SAP has set a 2027 end-of-life date for Business Suite 7 software. For many businesses, migrating from SAP ECC 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA is no longer a question of “if” but rather “when.” In fact, according to a recent SAPinsider poll, the majority of respondents (61%) who have yet to begin utilizing S/4HANA are now using ECC.
While 2027 may seem far away to some, the reality is that implementing S/4HANA sooner rather than later will tremendously benefit your business by increasing agility and providing a better user experience—all while paving the way to becoming an intelligent enterprise. S/4HANA enables customers to utilize sophisticated analytics, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and the internet of things (IoT), and to link people, systems, and data (ML). The advantages of adopting S/4HANA are undeniable: organizations that do so now are taking the first step toward achieving innovation on-demand and competitive differentiation in the future, even though becoming an intelligent enterprise means different things for many enterprises.
Despite these advantages, many SAP customers still need to improve. According to the same SAPinsider poll, more than one-third (38%) of SAP customers who have yet to begin utilizing S/4HANA see no obvious integration path with their current ECC 6.0 system. That’s because the journey to S/4HANA isn’t always straightforward for many businesses: a S/4HANA implementation plan heavily depends on your particular IT environment, meaning there’s no “one-size-fits-all” conversion path to SAP’s next-generation ERP.
Three S/4HANA Paths to Consider
Vizio’s SAP experts have identified three popular conversion models to help you navigate your S/4HANA journey and identify the correct path for your business.
Greenfield Approach: This approach ensures the benefits of new developments, such as SAP HANA, SAP Fiori, and others, while incorporating the industry’s most current best practices to standardize processes on the digital core. On the other hand, Greenfield deployments require more effort, time, and resources because they involve entirely revamping business processes. Another thing to remember is that data conversion to S/4HANA with Greenfield is often limited to master and open transactional items, leaving past transactional data behind (i.e., you lose all history of completed transactions).
Selective Data Transition (SDT): With the ability to transfer essential business data (including master and historical data) from ECC 6.0 to S/4HANA, enterprises can reuse the components of their current ERP solution that they want while revamping the parts they don’t. Business leaders undergoing divestitures, mergers, and acquisitions frequently use SDT to extract only the most critical corporate data and reorganize S/4HANA for the new organization. Therefore, unlike the Greenfield approach, your history of prior transactions will not be lost; instead, they will be transferred to your unique setting.
SDT allows businesses to update antiquated business procedures while preserving priceless historical data, but this potent combination has a cost. Because of the specialist tools required to extract configurations and data from existing environments for conversion to S/4HANA, it is a more complex and time-consuming conversion model.
Brownfield Approach: Our experts regard the Brownfield strategy as the most typical path in the field. It entails a complete in-place technical conversion of an existing ECC 6.0 system to S/4HANA. Said, it enables businesses to keep their present structure (configuration set) while upgrading it to function on S/4HANA and migrating all master and transactional data to the new system. Brownfield conversion is an ideal methodology for businesses that wish to keep their current business processes and data while allowing for faster adoption and development of new technologies.
The quickest and most economical way to get to S/4HANA is via brownfield. Once the project is finished, you’ll have the groundwork to implement other aspects of the intelligent enterprise. The company’s present IT landscape and your long-term objectives will determine the optimum route to S/4HANA.
Steps for the first phase of SAP S/4 HANA Implementation
The primary goal is to adapt the framework to the organization’s business cycles and make capacity planning, such as achieving business objectives, significantly more practical.
As a result, we treat the first phase of the S/4HANA transformation as a separate service. The result is a detailed roadmap defining how a firm should approach the conversion in concert with the SAP S/4 HANA implementation guide. Gathering information such as S/4 HANA features, cost and time required is also part of this process.
Step 1: Assess Business Readiness
A standard readiness report must be generated following a technical and business examination to determine its preparedness for the intended implementation. The project team uses this report to determine the best path for the SAP S/4 HANA installation.
Step 2: Examine the Business Requirements
This process entails creating a list of all the technical and business modifications that must be made to the current SAP ECC system. When deciding on the path to S/4 HANA deployment, it is vital to understand these progressions and how the cycles are carried out in the new environment. This critical phase answers the question posed by the development team: does the new climate support the current processes?
Step 3: Verifying the ABAP Code
Determining which development strategies are used to develop business metrics (exactness heavily depends on the amount of time available for data collection). This step examines the ABAP code for accuracy and compliance with SAP S/4 HANA programming standards. It is also essential to adapt any SQL queries used in ABAP projects to the most current standards and requirements defined by S/4 HANA.
Step 4: Environment Architecture
BASIS advisors and the internal IT division will research the accessible framework components using the information gathered during the readiness check and practical workshops with the client. Based on this information, they will propose the objective climate design at the level of SAP S/4 HANA applications. As part of the equipment service provider’s plans, the client will utilize the particular procedure to build an actual environment architecture (hardware, OS, LAN).
Vizio Helps You Choose The Right For Your Business
A transition to S/4HANA may act as the impetus for a further move to managed cloud services with a hyper-scale cloud provider, like AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, depending on where you are in your cloud migration.
Consult our experts at Vizio to learn more about the three S/4HANA conversion models, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to choose the appropriate one for your company. Whatever path you select to S/4HANA, we’re here to help. Learn more about our end-to-end SAP-managed services to see how VIZIO can assist you with your specific S/4HANA conversion.