Upgrad­ing to SAP S/4HANA Cloud can be a mas­sive, com­plex, and time-con­sum­ing process for any mod­ern enter­prise. For the Flori­da-based glob­al man­u­fac­tur­ing solu­tions provider Jabil, the secret to suc­cess­ful cloud migra­tion was a ​“staged lift-and-shift approach,” focus­ing on mov­ing to the cloud first and car­ry­ing out busi­ness process trans­for­ma­tion ini­tia­tives second.

Accord­ing to Cyn­thia Kendall, IT Direc­tor at Jabil, who recent­ly dis­cussed the com­pa­ny’s SAP S/4HANA jour­ney at ASUG Tech Con­nect in New Orleans, SAP solu­tions are at the core of Jabil’s vision to be one of the world’s most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced man­u­fac­tur­ing solu­tions providers. With 250,000+ ded­i­cat­ed employ­ees, 400+ cus­tomers across diverse mar­kets, 100+ sites strate­gi­cal­ly locat­ed world­wide, and 27,000+ sup­ply chain part­ners, Jabil is a large and grow­ing enter­prise. In 2022, the com­pa­ny gen­er­at­ed $33.5 bil­lion in rev­enue, which Kendall in part attrib­uted to its sol­id foun­da­tion in SAP technology. 

An SAP cus­tomer since 1998, Jabil start­ed on an SAP R/3 3.1H envi­ron­ment, con­tin­u­al­ly upgrad­ing until it reached the on-premis­es SAP ECC 6.0, with enhance­ment pack 7, in 2016. Soon start­ing to age out, this ECC envi­ron­ment also did not align with the cloud-first strat­e­gy lat­er imple­ment­ed by Jabil’s CIO, and Kendall focused on mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA Cloud as Jabil’s next phase of evolution.

Jabil’s S/4 Journey

In tran­si­tion­ing from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA Cloud across a three-year project, Jabil’s cloud adop­tion aimed to shift the com­pa­ny from tra­di­tion­al on-prem infra­struc­ture to AWS cloud-infra­struc­ture-as-a-ser­vice (CIaaS) and SAP HANA. 

Its tech­nol­o­gy trans­for­ma­tion involved upgrad­ing from ECC to S/4HANA 1909 (com­plet­ed in Jan­u­ary of 2022), mov­ing from the company’s 67 TB on-premis­es ECC envi­ron­ment – which had 40,000 users – to the 18 TB S/4HANA appli­ance after com­pres­sion. ​“We had a huge increase in our trans­ac­tion­al mem­o­ry speed, due to in-mem­o­ry process,” said Kendall.

Jabil’s exten­sive SAP land­scape also includ­ed SAP Busi­ness Ware­house (BW) and SAP Secure Net­work Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (SNC). Kendall’s team migrat­ed these sup­port­ing appli­ca­tions first, to bet­ter eval­u­ate the chal­lenges of cloud migra­tion before shift­ing more envi­ron­ments. SAP Glob­al Trade Ser­vices, SAP Gov­er­nance Risk and Com­pli­ance, and SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er fol­lowed soon after. 

Jabil’s trans­for­ma­tion project also required its IT team to address cus­tomiza­tions that its ECC envi­ron­ment had built up over the years, which would nei­ther trans­form for nor func­tion with­in the more stan­dard­ized SAP S/4HANA Cloud envi­ron­ment. Col­lab­o­rat­ing with the automa­tion tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny smartShift Tech­nolo­gies Inc., Jabil was able to sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce total cost of own­er­ship by reme­di­at­ing code. ​“We had five mil­lion lines of cus­tom code and real­ized that 1.5 mil­lion of those lines had not been used in a two-year peri­od,” said Kendall. ​“We were able to decom­mis­sion and delete that code.” 

In addi­tion, Jabil realigned more than 1,900 tech­ni­cal objects to the S/4 code and table set, and it suc­cess­ful­ly test­ed more than 180 inte­grat­ed appli­ca­tions with SAP. The trans­for­ma­tion ulti­mate­ly involved 14 upgrades and migra­tions to the cloud, as well as 12 lift-and-shifts to the cloud.

Final­ly, to per­form the cru­cial change-over to SAP S/4HANA, Jabil took advan­tage of SAP Near Zero Down­time through SAP Max­At­ten­tion, a pre­mi­um cus­tomer sup­port ser­vice. Its cli­mac­tic cutover was per­formed with only 62 hours of downtime. 

‘Notice­able Improve­ments’ from S/4 Transformation

Since go-live with SAP S/4HANA Cloud in Jan­u­ary of 2022, the com­pa­ny has ben­e­fit­ted con­sid­er­ably from cloud migra­tion, accord­ing to Kendall. 

App serv­er resiz­ing, which took days in its on-premis­es ECC envi­ron­ment, can be achieved with­in hours in its SAP S/4HANA Cloud envi­ron­ment. Sim­i­lar­ly, mov­ing app servers between avail­abil­i­ty zones can now be accom­plished in hours, as opposed to weeks. 

More flex­i­bil­i­ty, bet­ter busi­ness redun­dan­cy, and increased sys­tem speed are all defin­ing results of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud migra­tion, which allowed Jabil to col­lapse its num­ber of servers, move to larg­er sys­tems, and shift from two data cen­ters to three. Over­all, ​“things are a lot quick­er in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud envi­ron­ment, once you’re rolling with it,” Kendall said. 

Increased pro­cess­ing speed across the busi­ness has been a par­tic­u­lar­ly major improve­ment for Jabil since imple­ment­ing SA S/4 HANA Cloud. For instance, the process for inputting SAP trans­ac­tion codes (T‑codes) to exe­cute tasks in ERP sys­tems is much more effi­cient. Kendall notes that request­ing lists of open sales orders from Jabil’s larg­er plants had for­mer­ly timed out in the on-premis­es sys­tem but now comes back in 45 seconds. 

Tips for Change Management

Kendall believes that suc­cess­ful­ly car­ry­ing out such a mul­ti-faceted cloud migra­tion at Jabil required set­ting a man­age­able scope and stick­ing to it. ​“Keep the scope to a min­i­mum, and don’t take on more than you can han­dle,” she said. 

To that end, Kendall encour­ages staged lift-and-shift approach­es that put cloud ERP migra­tion ahead of busi­ness process trans­for­ma­tion. ​“Land the air­plane first, then wor­ry about paint­ing the out­side,” she said. ​“Don’t try to paint it mid-flight.” By tak­ing this approach to the migra­tion, Jabil’s IT team was able to man­age inte­gra­tions, con­tin­u­ous archiv­ing, and con­stant test­ing in a way that min­i­mized risk and max­i­mized benefits. 

Kendall added that, inter­nal­ly, enhanc­ing cross-team col­lab­o­ra­tion was essen­tial. Lead­ing a glob­al­ly dis­trib­uted team, includ­ing dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Jabil uti­lized var­i­ous tools for remote work, such as Microsoft Teams and Share­Point. The com­pa­ny ensured that its assigned S/4 trans­for­ma­tion team was in con­stant com­mu­ni­ca­tion, whether direct­ly col­lab­o­rat­ing or mon­i­tor­ing and decom­mis­sion­ing unused tech­nol­o­gy and functionalities. 

Fire­side chats, pod­casts, video record­ings, and TV mon­i­tors set to each team’s native lan­guage also helped Jabil to keep its wider, world­wide base of employ­ees informed of process trans­for­ma­tions before they hap­pened. A focus on part­ner expert resources, made avail­able dur­ing hyper­care hours, was anoth­er impor­tant part of Jabil’s orga­ni­za­tion­al change man­age­ment (OCM).

Kendall rec­om­mends that com­pa­nies explor­ing cloud migra­tion first exam­ine poten­tial pre-projects that can ease their work­load lat­er. Not all busi­ness lead­ers are cur­rent­ly on board with SAP S/4HANA Cloud trans­for­ma­tion, which can leave IT depart­ments frus­trat­ed as they attempt to move from on-premis­es sys­tems and improve effi­cien­cies. But even before trans­for­ma­tion projects are approved, IT lead­ers can move their com­pa­nies forward. 

Dur­ing the lead time before shift­ing its oper­a­tions, Jabil’s IT team went through pre-projects, from reduc­ing data­base sizes through archiv­ing to depre­ci­at­ing T‑codes that will not func­tion in SAP S/4HANA Cloud envi­ron­ments. ​“Even if you’re in a state of flux or can­not get fund­ing, there are still numer­ous activ­i­ties you can do today that will reduce your prob­lems lat­er,” Kendall said. ​“Start talk­ing about what you can do today, to make your jour­ney eas­i­er tomorrow.” 

Catch Up with Jabil at an ASUG Conference

Kendall pre­vi­ous­ly dis­cussed Jabil’s trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney in mul­ti­ple SAP, cus­tomer, part­ner, and ASUG Pow­er Peer Group ses­sions at the 2023 SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence, in addi­tion to dis­cussing Jabil IT Advi­so­ry Ser­vices, a new prac­tice to help oth­er SAP cus­tomers suc­ceed in their cloud trans­for­ma­tion journeys. 

At ASUG Tech Con­nect in New Orleans, Kendall fur­ther explored Jabil’s move to S/4HANA, shar­ing lessons learned, dis­cussing life after the upgrade, and dis­cussing how SAP S/4HANA and the cloud have improved user expe­ri­ence and allowed Jabil to main­tain cut­ting-edge rel­e­van­cy. Addi­tion­al­ly, Bri­an Sil­ve­stro, Direc­tor – Enter­prise Solu­tions, SAP Tech­nol­o­gy at Jabil, and Har­ish Manohar, Senior IT Man­ag­er at Jabil, dis­cussed life post-go-live at Jabil and reflect­ed on how they’ve used SAP Sig­navio to iden­ti­fy gaps in lega­cy pro­grams.