How to Plan for Your SAP S/4HANA Migration

Developing a Comprehensive Strategy for Your SAP S/4HANA Migration

Everyone running an SAP ECC installation is aware of the SAP deadlines for their customers to move to the Cloud to avoid increased support costs and even a lack of support availability. Many IT executives realize that it is important to move to SAP S/4HANA sooner rather than later. Therefore, looking at the best way to plan for your SAP S/4HANA migration is a timely topic.

Creating and following an effective plan for your migration will make the process easier, avoid excessive downtime, and set your company up for the future with a faster, more secure, and stable data management platform. Here is a high-level overview of the steps you need to take.

Start Thinking About SAP as a Cloud Provider

It’s important to change your mindset where SAP is concerned. As they are encouraging all customers to migrate SAP to the Cloud, SAP is also changing its business model to become a Cloud business. They’re moving away from being an on-premises provider, therefore, you’ll need to change your mindset from thinking of acquiring SAP capabilities using licenses that you capitalize to managing a subscription model.

Select a Migration Partner

The majority of businesses that plan to migrate their SAP installation to the Cloud make an early decision on a partner to help them through the process. Most businesses don’t have migration experts on staff. In fact, for many, migrating SAP to the Cloud will be their first experience with the process. Rather than trying to hire from a small candidate pool, most IT leaders choose to bring an experienced partner into the project.

Besides the expert assistance to ensure a smooth transition, there is a great deal of knowledge transfer that can take place during the migration process and the early operational phases. If your staff has the capacity, you may be able to develop your own staff because of your partner’s presence.

Decide on a Migration Strategy

There are several paths to SAP S/4HANA, and you’ll need to ensure that you choose the strategy that is best for your organization.

Greenfield: This is a fresh start strategy that includes reengineering and process simplification. This is the most expensive approach.

Selective Data Transfer (SDT): This approach is typically called Bluefield. It consists of transferring the base system with its data and running it in the S/4HANA environment to create a smaller system.

Brownfield: The Brownfield strategy is a modified lift-and-shift approach. Done well, it requires a much shorter amount of time than the other strategies.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each of the three alternatives. Your migration partner can help you evaluate which strategy will be the most beneficial.

Begin with a Proof of Concept

SAP systems are critical to your business since they drive mission-critical operations. Doing something as monumental as moving SAP systems to S/4HANA will create concerns about things like performance, security, and the possibility of disrupting operations. When you start your SAP migration with a proof of concept, you can test all your issues and see how SAP runs in the Cloud.

Plan for Operation, Not Just Migration

Moving SAP to S/4HANA gives you the opportunity to transform your operations, but that will only happen if you manage the operations, not just the migration. In order to take advantage of the power moving to S/4HANA will provide, you’ll need to plan for what will happen after the migration. In many ways, the migration itself is the easy part of the transformation you’ll undergo.

You’ll need to address the issue of training, not just for the IT team, but for all the users of the SAP system. Make sure you understand who will require training and plan for how that training will occur. The adoption rate of new technology depends to a large extent on the users receiving the right training.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to simply teach users how to use new features. You need to teach them how to perform their work using the technology that is available to them. That’s an important distinction to consider when you develop training opportunities.

Final Thoughts
Taking the right path to SAP S/4HANA can give your business a significant competitive advantage. New capabilities along with a faster and more cost-effective SAP operation will result in increases in productivity, more innovation, and cost savings.

It’s inevitable that you’ll need to migrate to SAP S/4HANA and starting now is a much better strategy than waiting until the last minute. Lemongrass can help you plan for your migration, guide you through the migration process, and provide managed services to make sure the operation of your new SAP environment meets your expectations.

If you want to learn more about planning for the fastest and easiest way to complete your company’s migration, download our eBook, “What Path Should You Take to SAP S/4HANA.” To discuss your company’s plans, contact a Lemongrass expert today.