How to Move to S/4HANA? - Migration to SAP S/4HANA Series: Part 4

For the fourth and final blog in my Migration to SAP S/4HANA series – How to Move to S/4HANA, I will discuss four steps your company needs to consider before starting the journey. To illustrate my point, I used an analogy most everyone knows – planning a road trip. Let’s get started!

Download Now – Free Step-By-Step Buyer’s Guide
SAP S/4HANA Implementation Best Practices

How to Move to S/4HANA – Four Steps to Getting Started

Step 1: Know Your Destination

We’ve talked about this in several of the previous blogs in this series.  Bottom line…what’s the plan?  Greenfield? Suite on HANA first? Or, maybe a jump all the way to S/4HANA Enterprise Management?  I haven’t really touched on S/4HANA Cloud Edition (Public or Private), but my point is that you need to think about your path.  Don’t just start driving…figure out where you are going with your environment(s).  In addition, you may want to rent your car (insert your own Managed Cloud joke…I don’t have one!).

Step 2: Get Your Systems Ready

ERP systems can be pretty funny.  Who knew that if you never maintain master data, it turns into garbage?  The point here is that you may have some housekeeping that should be taken care of before you start your journey.  You know if your master data is a problem….so, fix it before you start.  SAP HANA (S/4HANA) is very fast.  This means that you will be able to look at your garbage much faster in the future, but that does not help in your decision making process.  Get your system in order.

Step 3: Map Your Journey

After you’ve determined where you are going, you need to consider how you will get there.  If you are only running an ECC environment today, the path is pretty clear.  The problem is if you are running ECC, HCM, SCM, SRM, etc.…basically, a complex environment, then you need to figure out what the hop-skip-jump is for you to get your entire environment to your desired end state.  You must digest SAP’s direction through documents like the Simplification List and/or events.  Understand if you are going to be bringing products/functionality back into the core and/or figure out the order of your move(s) to SAP HANA (S/4HANA). Does anyone remember getting a Trip Tic back in the days from AAA (or CAA for my Canadian friends)? Think of this step as building your Trip Tic – it helps to have a partner work with you to map out your journey.

Step 4: Schedule Your Departure

Every year I drive my wife and kids from Richmond, VA to Northern Kentucky to visit family for Thanksgiving.  When my kids were little, we would leave early in the morning in hopes that they would fall back asleep and provide my wife and me a few hours of quite before the noises of movies and grumpiness from being in the car, overtook the tranquil sounds of the wheels against the road.  The same principle holds true for moving any ERP.  You must figure out the quiet times in your environment where you have the best opportunity for success.  You know your business…”Plan your work and work your plan!”

How to Move to S/4HANA – Conclusion

Now – let me give you the commercial part of this blog.  Don’t try to make this trip alone! Find a partner, like NTT DATA Business Solutions, that can help you plan and execute your journey.  To help you get started, download our free step-by-step SAP S/4HANA Implementation Best Practices Buyer’s Guide which will lead you through the best practices for achieving meaningful business transformation with SAP S/4HANA including how to gather your requirements, how to define a successful path, and how to choose the right implementation partner.

Check out the other posts in this series:

What is S/4HANA? – Migration to SAP S/4HANA Series: Part 1

Why Move to S/4HANA? – Migration to SAP S/4HANA Series: Part 2

When to Move to S/4HANA? – Migration to SAP S/4HANA Series: Part 3