There are many rea­sons com­pa­nies make the tran­si­tion to SAP S/4HANA. One of the most com­mon rea­sons is that users want to upgrade their ERP sys­tem, while min­i­miz­ing the changes asso­ci­at­ed with that process that could affect day-to-day business. 

ASUG recent­ly sat down with Otto Baskin, direc­tor of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy at Well­born Cab­i­net, a fam­i­ly-owned res­i­den­tial cab­i­net com­pa­ny based in Ash­land, Alaba­ma. He recent­ly over­saw the company’s tran­si­tion from its old SAP R/3 ERP sys­tem to SAP S/4HANA. We talked about the rea­sons Well­born Cab­i­net upgrad­ed, why a new sys­tem was vital for the com­pa­ny, and how the company’s IT team over­came some of the road­blocks of their brown­field implementation. 

Jim: You have been on SAP S/4HANA for less than six months. How has that expe­ri­ence been so far?

Otto: Over­all it has been real­ly good. How­ev­er, it is bet­ter in some areas than in oth­ers. We use Vari­ant Con­fig­u­ra­tion (VC), as we sell con­fig­urable cab­i­nets. It’s one of the more com­pli­cat­ed VC mod­els around, very code-inten­sive. So while SAP S/4HANA is much faster in some areas than what was in our old ERP sys­tem, some areas, like VC, are not. VC is actu­al­ly about the same speed as it used to be.