S/4HANA Migration
If your company currently uses SAP, the term SAP S/4HANA may also ring a bell. S/4HANA is SAP’s next-generation ERP system, optimised and rewritten for the SAP HANA database, which significantly improves the efficiency and transparency of the business processes of companies.
The current SAP ECC systems will be supported until 2027, but it is advisable to start planning ahead for a new system in due time. You will certainly pose the questions of how and when. Also while reading about the subject you may have encountered some unexplained terms such as greenfield or brownfield implementation, selective data migration.
When? The answer is clear: NOW! Planning ahead and making the transition can become a competitive advantage for your company!
How? This is AB Consulting Group’s competence, we can help you! We provide support in choosing the optimal alternative for your company and in the formulation or execution of the implementation or migration strategy.
Supported by the SAP Standard toolkit, we will provide you with a preliminary assessment on the level of compatibility of your current unique developments and business processes with S/4HANA. We identify the most significant benefits with the available and recommended migration strategies for your company.
MIGRATION STRATEGIES:
GREENFIELD IMPLEMENTATION
(NEW SYSTEM)
The new implementation will allow the company to completely redesign its business processes and use the latest technologies provided by the system.
Following SAP guidelines we assess your company’s operations, identify the related business and functional needs and match them to the standard SAP S/4HANA system functionality.
At the same time, our survey will highlight processes deviating from the standards and suggest modifications to those processes and functionalities or design and develop custom features to support the current operations. Due to the fundamental differences in the data structure of the system(s) used previously and the new integrated SAP system to be implemented, no historical data will be migrated, only master data and the documents of open transactions will be mapped and loaded into the new system.
Full system implementation is usually more time and cost intensive.
BROWNFIELD IMPLEMENTATION (SYSTEM CONVERSION)
The brownfield implementation is possible in case of migration (version change) from existing SAP systems. As the name implies, in this case a technical conversion, or mapping is carried out using a special toolkit or methodology provided by SAP.
Therefore, there will be no complete rethinking of processes and functionalities, and the new S/4HANA version will be based on the operations of the previous SAP system.
A system conversion allows us to migrate an up-to-date snapshot of the currently running processes.
It means less time and less risk compared to greenfield deployment. In this case, all historical data (master data, historical data, open documents, etc.) will remain available in the new S/4HANA system.
SIMPLE DATA CONVERSION (SELECTIVE DATA TRANSFER)
It combines the benefits of green and brownfield implementation – again assuming a migration from a previously implemented SAP system.
If you imagine part of the previously developed business operations on a different basis in the new SAP S4/HANA system, but at the same time you want to avoid the repeated development of several operational areas, processes and functionalities in the same way as the old ones, this may be the optimal migration strategy.
First only the settings of the previous SAP system are mapped and migrated to the new environment. Afterwards we modify the system settings related to the newly envisioned operations and transfer the data from the old system.
The method comes with some trade-offs: the partly new type of operation (may) also means a new data structure in the background. Assuming significant changes, the migration of historical data directly related to the modified operations may be challenging.
