Which form of transition to SAP S/4HANA suits your organisation?

05 May 2022
Digitale Transformatie,
ERP,
S/4HANA
2 reading minutes

Which form of transition to SAP S/4HANA suits your organisation?

05 May 2022

Are you looking at switching to SAP S/4HANA in your organisation? If so, you will no doubt be facing all kinds of questions. In this two-part blog series, we address two issues that every organisation has to tackle. We explain which changeover scenarios there are and what platform you can use to run SAP S/4HANA. In this first part, we take a closer look at the most common migration scenarios.  

The widely-used SAP ECC ERP system will reach its end-of-life in 2027, with extended support until 2030 at the latest. As a result, some users are feeling the pressure to switch to SAP’s new platform,°S/4HANA. However, the right reasons for choosing SAP S/4HANA are, first and foremost, to have more opportunities to innovate and for future-proofing purposes. S/4HANA, for example, comes with the user-friendly Fiori interface and Extended Warehouse Management. Your data is also in better hands thanks to Embedded Analytics and the HANA database. In short, there are plenty of reasons to migrate to S/4HANA.

Migration scenarios: choose your ideal route to S/4HANA 

If you believe your organisation needs to switch to SAP S/4HANA, the next logical question is: how? This depends mainly on whether you are satisfied with your current system and its setup.

Brownfield: system conversion 

If your business is running smoothly on your current SAP system right now and you want to migrate your historical data to S/4HANA, then a system conversion is probably the best choice. This is also known as the brownfield approach.

This approach implies a system conversion. When you do this, you take your existing business processes and technical setup and move them over to a new platform. In this case: SAP S/4HANA. This is a modernisation of your processes, where, as a first step, you complete the migration and then gradually make improvements and take advantage of new options later on. In brief, the brownfield approach is the quickest and cheapest option, and it ensures that your existing customisation is retained. However, it only makes sense if you are satisfied with your current installation.

Greenfield: a new implementation 
Are you less than satisfied at the moment? For example, perhaps your ERP no longer supports your business processes properly and you do not expect to make much use of your old data in the future. In this case, a new implementation is the right option. This is also known as the greenfield approach.

The greenfield approach means a new implementation or a re-implementation. With this option, you will first redefine and simplify your processes to make the most of the options and innovations in your new system. You will seek to standardise as many processes as possible. You can do this by using predefined best practices and deviating from them as little as possible. This keeps the core of your system “streamlined”, making it simpler to maintain.

With the greenfield approach, you will only migrate relevant master data. You do not carry over the settings and other data from the old system into your new system. Although this approach is more expensive and takes longer, you will be saying goodbye to current pain points and outdated setups.

Is there a middle-of-the-road option? 

Is it a black and white choice between brownfield and greenfield, or are any hybrid options available? Well… yes and no. There are hybrid forms in which you first split up your data and only move part of it over to S/4HANA, such as by cutting off old data before a certain date or splitting up into business areas.
It is also possible to migrate your system setup without any data to S/4HANA or to only take the current live data with you.

However, we would not recommend any of the above hybrid options unless you have a strong reason for doing so. A lean variant like this has a number of inherent disadvantages. For example, it takes a lot of time, which makes it expensive. Additional tools are needed and you will likely require assistance from SAP. This does not make the middle-of-the-road option the easiest route.

Plan your route to SAP S/4HANA with Ctac
Would you like some advice on the best approach to take in your situation? If so, please contact us about our S/4MOVE migration programme that we developed in house. With this, you move through five phases that make the migration or re-implementation of SAP S/4HANA as pain-free as possible. First, we show you what you can expect from S/4HANA. Then we create a map of how much preparation your organisation needs to do before migrating. After that, we shift our focus to the future architecture.

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