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.