How Data Management Maximizes the Move to SAP S/4HANA

Migrating to SAP S/4HANA is a significant undertaking for organizations, and the journey is often fraught with potential roadblocks. However, by proactively addressing key challenges, companies can navigate this transition more smoothly and effectively.

One of the most critical aspects of a successful SAP S/4HANA migration is thorough planning and strategy development. A lack of this can lead to undefined goals, unclear roadmaps, and misaligned expectations. To avoid this, companies should conduct a comprehensive readiness assessment to understand their current SAP environment and identify potential technical, operational, and data-related challenges.

Learning to Avoid Roadblocks

As SAP organizations make the move to SAP S/4HANA, they will likely need to lean on experienced professionals to help guide them through the transition. To that end, Serrala is hosting an upcoming webinar, in which Rob Jackson, Principal Solutions Architect at Serrala and Neev Chief Customer Success Officer, Jason Boyer will help attendees to discover practical strategies for managing data and documents that will remove roadblocks from your SAP S/4HANA roadmap.

One of the important aspects the webinar will cover is why including data management early on in your S/4HANA planning is essential to a successful transition. Migrating redundant, outdated, or low-quality data can inflate costs, slow down the process, and negatively impact post-migration system performance. To overcome this, companies should prioritize data management activities, including cleansing and archiving inactive or outdated data before migration begins.

Implementing tools and services like Neev’s Data Archiving as a Service (DAaaS) can help reduce the SAP system footprint and improve migration efficiency. Focusing on migrating only relevant, high-value business data and ensuring that users have transparent access to archived data post-migration through solutions like the Neev Content Suite is vital.

Archiving and moving data and related documents outside of SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA systems can significantly enhance system performance and reduce long-term retention costs for financial information. In fact, data archiving is essential for a fast and cost-effective transition to SAP S/4HANA.

Involving the Right People

Neglecting stakeholder involvement can also create significant roadblocks in an SAP S/4HANA migration. It is crucial to engage stakeholders from IT, finance, operations, and compliance teams in the initial planning stages, because the move to S/4HANA is not just a technical upgrade, it is also a business transformation. It is important, therefore, to regularly communicate project objectives, timelines, and benefits, and securing active support from your business leadership to ensuring buy-in and minimizing resistance.

Underestimating customization challenges is another frequent mistake. Heavily customized legacy SAP systems can create compatibility issues during migration. To mitigate this, companies should conduct a thorough custom code analysis using SAP’s tools to identify incompatible or obsolete customizations.

Adopting a clean core approach by leveraging native SAP S/4HANA capabilities and minimizing unnecessary customizations is recommended. A reassessment of all existing customizations to determine their relevance and alignment with SAP S/4HANA’s standard processes is also crucial.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Organizations embarking on an SAP S/4HANA transformation must make planning the first step of the process. Laying out a roadmap is essential to discovering roadblocks, involving critical stakeholders, and maximizing the value of the move. Additionally, companies should take the time to learn about how other organizations have gone about their digital transformation to ensure they avoid mistakes and hit the ground running.

Data underpins everything. Having a robust data management strategy is a critical building block to a successful SAP S/4HANA transition. Reducing the size and scope of their legacy deployment by better managing data helps organizations improve system performance and streamline the migration process.

Build the right system for today and tomorrow. When moving to SAP S/4HANA, companies should ensure that their deployment is future-proofed, so it can continue to drive innovation and value well into the future. Selecting a future-proof, cloud-native, and server-less architecture for your SAP archive repository can enhance system performance and reduce long-term retention costs for financial information.