Illumiti Innovation Blog

The Power of Next:​ Planning Your Move​ to SAP S/4HANA

Date: March 29, 2021
By: Shoshana Jamieson

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Accelerate your transition and start taking advantage of the latest SAP technology.

Making the move to SAP S/4HANA, now more than ever, has become a necessity for many businesses as the realization that enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions are evolving as quickly as businesses evolve. More modern tools are outpacing the old and the need for the right technology is essential to reducing operational disruptions. But your organization needs to be committed to actually moving to S/4HANA—it’s paramount to transforming into an intelligent enterprise and the only way to take advantage of the benefits of transparency, insights, and the ability to adopt and innovate.

There are numerous complexities to consider for balancing the need for implementing a newer, more modern technology versus the cost of any investment, and the need to identify the compelling benefits that are realized from a migration is imperative. Your digital transformation journey to S/4HANA can include:

  • Embedded analytics to provide insight into action and help companies achieve a better result
  • Enhanced predictive intelligence throughout your enterprise with data and artificial intelligence (AI).
  • Robotic process automation to reduce or remove manual tasks.
  • Leveraging the numerous benefits of cloud technology to reduce total cost of ownership.

If your organization is considering a move to S/4HANA, we’re certain that there are ample questions being asked such as:

“What will S/4HANA do for my organization, today and for the future?”

“What can I expect from the technology and how will it impact my business’ bottom line?”

“How can I make the business case for change?”

The shift to S/4HANA is gaining momentum as the cut-off date for ECC support approaches. You need to get beyond the inertia caused by the fear of not knowing where to start, so let’s guide you on the steps of your journey today.

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Building Your Business Case: Defining the Value Drivers and Associated Scope for your S/4HANA Migration

Understanding the business benefits as part of the decision-making process should be a main driver of a move to S/4HANA. It’s important that your business understands the value of optimizing your current business processes and enabling new operating models. Yes, the benefits of technology are factual and quantifiable, but will you struggle to get executive buy-in as your initiative competes for their attention and support? Customers running sophisticated and highly customized SAP landscapes, with key operational processes dependent on SAP should be cautious about disruption to their core systems with an upgrade and must plan accordingly.

Your move to S/4HANA is not simply an upgrade:

  • Whether you choose a Greenfield or Brownfield implementation, any move should be treated as a transformation project​.

It is not just a technical upgrade either:

  • The return on investment and business buy-in and adoption correlates to incorporating S/4HANA delta functionality and benefits.​

A technical upgrade can be the first step of an S/4HANA migration roadmap:

  • As long as you have analyzed and documented your company's phased ​transformation
  • We strongly advise including a Fiori roll-out for at least one business area as part of the initial migration to obtain immediate value, and to get your user community prepared for and excited about the new user experience.​

Start early to identify and prepare your S/4HANA implementation team:

  • The closer SAP clients get to the end of ECC maintenance, the fewer high-quality resources will be available​—while mass uptake may be increasing slowly, demand for talented SAP resources will be scarce, and costly.

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Why should you change?​

While thinking and talking about the benefits of a solution are enticing, they can only be appreciated if the right migration strategy is adopted. You need a smart approach to the evaluation of what S/4HANA scope to include in your upgrade, which technical path to choose, and which infrastructure model makes sense to optimize business and IT value. The aim is to ensure the roadmap, migration, and adoption lifecycle are flexible, value-driven engagements.

 

Calculating the Benefits, Costs, and ROI.

Simply put, we know how important transparency is when communicating with clients throughout the entire process. Illumiti's Power of Next SAP S/4HANA migration methodology involves:
  • By way of focused discussions with your key business users, we will assess issues, opportunities, key value drivers and desired business outcomes.
  • Benchmarking your organization against its peers to enhance focus and set realistic targets.
  • Analyzing SAP S/4HANA technology leveraging SAP’s Process Discovery Report to map functionality that addresses issues while helping you improve target KPIs to be included in the migration’s scope.
  • Leveraging SAP’s Readiness Check Report to better identify obstacles you may face with your upgrade, establish a mitigation plan, and determine S/4HANA sizing requirements to develop infrastructure options for you to select.
  • Leverage SAP’s Value Lifecycle Manager tool to generate a business case for the migration--inputting high-level financials, costs associated with licenses, hardware, and migration project costs; the benefits are calculated based on the S/4HANA scope, SAP products, and KPI targets selected by your organization.

 

Final Thoughts

Migrating to S/4HANA will allow your company to transform into an Intelligent Enterprise. You will have the tools necessary to become more agile with optimized business processes whereby you are able to manage and have visibility into every part of your organization – employees, customers, vendors, products, finance and IT. The move to S/4HANA supports data management and analytics and is the launch pad to newer technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), and the Internet of Things (IoT) among others.

This is no longer future thinking—this technology exists and is being implemented by SAP clients all over the world. The process of preparing for the move and executing the transition is complex. Illumiti can show you how to best plan for your transition, reduce risk, and ensure you leverage the benefits that become possible with S/4HANA.

Shoshana Jamieson

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Shoshana Jamieson

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