L3Harris and Lessons Learned While Moving SAP S/4HANA to the Cloud

When moving to SAP S/4HANA, it is important to learn as much as possible from the experience of others that have already travelled that path. And what is especially useful are the lessons that they have learned along the way. Josh Fisher, Senior Manager – SAP Technical Services at L3 Harris, has much that he can communicate about his experiences with multiple deployments of SAP S/4HANA in a cloud environment, and will provide insights during his session at our SAPinsider 2020 conference March 17-19 in Vegas into what he has learned that will help make your journey that much easier.

Coming into existence in 2019 after a merger between Harris Corporation and L3 Technologies, L3 Harris is a global aerospace and defense company with over 50,000 employees serving 130 countries. But their pedigree is much older, with Harris Corporation being founded in 1895, and L3 Technologies in 1997 based on divestiture of business segments following the merger of Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta. The merged company provides advanced defense and commercial technologies across air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains, with annual revenues of approximately $17 billion.

Like many companies today, L3 Harris is undertaking a cloud journey that includes SAP applications strategically being moved to the Microsoft Azure platform. Their journey began two years ago when they moved their first workload to the cloud, and their second deployment occurred in 2019. The end goal is to run SAP with a focus on optimized costs and agility to leverage the latest technology. L3 Harris is currently deploying their systems using Microsoft Azure as an infrastructure platform for the on-premise version of SAP S/4HANA.

Originally deployed using a greenfield approach, their most recent deployment of SAP S/4HANA Central Finance was complicated by the fact that it involved migrating the systems from a third-party Cloud environment, dealing with the complexity and nuance of traversing an Aerospace and Defense Security requirements, and then getting it up and running in the Cloud. This resulted in the project being more of a technical transition, without any significant functional changes to the system.

L3 Harris’ goal in this deployment was one of cost savings. The organization wanted to ensure that it maintained the service level of its existing system but moved to a new environment. Even though cost containment was one of the company’s primary reasons for the deployment, L3 Harris believed it important to ensure that the most effective cloud capabilities were leveraged to optimize both the project and ensure steady state processes were maintained for monitoring, alerting, reporting and cost savings.

To hear more about L3 Harris’ SAP S/4HANA Central Finance deployment, and to get advice that will help you prepare for your own hybrid and cloud-based deployments, come and hear Josh speak at SAPinsider Las Vegas where he will present the “Lessons learned while moving SAP S/4HANA to the Cloud.” Josh will share what he has learned from these two different SAP S/4HANA deployments, recommendations for taking on a project, and pointers for ensuring that you are aligned with the main objectives of the project.