A Smart & Selective Approach for Moving to SAP S/4HANA

The way you plan and execute your transition to SAP S/4HANA can have a substantial impact on your ability to adopt next-generation business processes and use new capabilities. Needless to say, making the right choices in your planning process is very important for your transition journey.

For companies with a large amount of data in the existing ERP system, Selective Data Transition (SDT) provides a good option. It can help your business to reduce costs, boost transparency, streamline your ERP environment, and future-proof your business. Even better, SDT helps you move to SAP S/4HANA smoothly and efficiently, with very little downtime before going live.

Another reason to go with SDT is that you can roll out controlled and targeted innovation without having to impact the entire organization. It is especially beneficial for companies operating globally in many countries. Unlike Greenfield conversion, which takes a long time to implement, and Brownfield conversion, which requires all countries to go live at the same time, SDT provides the opportunity to roll out the conversion in a way that best meets your business needs.

A Smart & Selective Approach to Data

Rather than moving all of your data to SAP S/4HANA, our Smart & Selective approach allows you to select the data sets your business needs and schedule the transition process based on a fixed timeline. By moving data selectively, you can eliminate obsolete or corrupt data as well as inactive business organizational units, resulting in a leaner future ERP landscape. It also provides opportunities for data transformation or adopting new SAP S/4HANA innovation capabilities that do not exist today in SAP ECC to solve business challenges.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1:  To minimize resource consumption and maximize data quality, an initial analysis of your SAP system is conducted with a powerful evaluation tool – Natuvion  SOPHIA™ — that offers transparency concerning a wide range of items, including:

Step 2:  Your business receives a structured report about your current systems and the steps you need to take to prepare for migration to SAP S/4HANA, along with recommendations for the right transformation scenario and path for your business.

Step 3:  Based on the analysis, our experts deliver tailored recommendations for your migration, working with you to draw up a potential roadmap and timeline for your project. Our common goal is to guide you through the migration process as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

How to Prepare for Your Migration

Moving your business to the cloud requires some thought about your data to determine what you want to move to the new system. The following are some guidelines for preparing for the migration.

Take stock of what you have.
Your company’s SAP landscape likely has accumulated a multitude of data over time – some of which you may not even know exists. Some of this data must be kept for specific reasons — for example for documentation or tax records — but a certain amount of this data is no longer needed.

Other datasets, such as personal information, are governed by GDPR and other privacy laws from being saved in your systems. Having an overview of what is in your systems is key to addressing compliance and security aspects when moving to SAP S/4HANA.

Decide what to move.
Rather than moving everything, Selective Data Transition offers the opportunity to perform some data housekeeping. For example, an analysis with Natuvion SOPHIA™ will help you to answer the following questions:

• What data do I have to move?
• What data am I allowed to move?
• What data must be deleted?
• What data can be archived?

Knowing all of these aspects allows for a much more streamlined moving process and leads to leaner systems in the future.

Prioritize what needs to be moved and when.
Moving can be done in stages, starting with the essentials. For example, first you may want to move your subsidiary data, then the headquarters – or you may choose to move department by department. There are countless important priorities and sensitive strategies to consider, especially since multiple stakeholders with different demands are involved. With data-based arguments, you can avoid stressful internal discussions.

Select what to move and where.
It’s important to think about how much storage space you will need for the data you wish to move. By calculating how much public cloud space you need in the first place, you can minimize any looping in the migration process afterwards.

Balance change with value.
Re-platforming to SAP S/4HANA provides a host of new intelligent technologies and simplified business processes, yet organizational adoption is the true measure of value creation. Taking the time to determine and evaluate your organization’s acceptance of change will help your team to focus on prioritizing the pace of change and innovation you plan to deliver to the business.

Achieve your Business Transformation with RISE with SAP

Business transformation towards the cloud often raises questions: How can we leverage the cloud benefits for our business model? How do we put process improvements and innovations into practice? And how do we ensure that the systems meet our industry-specific requirements?

RISE with SAP is a comprehensive package that contains all the fundamental components for an intelligent, sustainable enterprise in the cloud. Combined with our Smart & Selective approach, it’s an ideal way to handle your migration to SAP S/4HANA.

For more information, download our Smart & Selective buyer’s guide.