An SAP cus­tomer since 1998, J. J. Keller & Asso­ciates, Inc., a North Amer­i­can leader in safe­ty and reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance solu­tions, recent­ly migrat­ed from its long-held lega­cy SAP ECC sys­tem to SAP S/4HANA, hav­ing been moti­vat­ed by the approach­ing 2027 end-of-main­te­nance dead­line for SAP Busi­ness Suite 7.

“The clock was tick­ing on ECC; that was the biggest dri­ver,” said Josh Djup­strom, Vice Pres­i­dent of IT at J. J. Keller. Along­side oth­er com­pa­ny lead­ers, Djup­strom did not want the orga­ni­za­tion to delay its upgrade until clos­er to the end-of-sup­port date and risk fac­ing a short­age of qual­i­fied imple­men­ta­tion partners.

Such antic­i­pa­to­ry plan­ning posi­tioned the com­pa­ny ahead of what will like­ly become an increas­ing­ly crowd­ed field of orga­ni­za­tions rush­ing to meet the dead­line. Yet J. J. Keller resist­ed treat­ing this migra­tion as mere­ly a tech­ni­cal neces­si­ty, instead trans­form­ing poten­tial dis­rup­tion into a strate­gic advantage.

The enter­prise devot­ed six months to craft­ing its trans­for­ma­tion roadmap before choos­ing a spe­cif­ic approach. Only after exec­u­tive lead­er­ship reviewed and endorsed the plan did it eval­u­ate poten­tial part­ners, even­tu­al­ly choos­ing SAP’s Accel­er­at­ed Imple­men­ta­tion Services.

The ​“Lift and Shift” Approach

Many orga­ni­za­tions attempt to com­bine tech­ni­cal migra­tion with busi­ness process over­haul in dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion projects. J. J. Keller’s IT lead­er­ship, who will be speak­ing at the upcom­ing SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Conference, delib­er­ate­ly chose a dif­fer­ent path, draw­ing on their col­lec­tive imple­men­ta­tion expe­ri­ence to chart a more mea­sured course.

Chal­leng­ing pre­vail­ing trans­for­ma­tion philoso­phies, Djup­strom shared the team’s core prin­ci­ple: ​“You have to be on the plat­form before you can do the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. If you bun­dle every­thing togeth­er, it all fails together.”

Instead, the team embraced a clas­sic ​“lift and shift” strat­e­gy, estab­lish­ing a sta­ble SAP S/4HANA foun­da­tion first before tack­ling process reengineering.

Eric Leicht, Data Archi­tect at J. J. Keller, rein­forced this prag­mat­ic stance: ​“Avoid the big bang type of project where you’re try­ing to throw all kinds of things in and go live all at one time. Do it in phas­es and pro­vide val­ue as you go.”

July 2023 marked hard­ware pro­cure­ment for the RISE with SAP imple­men­ta­tion, fol­lowed by project ini­ti­a­tion with SAP in late Sep­tem­ber. The organization’s imple­men­ta­tion unfold­ed in dis­tinct phases: 

• Replace the lega­cy launch­pad with SAP Build Work Zone in November
• Migrate SAP BW/4HANA sys­tem to RISE with SAP in December
• Com­plete MII migra­tion in Feb­ru­ary 2024
• Push SAP S/4HANA live in May 2024

Break­ing the project into sequen­tial phas­es cre­at­ed tan­gi­ble wins every few months, rather than ask­ing stake­hold­ers to wait for a sin­gle big-bang pay­off. The company’s 2,000 asso­ciates received ongo­ing improve­ments every few months, cre­at­ing momen­tum that cas­cad­ed into enthu­si­as­tic sup­port for sub­se­quent phases.

Pre­ced­ing the for­mal S/4HANA dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion project, anoth­er strate­gic deci­sion would prove cru­cial. Pavan Pati, SAP Archi­tect for J. J. Keller, not­ed that when the orga­ni­za­tion acquired the RISE with plat­form, it upgrad­ed its SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) license to Enter­prise Edi­tion, and proac­tive­ly moved all inter­face end­points to BTP. These actions reduced inte­gra­tion test­ing com­plex­i­ty dur­ing the sub­se­quent S/4HANA implementation.

Through this move, the BTP became both an imme­di­ate migra­tion facil­i­ta­tor and a foun­da­tion for future inno­va­tion, includ­ing poten­tial­ly mov­ing cus­tomiza­tions out of the back end.

The Migra­tion Blueprint

J. J. Keller’s suc­cess­ful migra­tion relied on both its strate­gic approach and care­ful atten­tion to exe­cu­tion details. Sev­er­al key ele­ments dis­tin­guished this approach from oth­er imple­men­ta­tion projects.

Djup­strom empha­sized that halt­ing demand man­age­ment was a top pri­or­i­ty, as it both freed resources to focus on the project and pre­vent­ed con­stant changes from cre­at­ing mov­ing tar­gets. Achiev­ing this required a ​“bot­tom-up to top-down” approach — com­mu­ni­cat­ing needs to exec­u­tives who then imple­ment­ed nec­es­sary changes across the organization.

Tech­ni­cal pre­req­ui­sites demand­ed care­ful atten­tion before S/4HANA migra­tion could begin. The J. J. Keller team imple­ment­ed SAP Rev­enue Account­ing and Report­ing to replace dep­re­cat­ed ECC func­tion­al­i­ty while also tack­ling Cus­tomer Ven­dor Inte­gra­tion (CVI), a process Pati iden­ti­fied as a crit­i­cal learn­ing opportunity.

“If I had to redo it again, I would rec­om­mend per­form­ing CVI inte­gra­tion upfront in pro­duc­tion,” Pati advised. For an orga­ni­za­tion of J. J. Keller’s scale, this proac­tive approach could com­press a mul­ti-month process into mere days dur­ing cutover.

Secu­ri­ty man­age­ment, which is vital­ly impor­tant to J. J. Keller, pre­sent­ed unex­pect­ed com­plex­i­ty that chal­lenged ini­tial resource pro­jec­tions. ​“The area that we were slow on was around secu­ri­ty and roles and autho­riza­tions,” admit­ted Leicht. The ERP plat­form tran­si­tion involved exten­sive secu­ri­ty role changes requir­ing thor­ough test­ing and sig­nif­i­cant­ly more resources than anticipated.

At the heart of J. J. Keller’s exe­cu­tion strat­e­gy stood a com­pre­hen­sive migra­tion run­book. What began as a mod­est 50-task out­line evolved through mul­ti­ple iter­a­tions into an exhaus­tive 500-step play­book. Djup­strom dri­ly not­ed that, by the end, ​“when some­one had to sneeze at this point, it was writ­ten in a runbook.”

By the pro­duc­tion migra­tion, the sixth time exe­cut­ing the process, the team had refined its approach to near per­fec­tion, con­sis­tent­ly hit­ting time­line tar­gets or fin­ish­ing early.

Select­ing RISE with SAP neces­si­tat­ed six months of nego­ti­a­tion to final­ize the five-year con­tract. Though nego­ti­a­tions stretched over six months, this extend­ed plan­ning hori­zon forced them to fore­cast tech­nol­o­gy needs years in advance — strength­en­ing the enterprise’s bar­gain­ing posi­tion and lock­ing in pre­dictable costs that exec­u­tives could con­fi­dent­ly bud­get against through 2028.

Mov­ing to RISE shift­ed how the enter­prise oper­at­ed day-to-day, par­tic­u­lar­ly for tasks pre­vi­ous­ly han­dled by inter­nal teams. Func­tions pre­vi­ous­ly han­dled by inter­nal teams now required coor­di­na­tion with SAP’s Enter­prise Cloud Ser­vices group. Though this shift intro­duced new process­es, it also redis­trib­uted respon­si­bil­i­ty. ​“It takes some of the depen­den­cy off of you and makes you lean fur­ther on your part­ners. If they break it, it’s on them to fix it,” not­ed Leicht.

A Seam­less Transition

May 2024 marked the com­ple­tion of J. J. Keller’s nine-month S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion — under bud­get and with min­i­mal oper­a­tional dis­rup­tion. The most telling mea­sure of suc­cess came not from project met­rics but user expe­ri­ence, and it was mea­sured in terms of an over­all lack of con­spic­u­ous down­time dur­ing cutover.

“When our busi­ness folks left the office on Fri­day of the cutover week­end and had access again Mon­day morn­ing at six o’clock, the suc­cess of the project was entire­ly trans­par­ent to them,” said Djup­strom. ​“If there hadn’t been all kinds of com­mu­ni­ca­tion telling them what we were doing, they would nev­er have known.” 

In first mov­ing the SAP BW sys­tem over, as part of the S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion, Leicht reflect­ed that he knew they’d suc­ceed­ed when exec­u­tive lead­ers asked after the fact if the move had tak­en place. ​“We were able to do the project with­out peo­ple know­ing that we’d moved from on-prem to the cloud,” he said. ​“They didn’t notice it, because every­thing worked.”

The cloud migra­tion addi­tion­al­ly set up the orga­ni­za­tion to tack­le a long-stand­ing data man­age­ment chal­lenge. With stor­age costs direct­ly impact­ing month­ly bills, Djup­strom found the lever­age he need­ed to final­ly imple­ment data purg­ing and archiv­ing pro­to­cols — tasks that had been set aside for years in favor of more urgent pri­or­i­ties. Through con­ver­sa­tions with depart­ments across the orga­ni­za­tion, the team estab­lished reten­tion poli­cies for dif­fer­ent data types, elim­i­nat­ing unnec­es­sary his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion and cre­at­ing lean­er systems.

J. J. Keller’s RISE with SAP imple­men­ta­tion deliv­ered anoth­er often-elu­sive ben­e­fit: finan­cial pre­dictabil­i­ty. Djup­strom explained that, upon sign­ing the con­tract, the team knew exact­ly what its SAP expen­di­tures would be through 2028. ​“CFOs and CEOs love that pre­dictabil­i­ty. There are no sur­pris­es. They know what the spend is going to be,” he said.

Ear­ly exec­u­tive involve­ment in roadmap plan­ning secured buy-in for future phas­es while guid­ing prod­uct acqui­si­tion tim­ing. The team pur­chased SAP S/4HANA Advanced Vari­ant Con­fig­u­ra­tion, SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, and addi­tion­al solu­tions planned sub­se­quent­ly — all approved dur­ing ini­tial con­tract nego­ti­a­tions, elim­i­nat­ing annu­al bud­get bat­tles for tech­nol­o­gy investments.

The BTP envi­ron­ment quick­ly demon­strat­ed val­ue in phase two projects. Pati described its emerg­ing role as an inter­me­di­ary lay­er between sys­tems, reduc­ing devel­op­ment efforts in cur­rent ini­tia­tives by stream­lin­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion between back-end sys­tems and interfaces.

Oper­a­tional changes accom­pa­nied the RISE tran­si­tion. Tasks pre­vi­ous­ly han­dled inter­nal­ly now require SAP coor­di­na­tion but with com­pen­sat­ing advan­tages, like SAP patch­ing and upgrad­ing the system.

Build­ing on the S/4HANA Foundation

Hav­ing migrat­ed to SAP S/4HANA, J. J. Keller has shift­ed focus to its phase two ini­tia­tives cen­ter­ing on man­u­fac­tur­ing mod­ern­iza­tion and sales opti­miza­tion. After going live in May 2024, the orga­ni­za­tion began the busi­ness process trans­for­ma­tion at the end of summer.

The BTP envi­ron­ment estab­lished dur­ing migra­tion pro­vides a foun­da­tion for adopt­ing emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies. With BTP already in place, imple­ment­ing AI ser­vices becomes straight­for­ward — essen­tial­ly just increas­ing the organization’s cred­it con­sump­tion under its enter­prise agree­ment with­out requir­ing addi­tion­al infrastructure.

Pati out­lined three pri­ma­ry direc­tions for ongo­ing BTP expan­sion: lever­ag­ing API man­age­ment in man­u­fac­tur­ing mod­ern­iza­tion to stream­line sys­tem inter­ac­tions, extend­ing SAP Fiori appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment beyond their ini­tial suc­cess­ful deploy­ment, and explor­ing ​“clean core” approach­es to relo­cate cus­tomiza­tions from S/4HANA to BTP. The orga­ni­za­tion already deployed one cus­tom Fiori appli­ca­tion, with plans to roll out more Fiori appli­ca­tions on the platform.

“As we deliv­ered all those sys­tems, we were able to shut off sys­tems that were in our data cen­ter on-premis­es, and turn off that hard­ware and start using the hard­ware and RISE,” not­ed Leicht. ​“We were doing the shift to the cloud as well as get­ting us to the future platforms.”

J. J. Keller’s expe­ri­ence offers insights into its approach, which com­bines plan­ning, exec­u­tive align­ment, and care­ful exe­cu­tion. The deci­sion to sep­a­rate plat­form migra­tion from busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion helped them cre­ate a man­age­able approach that deliv­ered val­ue through­out the process while estab­lish­ing a foun­da­tion for future work.

As J. J. Keller advances through phase two, its mea­sured strat­e­gy con­tin­ues to pay div­i­dends. By avoid­ing a scram­ble to meet the end-of-main­te­nance dead­line, man­u­fac­tur­ing mod­ern­iza­tion and sales opti­miza­tion can now progress on a sta­ble S/4HANA foundation.