How SAP ECC Systems can be transformed to S/4HANA ?
Every Business needs to update its technology and adapt to the changing needs and market conditions along with it are the challenges in moving to the new SAP S/4HANA Product Suite. The article focuses on how SAP ECC Systems can be transformed and the key steps involved during the transformation.
Start by creating a high-level plan
Take into account your current situation, identify the applications that you want to run on S/4HANA, and identify the business case for moving to SAP
- Identify potential challenges and risks
- What are your key user applications?
- Which parts of your application landscape will be affected by this migration and what will be the impact on business processes in these areas?
What are the advantages of moving to S/4HANA?
Improvements to the user experience
- Simplified data model
- Ability to create custom apps
- Increased business agility
- Improved data security
- Reduced hardware costs
- Because your apps will be running through clustered servers instead of individual ones like before, they will perform much better under heavy loads
Understand your current landscape
You would need to have a view of the impacted stakeholders because of the transformation so that you could foresee the effort from your business.
- Consider conducting design thinking workshops with end-users (key users).
- These workshops should focus on: Reviewing business process flows, identifying pain points, understanding critical success factors, determining key process improvement opportunities, collecting requirements for future capabilities needed, and discussing changes or extensions to standard functionality based on regulatory or other requirements
Conduct Feasibility Analysis
Create a solid timeline by breaking the project up into stages that you can tackle sequentially
- System Discovery
- Identify what aspects of your current system won’t work well and need improvement
- Determine which business processes are most important to transition first
- Functional Mapping
- Test how your existing solutions integrate with S/4HANA
What are the different ways to move to S/4HANA?
There are two options: New implementation and System Conversion
Are all the solutions and solutions available on ECC also available on S/4HANA?
No.
- Some ECC solutions will not be available in the new SAP solution
- You will have to migrate to an alternative solution or go without
- Re-evaluate your solutions to see if there are solutions that can be done without
SAP S/4HANA is a robust solution, but you need to be aware of the challenges your company may face transitioning from ECC.
Before embarking on the move, take these steps:
- Ensure you have business process blueprints for all your business processes
- Identify use cases that drive value for your company and map those processes as well
New Implementation
This is where you start from scratch and decide on the level of functionality that you want to implement in your organization.
- There are up to three different levels-SAP Best Practice, SAP Activate or a Customized Project
- You will also have the opportunity to activate various S/4HANA modules and applications as well as preconfigured business processes based on Best Practices from SAP.
What is the recommended timeline?
Transitioning to S/4HANA requires a lot of planning and testing
- The timeline depends on the size of the company and the industry.
- Planning should be done in stages
- To facilitate a successful move, it is recommended that you break down the move into phases or stages.