CRM system. 

“When we had dis­cus­sions with SAP, we were try­ing to under­stand options with RISE with SAP,” Jakub said. Even­tu­al­ly, the util­i­ties com­pa­ny decid­ed to work toward lever­ag­ing SAP CRM embed­ded in SAP S/4HANA along with SAP Cus­tomer Engage­ment for Util­i­ties. Addi­tion­al­ly, LES exam­ined how the RISE with SAP jour­ney would affect the orga­ni­za­tion’s human resources data. LES was already an SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors cus­tomer, and the orga­ni­za­tion lever­aged SAP Human Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment (HCM) as part of its HR oper­a­tions. LES dis­cov­ered that RISE with SAP pro­vid­ed options to inte­grate with SAP HCM and SAP S/4HANA.

Through­out the process, LES worked with SAP to con­tin­u­ous­ly eval­u­ate whether RISE with SAP was the right option for the orga­ni­za­tion. SAP pro­vid­ed knowl­edge and tools so LES could under­stand the full tech­ni­cal impli­ca­tions and changes stem­ming from the migra­tion project. 

“SAP did a great job giv­ing us the tools to fig­ure out the tech­ni­cal aspects ahead of time,” Gans said, specif­i­cal­ly high­light­ing SAP siz­ing guide­lines as well as roles and respon­si­bil­i­ties doc­u­men­ta­tion. ​“These tools gave our employ­ees a good foun­da­tion for under­stand­ing the solu­tion details and exam­in­ing what SAP pro­vides — and what it does not,” he said. 

Accord­ing to Gans, these tools helped LES fig­ure out not only the crit­i­cal parts of the migra­tion but also any extra costs. For exam­ple, LES lever­aged the SAP Pro­duc­tion Inte­gra­tion Por­tal (PiP) process to under­stand inte­gra­tion and orches­tra­tion. ​“We looked at how to migrate to the SAP Cloud Plat­form Suite,” Jakub added. LES also relied on Red­wood for job sched­ul­ing. Accord­ing to Jakub and Gans, fig­ur­ing out how to car­ry over that solu­tion was also a pri­or­i­ty for LES. 

Keys to Success 

Gans and Jakub also spoke about best prac­tices that have made their RISE with SAP eval­u­a­tion easier. 

Accord­ing to Jakub, ​“chunk­ing” an imple­men­ta­tion project — or focus­ing on spe­cif­ic com­po­nents as opposed to the entire project — helped the LES team. ​“It’s super risky to do a big project,” he said, before under­lin­ing how focus­ing on one sec­tion at a time helped LES man­age the over­all imple­men­ta­tion project. 

Addi­tion­al­ly, SAP has been incred­i­bly help­ful through­out the entire process. Accord­ing to Gans, SAP guid­ed LES through some of the com­pli­cat­ed parts of the enter­prise-wide migra­tion. He also dis­cussed how SAP has con­nect­ed LES with both busi­ness-spe­cif­ic and solu­tion-spe­cif­ic pro­fes­sion­als to help ease the tran­si­tion on the LES team. 

Ben­e­fits of RISE with SAP 

Gans and Jakub also dis­cussed the poten­tial advan­tages of RISE with SAP. Gans men­tioned that being cloud-focused will make the process of stay­ing cur­rent and up-to-date eas­i­er. ​“We don’t have to wor­ry about updates to the data­base,” Jakub said. ​“SAP is han­dling that.” Addi­tion­al­ly, Jakub and Gans dis­cussed how SAP held ses­sions for LES to answer ques­tions through­out the process. For exam­ple, Jakub dis­cussed how SAP host­ed ses­sions for LES on SAP Work Manager. 

“Get­ting both the busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy peo­ple from SAP on the phone has been so ben­e­fi­cial for our teams,” Gans said. 

LES is still in the midst of its RISE with SAP eval­u­a­tion and has not made an offi­cial deci­sion to move for­ward with RISE; that deci­sion will come in 2024. While the enter­prise is mak­ing progress, there are still aspects it’s con­sid­er­ing, includ­ing tech­no­log­i­cal sup­port for dis­as­ter recov­ery. Both Gans and Jakub will speak fur­ther about the cur­rent state of the LES migra­tion at the SAP for Util­i­ties, Pre­sent­ed by ASUG con­fer­ence on Octo­ber 9 – 11. Reg­is­ter here.