In June 2019, I pub­lished a blog high­light­ing con­cerns with the SAP third-par­ty appli­ca­tion cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process for SAP S/4HANA. Over the months of July and August, ASUG con­duct­ed a research project to more ful­ly under­stand this issue. ASUG sur­veyed SAP cus­tomers who are cur­rent­ly live on SAP S/4HANA, cus­tomers plan­ning or active­ly engaged in an SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion, and third-par­ty cer­ti­fied solu­tion partners.

Johnsonville’s SAP S/4HANA Upgrade Hurdles

Before we dig into the results of the sur­vey, let me update you on my organization’s sta­tus as a cur­rent SAP S/4HANA cus­tomer. As I not­ed in my orig­i­nal blog on this top­ic, John­sonville had to aban­don an upgrade from 1610 to 1809 due to lack of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for crit­i­cal third-par­ty solu­tions. In Octo­ber 2019 we received final cer­ti­fi­ca­tion on our third-par­ty solu­tions for 1809 — more than a year after the ini­tial release of 1809 and a month after the release of 1909. In Decem­ber 2019, John­sonville suc­cess­ful­ly upgrad­ed our pro­duc­tion instance to the 1809 release. 

I do want to share that SAP has worked with John­sonville to help move cer­ti­fi­ca­tions along with sev­er­al part­ners — one of our key solu­tions was cer­ti­fied in July 2019 with help from SAP. 

ASUG Research on Third-Par­ty Certifications

ASUG will be pub­lish­ing its find­ings from this research via a vari­ety of chan­nels through­out 2020. Stay tuned for an exec­u­tive sum­ma­ry of the research results in Q1 2020 and some inter­est­ing insights from both cus­tomers and part­ners. In the mean­time, let me share a few key points from the research to whet your appetite for the summary.

First and fore­most, the issues we expe­ri­enced (and are con­tin­u­ing to expe­ri­ence) are not unique to John­sonville. Almost half of all cus­tomers who are cur­rent­ly live on SAP S/4HANA (both green­field and brown­field imple­men­ta­tions) expe­ri­enced issues with their project relat­ed to third-par­ty solu­tions. One-third of all cus­tomers expe­ri­enced project issues direct­ly relat­ed to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of those solutions. 

SAP Cus­tomers at Risk of Upgrade Issues

Let’s look at cus­tomer plans for SAP S/4HANA adop­tion over the next few years. Six­ty per­cent of cus­tomers who are cur­rent­ly in project plan­ning or engaged in an imple­men­ta­tion project intend to take a brown­field (upgrade or migra­tion of an exist­ing SAP ECC envi­ron­ment) approach to imple­ment­ing SAP S/4HANA. Addi­tion­al­ly, 67% of cus­tomers will con­tin­ue using exist­ing third-par­ty solu­tions in their tar­get SAP S/4HANA envi­ron­ment. This is the group of cus­tomers — those look­ing to migrate (ver­sus a new install) and use exist­ing third-par­ty solu­tions — who will encounter the most sig­nif­i­cant issues with cer­ti­fied solutions. 

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A Hard Halt May Be Ahead

To reit­er­ate the core of the issue here, for any­thing beyond a sand­box envi­ron­ment, the soft­ware update man­ag­er (SUM) process will phys­i­cal­ly halt if a third-par­ty solu­tion is found in the source sys­tem (SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA) and is not cer­ti­fied in the tar­get (SAP S/4HANA) sys­tem. There is no way to bypass this hard halt. There are options, such as unin­stalling the solu­tion, run­ning the SUM process, and then rein­stalling the solu­tion. But that is not prac­ti­cal for most environments. 

The most fright­en­ing sta­tis­tic is that only ​“37% of future cus­tomers, or those at least in the plan­ning phase, are aware of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for third-par­ty solu­tions.” That means two-thirds of the cus­tomers plan­ning or in the ear­ly stages of an SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion project are sim­ply not aware of the real pos­si­bil­i­ty of sig­nif­i­cant impacts on their project.

Part­ners Face Bar­ri­ers to SAP Certifications

The last find­ing I would like to share is the mis­match between cus­tomer expec­ta­tions and part­ners’ plans to get cer­ti­fied. Based on the research, 40% of cus­tomers expect part­ners to have solu­tions cer­ti­fied with­in 60 days of the gen­er­al avail­abil­i­ty (GA) of each release. Yet, only 22% of part­ners expect to be cer­ti­fied with­in that same time peri­od. The most con­cern­ing result of the sur­vey is that near­ly 20% of the part­ners are expect­ing it may take up to a year or more after GA to cer­ti­fy. Addi­tion­al­ly, some part­ners do not plan on cer­ti­fy­ing for every release. 

Time Is Not on Our Side

Based on these results, it seems most pru­dent for cus­tomers to plan a min­i­mum of six months for most third-par­ty solu­tions to get cer­ti­fied on the most cur­rent release. Obvi­ous­ly, every cus­tomer has a dif­fer­ent mix of solu­tions and will have to plan accord­ing­ly to adapt to their part­ners’ cer­ti­fi­ca­tion schedules.

The part­ners who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the research study iden­ti­fied a host of con­cerns with the cur­rent cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process, includ­ing cost and com­plex­i­ty. Hav­ing to go through a dif­fi­cult annu­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process takes resources away from their R&D activ­i­ties or cus­tomer sup­port efforts. Like every orga­ni­za­tion, part­ners must pri­or­i­tize where they spend their scarce resources. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, cer­ti­fy­ing for an SAP S/4HANA release with a rel­a­tive­ly small cus­tomer base may not become a top priority. 

No Sil­ver Bul­let Yet

As I stat­ed in my orig­i­nal blog on this top­ic, I don’t have a sil­ver bul­let to solve this issue. John­sonville will be forced to take an N‑1 approach to our solu­tion road map, and by the time we get 1809 imple­ment­ed, it will be 14 months from the orig­i­nal GA date. Pri­or to mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA, we con­sis­tent­ly applied the lat­est enhance­ment packs to our SAP ECC envi­ron­ments on an annu­al basis — some­times more fre­quent­ly to sup­port project require­ments. This allowed us to take advan­tage of SAP enhance­ments and inno­va­tions in a more time­ly manner. 

From a cus­tomer per­spec­tive, I believe two things need to occur. First, SAP needs to pro­vide cus­tomers the abil­i­ty to over­ride the hard halt that hap­pens when the SUM process encoun­ters non­cer­ti­fied solu­tions. Sec­ond, the part­ners and SAP must iden­ti­fy a more effec­tive and effi­cient process to cer­ti­fy exist­ing solu­tions on the lat­est release of SAP S/4HANA.

For the past five years, SAP has focused on get­ting cus­tomers to move to SAP S/4HANA. At this point it is crit­i­cal for SAP and part­ners to begin address­ing the thou­sands of cus­tomers — espe­cial­ly ear­ly adopters — who have already moved to SAP S/4HANA and are prepar­ing for their first upgrades, and those that will be required to stay on main­stream main­te­nance for SAP S/4HANA. For SAP S/4HANA 1610, accord­ing to the SAP Prod­uct Avail­abil­i­ty Matrix, main­stream main­te­nance ends on Dec. 31, 2021. For those on 1511, main­stream main­te­nance ends Decem­ber of 2020. As cus­tomers look to upgrade, the most attrac­tive path for­ward is to move to the lat­est release. Giv­en the delay in part­ner cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, how­ev­er, this will not be a viable option for many customers. 

For those inter­est­ed in whether their part­ner solu­tion is cer­ti­fied, SAP has pro­vid­ed a blog with links to ver­i­fy cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sta­tus. The blog pro­vides mul­ti­ple links — I would sug­gest fol­low­ing the link spe­cif­ic to the SAP S/4HANA ver­sion you are inter­est­ed in. For those inter­est­ed in ver­sion 1909, note that few­er than 20 solu­tions are cur­rent­ly cer­ti­fied for the lat­est release — ver­sus 80 – 90 solu­tions for pri­or releases. 

ASUG has tak­en the first step to address­ing this top­ic by assess­ing the mag­ni­tude of the issue from a cus­tomer and part­ner per­spec­tive. I look for­ward to work­ing with SAP, ASUG, and the part­ner net­work to find ways to elim­i­nate this bar­ri­er to adop­tion of SAP prod­ucts and part­ner inno­va­tion. Please reach out to ASUGNews@​asug.​com if you are inter­est­ed in shar­ing your expe­ri­ences with this top­ic.

Reg­is­ter for ​“Your Move to SAP S/4HANA: Find­ing a Path that Fits” Pre-Con­fer­ence Sem­i­nar at ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence to hear lessons learned, val­ue sce­nar­ios, and tips for build­ing a busi­ness case from cus­tomers who are already live.