One of the biggest challenges of moving to S/4HANA is helping the business understand where the value lies. Since an S/4HANA migration is often seen as an IT project, business leaders tend to think of it merely as a technical upgrade. So, while IT might be enthusiastic about an S/4 migration, business leaders are looking for a more concrete justification for the budget outlay that would accompany any such endeavor.
At a high level, there are three clear drivers to justify the investment now.
1 End of SAP ERP support in 2027
An end to SAP support would result in all new SAP innovations to apply only to S/4HANA, putting customers on SAP ERP into a disadvantageous competitive position. It would be best to plan an SAP S/4HANA migration to have enough time to adopt an intelligent system for positive business process transformation.
2 Cost of doing nothing.
To stay ahead of your competitors, you must take a proactive position and rely on innovations — a bold strategy lets you achieve positive business outcomes as soon as possible. With the increasing pace of innovation businesses need to adopt the technology that will enable them to keep their competitive edge. Often, these technologies rely on a backend that can process large volumes of real-time data, an area where S/4HANA shines.
3 There are employee benefits too!
The better user interface, efficiency, and automation that S/4HANA brings free up employee time to work on more engaging projects, and that is the fundamental principle of the Intelligent Enterprise. These projects lead to new product lines and additional revenue streams – all of which can be tied back to S/4HANA be directly or indirectly.
Business Advantages of S/4HANA
The business advantages of moving to SAP S/4 are numerous and easily accessible. Here are just a few to get started.
- Defined user role structure with smooth business processes.
- Ability to scale with minimal expenses and risks.
- New opportunities for integration and data exchange.
- Increased flexibility and scalability to accommodate new business events such as increased sales or changes to business process operations.
- A new level of user experience with massive simplification of business process flows. Responsive design allowing for their device-independent use driving higher customer satisfaction with all applications.
- Extended analytics and reporting with user-friendly tools to create reports and perform real-time analytics. And since S/4HANA combines transactional and analytic capabilities, it can be used as an analytical database management system.
- SAP S/4HANA runs in-memory, which helps to deal with the critical performance bottlenecks of databases and improve performance significantly. A single source of truth for OLAP (online analytical processing) and OLTP (online transaction processing) leads to speed benefits.
S/4HANA Implementation Approach
There are three typical approaches to implement SAP S/4HANA.
- Greenfield – A new implementation of SAP S/4HANA from scratch enables complete re-engineering and process simplification. It lets organizations predefine migration objects and best practices, lowers time-to-value, and facilitates faster adoption of innovations.
- Brownfield – A system conversion that presents a low-risk opportunity to cost-effectively combine the SAP landscape rebuild with a consolidation of existing SAP-related business processes. It can be broken into several distinct phases – enabling companies to keep a clear view of the project scope.
- Hybrid – Combining the strengths of Greenfield and Brownfield involves creating an empty copy of your source system as an initial target system for selective data migration. It thus helps to separate data from configuration, and performing differential data migration, helps to reduce downtime significantly.
SAP S/4HANA Migration – Methodology
- Discovery
The discovery phase allows you to make the appropriate business transformation steps and a transition plan with impact analysis. Analyze legacy systems and compare the functionality with SAP S/4HANA to make the list of required adjustments.
- Define Implementation Strategy
In this phase, you define the optimal implementation scope, target architecture adjustments, and SAP S/4HANA adoption strategy. Conduct a technical readiness check for SAP S/4HANA, including identifying simplification items and analyzing business functions, industry solutions, and custom code.
- Define Technical & Business Architecture
Cover all critical architecture and infrastructure issues to derive exact estimates on the required hardware size and capacity. Conduct an analytics architecture and data migration model. Prepare a gap analysis between the as-is and to-be business processes to cover the business needs.
- Mock Conversion
A mock conversion allows the business to understand the value of SAP S/4HANA in the shortest terms and with minimum efforts. It will enable you to identify technical roadblocks and data conversion challenges along with the level of effort estimation.
Specific advantages gained with an S/4 migration.
While the general benefits of an S/4 migration are myriad, here are some specific examples based on individual modules.
From SAP EWM to S/4HANA Embedded EWM
- SAP S/4HANA guarantees a higher processing power of Embedded EWM in comparison to standalone EWM.
- Among the vital simplification points are getting rid of data replication and additional transactional documents.
From SAP BW to BW/4HANA
- The number of all modeling object types are reduced due to simplification.
- BW/4HANA enables overall better efficiency in terms of operations and data processing.
From SAP BPC Classic (Standard) to SAP BPC Embedded
- No more data replication is required. There is no need for separate transaction data flow with SAP BPC Embedded.
- Provides better planning functions and capabilities.
From SAP APO to IBP
- Flexible SAP Fiori-based UI, which speeds up planning processes.
- Much faster deployment processes.
From SAP SRM to Ariba
- Higher efficiency of all sourcing processes for both buyers and suppliers.
- Master data and transaction data is smoothly transferred thanks to SAP Ariba integration capabilities.
inoBrix is a boutique SAP services provider. We deliver high-quality services, including SAP implementation, functional and technical consulting, and managed services. We have a broad pool of certified experts with relevant SAP S/4HANA expertise who can cover all tasks, from system analysis and implementation to go-live support. We invite you to reach out to us to help you on your S/4 transformation journey.