What to Expect When Moving From SAP Business Suite to SAP S/4 HANA
A question we at Blue Harbors frequently hear from clients considering the move to SAP S/4 HANA is,“what should I expect from the migration – how difficult/time-consuming/expensive is it?”
The answer depends somewhat on which version of SAP you are currently using – SAP Business Suite or ERP 6.0 – and whether your current system is heavily modified.
Customers operating SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA will find the migration to be relatively simple, since only the exchange innovation (that’s SAP lingo for “new code”) needs to be deployed in order to migrate to SAP S/4 HANA.
For SAP ERP 6.0 customers it’s a little more complex. These customers will need to upgrade to the latest enhancement package, then migrate their database to SAP HANA. The database migration usually requires deployment of the exchange innovation. The upgrade and migration can be done in sequence or simultaneously.
As for modifications, as with any system migration or upgrade, the migration to SAP S/4 HANA is a great time to take a closer look and validate whether the modifications that have been made to your system over time are still serving your business well, or whether it is time to simplify your solution.
In Blue Harbors’ experience, validating modifications and eliminating any that have become obsolete saves time and money over the long term. Improvements in functionality with more recent releases of SAP mean that as many as half the modifications customers once needed to run their business may no longer be necessary. Eliminating them speeds up release cycles and reduces the amount of testing needed to successfully implement SAP S/4 HANA – not to mention simplifying the process for future upgrades.
The migration path for all of these scenarios is well proven, with hundreds of SAP customers having already migrated successfully to SAP S/4 HANA.
The migration offers a number of benefits – not least of which is the ease with which functionality can now be extended using the SAP S/4 Cloud Platform. In fact, many standard extensions can be done directly from SAP Fiori UX, with the Cloud Platform available for more significant development work. SAP HANA (the common platform for SAP S/4HANA) also offers a “safe” environment in which to isolate enhancements so that innovations can be easily applied. Open source solutions can be integrated and modifications isolated from the core code, driving greater agility for on-premise deployment, and safeguarding agility for cloud deployments.
This also keeps the core “clean,” allowing it to be quickly and easily updated when new innovations are added, making any future upgrades or enhancements faster and easier.
