Transferring off ECC environments to SAP/S4HANA

With solely about one quarter of SAP prospects having moved from their present ECC environments to S/4HANA, it’s clear companies are on the lookout for steering on one of the simplest ways to handle such a transformative migration. This hesitancy is comprehensible – SAP S/4HANA represents greater than a technical improve, it’s a significant purposeful change.

Which means IT leaders are occupied with extra than simply the prices of transferring and the timing of workload migration. They’re additionally confronted with creating a method for taking full benefit of S/4HANA’s radically totally different, cloud-optimized software and database environments, and utilizing the transfer as a possibility to undertake a clear core methodology. In any case, the actual driver for transferring to S/4HANA isn’t a deadline, it’s the enterprise worth of modernizing one’s code, knowledge, processes, and infrastructure. Put one other approach, if prospects are going to make a big funding emigrate to S/4HANA, they need to do it within the smartest doable approach.

A clear core methodology can decouple ERP environments from customization that has elevated complexity and made such environments far more tough to improve. Particular to SAP, clear core means retaining S/4HANA freed from customization, making a system that’s manageable, straightforward to improve, and extensible to fulfill distinctive enterprise wants. Such modernization will allow companies to leverage new sources of information, extra successfully reply to adjustments of their markets, and innovate at a tempo that can delight their prospects.

Let’s break down S/4HANA migration into its part elements:

Code modernization

Code modernization – which depends closely on the clear core methodology – establishes a path away from present monolithic ERP fashions and customized code, which make integrations throughout enterprise purposes advanced and sluggish innovation. Step one in code modernization is to make sure there’s a cloud-native DevOps platform in place to comprise the SAP extensions. Throughout migration to S/4HANA, extensions requiring customized improvement must be executed on the cloud-native platform and built-in to the digital core by way of internet service APIs.

As soon as an SAP ERP digital core is “clear”, SAP model upgrades change into considerably much less disruptive. Companies are additionally higher ready to make use of superior expertise native to cloud environments, together with machine studying and AI. As well as, code modernization lets companies incorporate new knowledge sources into their purposes. Contemplate, for instance, the affect of including climate knowledge to an organization’s purposes for provide chain administration, monetary forecasting, predictive upkeep, or logistics routing.

When selecting a cloud-native DevOps platform that’s inherently in a position to run your extension workloads on any main cloud supplier, the pure alternative for SAP extensions is SAP’s Enterprise Expertise Platform (BTP).  SAP BTP facilitates the mandatory connectivity setup  that should exist between the extensions and the S/4HANA core when it comes to customers, authorizations and entry to APIs. Moreover, SAP BTP comes with a number of trendy cloud providers for enterprise workflows, integration and analytical eventualities.

As well as, many organizations have already chosen a cloud supplier and used the cloud-native providers out there to create modern options.  Many have a most popular cloud-native DevOps platform, supporting a “develop as soon as, deploy anyplace” functionality, similar to Purple Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher, or VMware VCF.  Enterprise-scale DevOps platforms are typically chosen as a result of they can be utilized to increase any software throughout the enterprise, not simply SAP.  Additionally, along with with the ability to deploy workloads to any cloud, a runtime and administration tooling is offered to deploy cloud-native workloads to an on-prem datacenter.  Of the enterprise multi-cloud DevOps platforms out there out there, Purple Hat Openshift has a powerful management place with practically 50% of the highest Fortune 100 corporations utilizing it.

 Information high quality and conversion

As companies plan their transfer to S/4HANA, it’s crucial to find out if the present state of information helps deliberate enterprise outcomes, and to automate remediation of information errors to scale back general knowledge complexity and footprint. One in all SAP S/4HANA’s largest adjustments is the consolidation of grasp knowledge and transactional knowledge databases throughout the assorted software modules. In earlier variations of SAP, for instance, there have been a number of buyer grasp databases for ERP, CRM, provide chain, and different modules – every of which wanted to be always synchronized for consistency.

As well as, a migration to SAP S/4HANA offers a possibility to cleanse and archive knowledge that has accrued in SAP for years. Usually, there are duplicate, incomplete, out of date, and outdated data which might be now not wanted.  Examples may embody 5 totally different buyer document entries for a single buyer, or bill data from 12 years in the past.

An S/4HANA migration offers an important alternative to consolidate and cleanse this knowledge. As a result of SAP S/4HANA requires the HANA database to run in-memory on the server, lowering the info footprint can present vital financial savings on {hardware} or cloud IaaS subscription prices.

Course of optimization

Course of optimization provides a technique to simplify and optimize enterprise processes to enhance outcomes. SAP is historically a transaction-driven software, not a process-driven software. SAP has a repository the place processes will be graphically designed and documented, however there isn’t any course of runtime engine that ensures SAP customers comply with that course of movement as they use SAP. 

A migration to S/4HANA offers a possibility to investigate whether or not customers are utilizing SAP because it was meant primarily based on the unique course of design, analyze for potential to enhance enterprise processes, and put expertise in place that may automate and monitor processes in SAP. That offers companies the chance to achieve real-time visibility into energetic processes and to proactively handle inefficiencies by way of automation.

 Infrastructure modernization

 Infrastructure modernization includes introducing cloud native capabilities to ERP environments whereas extending the worth of present investments. When transferring to S/4HANA and the SAP HANA database, companies ought to search for a cloud supplier that may speed up time-to-value leveraging your present investments and provide infrastructure capability that may scale in granular increments. This helps you preserve right-sized environments and pay for less than what you want, with out being pressured to overprovision capability. 

Organizations have the selection of deploying SAP S/4HANA on-premise or within the cloud.  To deploy SAP S/4HANA on-premise an SAP perpetual software program license is required.  On-premise licenses can be deployed by way of an SAP licensed cloud supplier.  Nonetheless, most who select to modernize their SAP atmosphere with cloud IaaS will choose to license SAP as a subscription service.

With a purpose to assist easy the transition of operating SAP workloads within the cloud, SAP launched RISE with SAP at first of 2021.  RISE with SAP is a totally managed subscription service that comes with a pre-defined set of service-level argreements (SLAs) for parameters similar to software availability, efficiency and backup retention.  Organizations can use their most popular cloud supplier for RISE with SAP S/4HANA cloud non-public version, together with IBM cloud.

HANA database sizes, and whether or not S/4HANA databases have to run on a bare-metal atmosphere, must also be thought-about, or if there may be extra profit within the flexibility of a virtualized cloud infrastructure to run their SAP workloads as a part of modernization efforts.  SAP HANA is an in-memory database that works finest when your complete database is totally contained within the system’s reminiscence.  Some {hardware} platform choices have limitations of how giant of a HANA database will be supported whereas virtualization is enabled.  When shoppers hit the reminiscence limits of virtualization on x86 platforms, they’re pressured to modify to bare-metal environments, which scale back the worth/advantages of cloud and might contain a multi-year dedication to the precise bare-metal server.  As a substitute, the IBM Energy platform doesn’t have any limitations related to HANA database dimension and virtualization and provides higher scaling in granular increments as database dimension grows.  The last word aim is to not should pay for greater than what you want within the cloud.