SAP ECC Migration

What is SAP ECC Migration?

Following the release of SAP S/4HANA in 2015, SAP initially announced that mainstream maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 and core applications, such as SAP ECC, would end in 2025. In February of 2020 this was extended to 2027. Organizations will have the option to purchase extended maintenance until the end of 2030. This means that organizations running these solutions will need to move to SAP S/4HANA from their existing SAP ERP systems.

What is SAP ECC Migration?

Following the release of SAP S/4HANA in 2015, SAP initially announced that mainstream maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 and core applications, such as SAP ECC, would end in 2025. In February of 2020 this was extended to 2027. Organizations will have the option to purchase extended maintenance until the end of 2030. This means that organizations running these solutions will need to move to SAP S/4HANA from their existing SAP ERP systems.

SAP ECC migration involves evaluating an organization’s existing systems to see whether they are ready for the move to a new system, acquiring licenses for new software, converting data to the requirements for the new system, determining a deployment model, sourcing infrastructure, and determining whether you will make the move yourself or whether external resources are required. These all represent decisions that need to be made before any SAP ECC migration occurs.

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders:

• An ECC migration can be challenging, so what do you need to do to make the move successful? In talking with SAP Mentor Tammy Powlas, SAPinsider received some recommendations that can make any migration successful. Testing is an integral part of the migration. Prepare and cleanse your data before you move using the checklists that SAP provides in order to make sense. Make sure your third-party tools are SAP S/4HANA compliant. Perform at least a couple of dry runs or sandbox systems to work out kinks before the final go live. You can see the full interview here.
• Listen to what other customers have to say about their SAP ECC migration, and what they were and were not prepared for. SAPinsider has talked to many customers about their move from SAP ECC, and this conversation with Fairfax Water, Newport News Shipyard, and Dow Jones covered several different topics around their environments, the deployment models they used, testing approaches, security challenges, and plans for future upgrades. All these and more are topics that need to be considered for the migration.
• Evaluating and preparing your customized code for migration can be a significant step, but there are ways of making sure you’re ready. Most SAP ECC systems contain customized ABAP code. To perform an SAP ECC migration involves evaluating and determining what part of that code is still needed, and whether it is even still applicable given the underlying data structure changes in SAP S/4HANA. This presentation walks though migrating legacy ABAP code into a new system and highlights challenges along the way, tools that are available to help make the transition easier, and how you can get your development team up to speed for the future.