Like snowflakes, every SAP system is different. That means every SAP customer’s journey to S/4HANA will look different too. Different starting points, different migration paths, and different end goals.
Therefore, this might not be the definitive list of ‘must-dos’ to start your organization along its S/4 journey. But these are great stepping stones to consider
Run SAP’s S/4HANA Readiness Check
– This free tool will look at the following:
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Custom Code Impact
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S/4HANA sizing
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Recommended Fiori apps to replace existing transactions
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Relevant simplification items
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Business process analytics
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Data volume management
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Business warehouse extractor
Run SAP’s Transformation Navigator
– A tool that allows you to input information about your organization’s drivers, priorities, benchmarks again peers, etc., as well as your current SAP landscape. The outcome provides three documents: a business guide, a technical guide, and a transformation guide. These guides give information on SAP products and processes to accomplish your inputted goals and licensing info and project planning tools for this proposed transformation.
Leverage SAP Enterprise Support for their value maps
– SAPs EGI (Expert Guided Migration), which is part of SAP’s Enterprise Support Academy, has a plethora of pre-built and customizable value maps to help illustrate the value of S/4HANA to organizational leaders.
Understand the values of S/4HANA’s updated and standardized business processes
– SAP has prepared many tools and metrics to arrive at potential improvements in the time/cost/complexity of processes in S/4 to help build your business cases for the migration to S/4HANA.
Create a Data Migration plan
– Review your existing data and determine your data migration strategy. Time and organization will be essential. Try to eliminate as much unnecessary.
Understand SAP’s Migration Cockpit tools
– A replacement for LSMW, this cockpit of tools facilitate the transfer of master and business data to S/4 HANA.
Talk with experts who have S/4HANA migration experience
– This could be an SI or other consulting partner, many of whom have helped in S/4HANA migrations, and some offer help with migration roadmaps.
Get plugged into ASUG
– If you’re not already part of ASUG, shame on you. More recently, I’ve seen many useful webinars, white papers, blogs, and pieces addressing the S/4HANA journey. SAP customers are writing about their journey’s experiences.
Where will SAP live?
– a move to S/4 is a convergence of business process improvements, IT platform improvements, and infrastructure improvements. Many organizations use the move to S/4 as an opportunity to review and possibly align with their organization’s cloud strategies. It might also be the first opportunity for an organization to dive into what cloud means for them and how they will leverage cloud benefits to maximize efficiencies and investments. Cloud has a vast meaning, so ask yourself, what is my organization’s definition of cloud. Is it agility? Is it diverting spend from CapEx to OpEx? Maybe it is just outsourcing non-strategic IT skillsets? You can accomplish some or all of these in a variety of ways. It could be going with a hyperscaler like Azure, AWS, or GCP. It could also be going to a private cloud. It might be as simple as outsourcing your data center operations and support. Organizations should consider all of these things and more as an opportunity to modernized your infrastructure and how it’s best leveraged.
What do you think? What did I miss? What did you find helpful on your S/4HANA journey?