As the 2027 end-of-main­te­nance dead­line approach­es for SAP Busi­ness Suite 7 — which includes SAP ERP Cen­tral Com­po­nent (ECC) 6 — orga­ni­za­tions are mov­ing with greater urgency to ensure these ini­tia­tives are top of mind for both IT and busi­ness leaders.

Accord­ing to the 2024 ASUG Pulse of the SAP Cus­tomer Research, 48% of respon­dents indi­cat­ed mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA will be a pri­or­i­ty focus for their orga­ni­za­tions this com­ing year. And these ini­tia­tives, in many cas­es, are cur­rent­ly in progress; 47% of respon­dents said they are already live on the ERP plat­form or are prepar­ing to migrate. 

As SAP S/4HANA dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion projects take on greater impor­tance for our mem­bers, ASUG recent­ly sat down with three of the co-authors of Migrat­ing to SAP S/4HANA, a recent SAP Press best­seller. In con­ver­sa­tion, Frank Finkbohn­er, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Data Migra­tion Con­tent Own­er at SAP; Petra Kloess, SAP Senior Direc­tor of Cen­tral Busi­ness Con­fig­u­ra­tion; and Boris Rubarth, Prod­uct Man­ag­er at SAP, shed light on cru­cial aspects and con­sid­er­a­tions for suc­cess­ful SAP S/4HANA migra­tion projects.

In the sec­ond half of our con­ver­sa­tion, we focused on the impor­tance of deploy­ment mod­els, the util­i­ty of tri­al sys­tems, and the authors’ advice for brown­field imple­men­ta­tion strategies. 

This con­ver­sa­tion was edit­ed and condensed.

ASUG: Chap­ter three of Migrat­ing to SAP S/4HANA focus­es on deploy­ment mod­els, includ­ing pub­lic cloud, pri­vate cloud, on-premis­es, and hybrid. How can orga­ni­za­tions decide on the best deploy­ment mod­el based on their spe­cif­ic oper­a­tional needs?      

Petra Kloess: I rec­om­mend fol­low­ing a roadmap. Con­sid­er cre­at­ing a deci­sion matrix, pri­or­i­tiz­ing cri­te­ria, and mak­ing man­age­ment deci­sions based on the most impor­tant argu­ments. We have cov­ered this in var­i­ous chap­ters, includ­ing chap­ters two, three, and five. Specif­i­cal­ly, chap­ter five pro­vides an exam­ple of such a matrix. Addi­tion­al­ly, chap­ters three and four con­tain numer­ous tables with detailed infor­ma­tion for both cus­tomers and part­ners. These tables include exam­ples that can help you deter­mine if a par­tic­u­lar argu­ment is valid for your situation.

For instance, con­sid­er whether it’s impor­tant for your sys­tem to always be avail­able, or if stay­ing up to date is more crit­i­cal. This is sig­nif­i­cant because SAP S/4HANA Cloud receives updates every two weeks. While this ensures you remain cur­rent, it also means you’ll expe­ri­ence brief peri­ods of sys­tem unavail­abil­i­ty dur­ing upgrades. How­ev­er, with on-premis­es sys­tems, you have the flex­i­bil­i­ty to define when you per­form upgrades yourself. 

ASUG: How do tri­al sys­tems assist in the migra­tion process? What advan­tages do they offer for under­stand­ing the require­ments of migra­tion?   

Frank Finkbohn­er: Tri­al sys­tems offer a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to become famil­iar with the sys­tems, espe­cial­ly if you’re com­ing from a non-SAP sys­tem or an old ERP sys­tem like SAP ERP Cen­tral Com­po­nent (ECC). Tri­al sys­tems allow you to become famil­iar with the new con­cepts of the SAP Launch­pad, spaces, and pages. It’s not just an SAP GUI any­more; it’s now an SAP Fiori Launch­pad. You can become famil­iar with the apps’ new look and func­tion, along with how they inter­con­nect. You can com­pare how things looked in your old sys­tem ver­sus how they look now. So, it’s more than just get­ting famil­iar; it’s also about test­ing out process­es to see how they work and how they com­pare with your cur­rent work­flow. It’s a nice sand­box to try out things, learn, and then apply that knowl­edge. You can access the doc­u­men­ta­tion and all the nec­es­sary resources to get a com­plete feel for your new sys­tem that you can then use in the future once it’s implemented. 

Boris Rubarth: Apart from those tri­al sys­tems, some of us have con­tributed to the open­SAP cours­es. There, the SAP Cloud Appli­ance Library — a library of sys­tems — pro­vides ERP source sys­tems so that users can even try out the con­ver­sion step as one of the pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios in our tri­al envi­ron­ment. This is help­ful because our vir­tu­al machines don’t con­tain cus­tomers’ data. How­ev­er, they allow users to get famil­iar with the process and learn which aspects are relevant. 

Kloess: Addi­tion­al­ly, a lit­tle spe­cial­ty in the whole thing is that S/4HANA Cloud uses con­tent as a start­ing point for your process­es. It speeds up the process sig­nif­i­cant­ly. This enables users to under­stand the con­tent and their start­ing val­ue. The tri­al sys­tems are essen­tial. When you go into the cen­tral busi­ness con­fig­u­ra­tion, you not only pick the busi­ness process­es, but you also man­age your imple­men­ta­tion with this con­tent as a start­ing point. This speeds up the process and results in a high­ly stan­dard­ized sys­tem, which is eas­i­er and faster to main­tain. A lot of advan­tages come out of it, so we thought it was an essen­tial part of the book. 

ASUG: It sounds like a gift.       

Kloess: Cus­tomers love it. 

ASUG: It makes me wish that life came with a tri­al sys­tem.       

[Every­one laughs.] 

ASUG: What are the advan­tages and lim­i­ta­tions of a brown­field migra­tion strat­e­gy, par­tic­u­lar­ly for on-premis­es SAP S/4HANA envi­ron­ments?       

Kloess: It comes down to the fact that migra­tion is not an easy, quick process that hap­pens with­in a day. Migra­tion is a project that needs to be care­ful­ly thought-through and planned. It requires cus­tomers to take sev­er­al steps. The start­ing step is con­vert­ing what you have to the new land­scape, enabling you to adopt these inno­va­tions piece by piece. This enables the cus­tomer to go down the path in a struc­tured and con­trolled way. Sys­tem con­ver­sions are a clear enabler to get the cus­tomers into this world of SAP S/4HANA Cloud in a new way. 

Rubarth: In addi­tion to what Petra has laid out, a brown­field approach — or sys­tem con­ver­sion — will take one ERP source and con­vert it com­plete­ly, even his­tor­i­cal data is still present after­ward. And then you can take fur­ther steps to cre­ate more inno­va­tions. That is, in most cas­es, the ide­al pro­ce­dure. But if you take every­thing with you, then every­thing will be affect­ed by the nec­es­sary sys­tem down­time. The first ques­tion to ask is how long the down­time will be. If you must con­vert the com­plete source sys­tem, it may take longer to get through down­time. There are ways to reduce the down­time, includ­ing archiv­ing part of the source sys­tem. We also have tech­ni­cal means of reduc­ing down­time with advanced features.

ASUG: How much of the con­tent in this book is con­sid­ered ever­green, and how much do you antic­i­pate that it will remain rel­e­vant as SAP S/4HANA evolves? 

Kloess: The book’s core is ever­green, because the argu­ments them­selves cen­ter on orga­ni­za­tion­al inno­va­tion, how a com­pa­ny can be set up in a way that pro­motes inno­va­tion, and using dif­fer­ent migra­tion options to stay ahead of the curve. These will always be ever­green. Cus­tomers need to inno­vate. The argu­ments behind that detail actu­al tools that will evolve with time. That is why we need reg­u­lar tool updates. But I believe the book’s core is ever­green and will remain so, as long as SAP is the lead­ing ERP provider, which is why we are on the fourth edi­tion of the book. 

For more from the authors of SAP Press pub­li­ca­tion Migrat­ing to SAP S/4HANA, read the first part of our con­ver­sa­tion, and pur­chase the book on the SAP Press web­site.