Key Considerations When Upgrading to SAP S/4 HANA
SAP has been touting many of the benefits of upgrading to SAP S/4HANA. Those benefits include a vastly improved user experience and interface, simplified functional areas, and better industry-specific solutions. With the simplified systems and processes, SAP says that deployments are also simplified.
And the market is responding in a big way. In October 2016, SAP announced its Q3 results along with numbers for the first three quarters of the year. Revenues and profits were up pretty much across the board and in every geographic territory world-wide.
It All Starts With the Data
The key to that success is in the data. SAP S/4HANA only runs on SAP HANA which is an in-memory database that can provide you rapid access and instant insights from data. As your world continues to go digital, the volumes of data that your company has at its disposal grows exponentially. The goal is for you to gain actionable insights from that data in real-time.
The data structure of HANA is different from previous SAP systems. It has been greatly simplified so that hierarchies for reporting are external to the data. This means that new reports, dashboards, and queries can be generated on the fly without any changes to the underlying database. That frees up time for the database developers and administrators to put towards the development of entirely new and reimagined business processes.
It Is Not Technical, It’s Business
While any migration to a new primary business application is technical, the first decisions that you have to make are business related. Most organizations spent a lot of time, energy, and money on customizing their applications to meet their business processes. The changes you make should be completely thought through because those customizations do not simply transfer over.
SAP has taken an approach to simplifying the applications and business processes as much as possible with the goal of eliminating a lot of those customizations. This should be good news to most organizations and their developers.
Managing code is expensive. And most developers would rather work on new projects than manage and update custom code that they have already completed. It frees them up to work on those cool new apps, like extending mobile capabilities or adding automation.
Before your organization moves from SAP ECC 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA, you will need to closely map out the business processes to make sure they match up with the new environment, or determine if it makes sense to modify the process itself rather than the software.
SAP HANA Deployment in Stages
The simplification of the data structure and the applications may cause your organization to completely rethink how it operates. But those goals are difficult to determine without first test-running the new system with current business practices. That is why many enterprises are choosing to deploy in stages.
You can begin with an SAP Business Warehouse (BW) built on SAP HANA and tie that back to your existing SAP deployment to grab data. You can then connect to external sources outside of the legacy SAP systems. This provides an ideal place to experiment and learn how to get the most out of your data.
SAP has undoubtedly been recommending the cloud to your lines of business leaders as a way to get started. And cloud does have some benefits and situations where it should be the first choice. But if your other applications are on-premise, you might want to keep the BW and the SAP HANA database close to the source of data. That way you can connect with higher speed switched network connections. We discuss some cloud deployment scenarios in a previous article.
Originally published at convergeone.com on April 11, 2017.
