Lessons Learned from a Real-World SAP S/4HANA and RISE with SAP Project

SAP S/4HANA has emerged as a top priority for SAP customers, as revealed by the latest SAPinsider research. According to the executive report “The CIO’s Transformation Report Card,” nearly half of leaders have yet to complete their SAP S/4HANA migration, while 30% remain in the evaluation or pilot phases.

To help customers prepare for this critical initiative and provide practical advice for those embarking on their SAP S/4HANA and RISE journey, SAPinsider hosted a webinar featuring executives from GyanSys, a leading systems integration partner, and Panasonic Marketing Middle East and Africa (PMMAF). The panel included experts from both organizations who shared valuable insights.

Drivers

PMMAF had several drivers for the project including:

• Provide a more seamless integrated flow of information.
• A desire to standardize all business and corporate functions.
• Improve product reliability and employee efficiency.
• Streamline workflows and support interfaces.
• Provide real-time KPI monitoring using embedded analytics.
• Improve the effectiveness and efficiency of business processes.

“We wanted to provide scalability to support future ventures and make our SAP platform robust so we can be ready for all future enhancements as well as improve production reliability and employee efficiency,” said Anil Chowtapalli, Business Solutions Manager, Panasonic MEA.

PMMAF and GyanSys engaged together in a six-week workshop to better understand the current state of the Panasonic system and map to a future state. Based on this extensive analysis, GyanSys recommended that Panasonic Middle East perform a brownfield migration which they felt would be a more cost-effective approach and would limit the change expectations on the business.

PMMAF currently supports a complex system landscape including home-grown systems, satellite systems, third party integrations, Salesforce, and SAP ECC. PMMAF also leveraged SAP BW for analytics and as their data hub. The transformation project targeted core business processes such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, logistics and inventory, and included both ECC and BW.

Extensive Analysis Required

According to GyanSys’s Neeraj Sahu, VP and Client Partner, he recommends to all their customers preparing for an SAP S/4HANA or RISE with SAP project perform a very thorough, multi-dimensional analysis of business processes, customizations, infrastructure, and data. “This type of analysis informs you on what you need to do from a security role perspective, from a Fiori perspective, and help you design your approach in a model which allows you to limit risk and provide predictability for your overall project,” asserts Sahu.

According to Sahu, this assessment provides a clear view of which migration approach to take; Greenfield (reimplementation), Brownfield (migration of existing system and data), or hybrid (a combination of the two).

GyanSys divided the assessment into two sections. One focused on SAP ERP and the transition to SAP S/4HANA. The second part focused on SAP BW and transforming the analytics function.

One of the keys to the analysis on SAP ECC involved the meticulous evaluation of core business processes to really understand how the current business users are leveraging the existing system and how that might be impacted or improved by the move to SAP S/4HANA. “As part of this assessment we developed very customized demos for Panasonic business processes and in that way the members of the team could really visualize all the changes that were coming. We did this assessment process by process and that’s how were able to show them where are the challenges and what requires changes, what is the impact on deployment, and what are the requirements needed to support these changes,” describes Raghu Paide, Managing Director, SAP S/4HANA Practice, GyanSys.

These assessments also closely examined the impact on existing transaction codes and security roles as well as if there were changes needed for infrastructure and deployment, and whether certain scenarios would require additional licensing.

Other critical areas of analysis include custom code and an examination of what is going to be replaced in SAP S/4HANA so that they would have a clear idea of what a development effort would be required for the migration. GyanSys also looked very closely at all the BI tools PMMAF was using the versions they supported and how the data flowed into the tools from ECC and if and how that might change after the move to SAP S/4HANA.

Greenfield vs. Brownfield and Other Key Decisions

Based on the extensive analysis of existing business processes and scenarios, GyanSys recommended that PMMAF opt for the brownfield approach which supported the migration of customizations into the new SAP S/4HANA environment. “When we looked at every single scenario holistically, it was unanimous to go for brownfield,” reports Paide.

As they moved through their analysis, GyanSys found that in all areas except for credit management and areas of profitability analysis it made sense to go for the brownfield approach.

The in-depth analysis that GyanSys and PMMAF performed together also created another benefit in that they were able to identify any pre-requisites and pre-projects that needed to be complete before the migration. “We were able to identify some of the key preparation projects that were mandatory like steps that need to be complete for the business partner area and for credit management, “says Paide.

In defining the technical scope of the project, the team also identified key tasks such as CVI migration, custom code analysis, security role remediation, and remediation of BW extractors in ECC that needed to be completed.

Key Lessons Learned and Success Factors for SAP S/4HANA and RISE with SAP projects

GyanSys and PMMAF shared several lessons learned from this project as well as specific challenges and how they worked around them.

Invest in Organizational Change Management and Training Early and Often: GyanSys and PMMAF made sure these elements were integrated through all levels of the project. They took the ‘train the trainer’ approach and created extensive documentation, videos, and hands-on exercises that the teams could access quickly.

Overcommunicate to stakeholders: “We defined more than 400 lines of a detailed project plan. We meticulously made sure that everyone understood where we were on our timeline and had visibility early on if even a small task was slipping behind schedule,” described Paide.

Test everything, even the seemingly small things: GyanSys and PMMAF copied the entire production system into their sandbox and performed the brownfield migration within that box. They tested comprehensively including different scenarios such as data migration activities, the impact of financial processes down to the penny, entity dimensions, GL accounts, and more.

PMMAF leverages the Letter of Credit functionality, and they discovered in this testing process that the SAP S/4HANA Letter of Credit functionality changes in SAP S/4HANA. “We could not visualize this impact in the planning phase because this feature was not well documented in SAP S/4HANA. Unless we did this sandbox migration, we would not have uncovered this issue,” asserts Paide.

Establish a cadence of collaboration with the SAP RISE team: According to PMMAF’s Chowtapalli, there were several challenges that they faced during the project that could only be solved by close collaboration with the SAP team. One was the aforementioned Letter of Credit functionality while another involved the Business Partner Migration process.

“Yes, we had some challenges but thanks to the GyanSys team, SAP, and our business team which was available around the clock during our cutover time we were able to resolve the issues on a real-time basis and were able to minimize downtime,” reports Chowtapalli.

To listen to the full webinar click here.