Greenfield, Brownfield or something in between? Choose the Right S/4HANA Migration Approach

⇨ Transitioning to SAP S/4HANA offers businesses a chance to modernize operations, improve decision-making, and streamline processes, but poses complexities related to costs, disruption, and customizations from legacy systems.

⇨ Companies can choose from three migration strategies: Greenfield (new implementations), Brownfield (upgrades of existing systems), or Selective Transition (a balanced approach that retains viable customizations while adopting new features).

⇨ Applexus Technologies' CeleRITE platform facilitates the Selective Transition approach through methods like Carve-Out, Consolidate, and Hybrid, allowing organizations to migrate and modernize specific components of their ERP landscape with minimal disruption.

Transitioning to SAP S/4HANA represents an exciting opportunity for businesses to modernize their operations, enhance decision-making, and streamline processes. However, many companies running their systems on legacy ERP are still in the throes of deciding whether they want to move to SAP S/4HANA or how to move and what approach would suit them best. Migration to SAP S/4HANA can be complex and challenging. From costs to business disruption to migrating highly customized ECC systems, companies are still not convinced of the business value and ROI of transitioning to SAP S/4HANA.

For an SAP S/4HANA transition, companies can traditionally adopt two main migration strategies: Greenfield and Brownfield. Greenfield or new ERP implementations involve building a system from scratch with much of the same experience they had when implementing the legacy ERP. A new implementation provides the opportunity to embrace modern best practices with minimal baggage.  It also demands significant resources and investment. Brownfield involves upgrading existing systems and preserving current processes and customizations to minimize disruption and cost. Brownfield implementations may continue outdated practices and miss opportunities to leverage some of the newer innovations. While both approaches can be effective, neither fully addresses the unique, layered needs of organizations seeking to strike a balance between ambition and continuity.

Applexus provides a third approach, Selective Transition, an alternative to Greenfield and Brownfield. Selective Transition provides an opportunity to upgrade the underlying platform supporting specific data and processes that work well for the business today.  Customizations that were developed over time to meet unique business requirements can be retained, remediated and modernized. It also allows selectively using some of the new features provided in SAP S/4HANA. While each approach necessitates a thorough evaluation of the current ERP landscape to understand the system complexities, Selective Transition offers an approach that offers the best of both worlds combining the latest SAP S/4HANA features while retaining the existing systems and processes that work well for a company. Selective transition enables businesses to minimize disruption and get a new innovative platform in areas that need a modern update.

3 Approaches to Selective Transition to S/4HANA with CeleRITE

Applexus Technologies’ CeleRITE is a platform that integrates automation capabilities with a structured migration approach that is cost effective and accelerates the SAP S/4HANA transition and landscape modernizations. CeleRITE simplifies the migration to SAP S/4HANA and offers three ways in which organizations can do Selective Transition:

• Carve-Out: Through this approach, organizations can selectively extract and migrate specific components of an existing SAP landscape. CeleRITE can select a particular company code, business unit, or a defined set of processes—and transition them into a new or existing S/4HANA environment. This enables focused upgrades and process improvements in targeted areas. Carve-out is ideal for divesting businesses seeking a clean and quick separation of the divested entity.
• Consolidate: The Consolidate method centers on selectively migrating from ECC to an existing S/4HANA environment. This approach is ideal for organizations with multiple SAP versions due to mergers, acquisitions, or global operations. This approach helps organizations reduce their application footprint while harmonizing data, standardizing processes, and reducing complexity.
• Hybrid Approach: The hybrid approach helps transition specific business areas to the new S/4HANA system while implementing new areas from scratch. This approach allows businesses to retain selected parts of their legacy systems along with SAP S/4HANA’s advanced capabilities, and establish an optimized, future-ready system tailored to their unique needs. Hybrid transitions are highly effective for organizations with varying levels of customization and complexity across processes. The Hybrid approach can enable phased transformations, minimizing disruption while achieving incremental modernization.

As companies decide their options on whether to remain with a legacy ERP system or migrate to SAP S/4HANA, they will need to figure out how and when. Applexus Technologies, with its expertise in SAP S/4HANA migration and the CeleRITE toolset offers assessments that can help guide companies to the right approach for a seamless migration process. This makes them uniquely positioned as a strategic partner to companies who want to effectively and seamlessly migrate to SAP S/4HANA and achieve sustained value post-migration with a lower initial investment.