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SAP S/4HANA® Selective Data Transition Engagement

Key Takeaways

• Flexible Migration: Selective Data Transition offers flexibility in choosing the speed and scope of your SAP S/4HANA® migration, allowing for a single go-live or phased approach.

• Data Management: Migrate only relevant historical data, leaving behind obsolete information, and adapt business processes while protecting previous investments.

• Reduced Disruption: Near-zero downtime approach enables a smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA®, minimizing business disruption.

A SAP S/4HANA® Selective Data Transition goes beyond a standard New Implementation or System Conversion. It includes a host of options, related to the handling of software & data provisioning, requiring additional expert services and tools to accomplish.

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The Benefits

A SAP S/4HANA® Selective Data Transition goes beyond a standard New Implementation or System Conversion. It includes a host of options, related to the handling of software & data provisioning, requiring additional expert services and tools to accomplish.

The benefits of the Selective Data Transition approach are diverse and often customer specific.

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As a starting point, we defined the typical key benefits of this approach suitable for most SAP customers:

• Avoid business disruption when moving to SAP S/4HANA® and go live in a way that suits business needs. This approach allows for a single go live, moving a high number of organizational units or roll-out in multiple phases (e.g., by country).
• Migrate your relevant historical data only and retain a consistent process chain / document flow. Leave obsolete data behind, such as outdated company codes.
• Define your own speed and combine single projects, including a new go live implementation, finance harmonization, or others with the move to SAP S/4HANA® in one single step—or separate them in a phased approach.
• With your journey to SAP S/4HANA®, you may introduce new business processes and adapt / harmonize your historical data, while protecting good practices and previous investments (e.g., custom applications).
• Near-Zero Downtime approach provides the ability to restrict the technical downtime to a couple of hours only.
• Possibility to change your landscape (e.g., split or consolidate existing systems).

The Approach

The term “selective” is often used to describe a restrictive migration of current data, including master data, open items, and balances. This is not what the SAP S/4HANA® Selective Data Transition approach is about in terms of methodology, scope, and disruption to the business.

The SAP S/4HANA® Selective Data Transition is an alternative to a System Conversion and New Implementation to move to SAP S/4HANA®. This option is all about combining the benefits of both approaches without their limitations: use the innovations in S/4HANA®, while selectively leveraging / re-using your investment. Selective Data Transition gives you the flexibility to adapt customization, data, and processes in your new SAP S/4HANA® system.

This transition methodology maps your current system’s data and processes to a new setup. All relations and interdependencies between the different items stay intact. It also enables a direct further-on processing of partly delivered sales orders migrated from ECC without any cutover effort in SAP S/4HANA®. The complete reporting and lookup functionalities can be used in the new system, and the ECC system will not be needed anymore for daily business.

For further information, visit our Practical Guide for Senior IT Specialists

The Experts

To provide SAP customers with a reliable and proven migration approach in their migration to SAP S/4HANA®, SAP established an expert group of partners – the SAP S/4HANA® Selective Data Transition Engagement. Formed in 2018, this working group unites the system landscape transformation experts of five companies: cbs, Datavard, Natuvion, SAP, and SNP.

The mission of this working group is to establish and adhere to joint standards, methods, and processes that are co-developed with SAP for a secure, yet flexible migration to SAP S/4HANA®. This alignment of the five companies aims to ensure high quality, reduced risk, shorter time to value, and cost-reduction of moves to SAP S/4HANA®, through effective standardization.

The joint standards mainly focus on three areas:

• Quality standards regarding solution and project management methodology.
• Transition scenarios and solution patterns for company-by-company go live, object dependencies, and retro-active implementation of new SAP S/4HANA®, features (e.g., document split in the new General Ledger).
• Define a common approach for migration content and procedures, while each member continue using their own migration tools.

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