Things to do before an SAP S/4HANA System Conversion

The phrase “Readiness Assessment” is resonating across the SAP ecosystem. Organizations on SAP ECC are taking up readiness assessments to get a complete understanding of their ECC system and plot their risk-free path to S/4HANA.

This is primarily because they understand that SAP S/4HANA will :

• Improve operational efficiency by removing aggregate tables and rigid data structures
• Provide instant information and real-time insights by removing batch jobs and manual effort
• Provide a virtual data model that offers informational analytics with a combination of transactional and operational data
• Offer a future-ready platform for innovations and R&D
• Simplify the IT landscape to minimize operational costs and capital expenses
• Provide an intuitive and modern user interface and user experience
• Act as the “digital core” for the “intelligent enterprise”

What you should know is that moving from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA is not like a typical EHP upgrade. It requires a deep understanding of the business structure, business implications, technical & functional impacts, business strategies, executive strategies, and updated skillsets. In addition, a thorough understanding of the required effort and expenditure is needed as well.

In such a situation, how can you get the other stakeholders on board?

The answer is building a business case and discovering the path to S/4HANA through a comprehensive readiness assessment.

Table of Contents

• The First Step – Building the Business Case
• Moving Forward – Readiness Assessment and Beyond

The First Step – Building the Business Case

Build Early

• Building a coherent business case is critical for any SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA transition. Also, it is important to start building the business case well ahead of the move – at least a year in advance.
• Waiting till the last minute is a recipe for disaster as you will have to pay the cost of indecision, higher prices for S/4HANA licenses, market share loss to the competition, and a rushed S/4HANA transition which carries a high risk for failure.

Be clear on your Objective

• While building the business case for S/4HANA, focus on where you are going and what you will get by going there. Focus beyond savings to understand the innovation, understand the value, and the business and IT benefits.
• You can make a good start by referring to the SAP Value Advisor Tool and the SAP Business Scenario Recommendations Tool to identify the specific areas of your business you can transform.
• You can also look at the success stories & use cases of other organizations in your industry, and network with your industry peers & SAP experts to try and draw examples from them to build your business case.

Moving Forward – Readiness Assessment and Beyond

A readiness assessment is a process that helps businesses evaluate their preparedness for implementing a new technology or solution. A Ktern.AI readiness assessment might involve evaluating a business's current infrastructure, processes, and systems to determine whether they are capable of supporting the implementation of an AI solution.

During a readiness assessment, Ktern.AI might consider factors such as the business's IT infrastructure, data quality and availability, and the availability of skilled personnel to implement and maintain the AI solution. The assessment might also consider the business's goals and objectives, as well as any potential challenges or risks that might arise during the implementation process.

After completing the assessment, Ktern.AI would provide recommendations and a plan for implementing the AI solution. This might include recommendations for any necessary infrastructure upgrades or changes to processes and systems, as well as a timeline and budget for implementing the solution.

Once you define your business case, you will soon realize that there is a huge path ahead. System conversion projects require a lot of planning and in-depth inputs from technical, functional, and business stakeholders. But, don’t worry too much and start stressing over it to a point of absolute mental breakdown. Stop worrying too much about the potholes and start preparing for your journey. After all, there is a blissful destination at the end of the journey.

But, how can you ensure the right budget, effort, expertise, man-hours, project plan preparation, and project execution?

The answer lies in your SAP ECC system. This is because the “to-be” state of your S/4HANA system is directly dependent on the “as-is” state of your ECC system. But, how do you get the answer? You get the answer by completing a comprehensive readiness assessment or study of your SAP ECC system, preferably with KTern.

KTern is a disruptive all-in-one product built on the SAP Activate framework, the “S/4HANAPEDIA” automation rule engine, a next-gen collaboration platform, and future-ready machine learning algorithms. All these components work in coalition to help ECC customers before their transition, during their transition, and after the transition. Since we are still in the discovering and planning phase here, let’s just cover the features which help before the transition.

Before the transition, KTern provides an auto-generated blueprint for ECC to S/4HANA system conversions by completing a comprehensive automated readiness assessment in 48 hours. This blueprint will help you define the right plan, the right effort estimate, the right system sizing, the right execution, the right project management, and the right quality for your ECC to S/4HANA transition - Ensuring up to 53% faster, 37% cheaper, and 99.9% safer S/4HANA migrations.

Simply put, The KTern ECC to S/4HANA Readiness Assessment Report is like an SAP S/4HANA Readiness Check Report on steroids.

It provides a wide range of readiness assessment results to sketch your blueprint and resolves many pain points such as:

• Long exhausting weeks and maybe months of assessments and preparations on what to analyze and fix
• Time allocated to assessing which teams and how many people are needed from each business area in order to successfully complete the transition
• Ambiguities regarding which business functions should be “On” and which business functions should be “Off” during the transition.
• Time and effort involved in finding the right notes or report to run before and after the ECC to S/4HANA conversion
• Endless number of sandboxes needed for trial and error due to problem-ridden mock conversions from ECC to S/4HANA
• Time and effort needed to guess what to test or testing everything since “S/4HANA conversions will impact everything”

KTern provides the following through the KTern ECC to S/4HANA Readiness Assessment Report:

• Conversion project roadmap
• Suggested Execution plan with milestones
• Effort Estimate
• Project Resource Estimation from System Integrator and Customer
• Simplification Item Checks
• Fiori App Recommendations
• Add-on Analytics
• Business Function Analytics
• Custom Object Analytics
• Business Process Mining
• User Assessment
• Custom Code Clean Up Recommendations
• HANA Sizing Recommendations
• Business Process Analytics
• BW Extractor Checks
• Transport Analytics
• Data Archiving Recommendations
• Test Case Recommendations
• Training Scenario Recommendations

Discovery and Planning are just the first steps on your path from ECC to S/4HANA. There are a lot more steps which are to come and KTern has more features that will help you get through those steps as well. We’ll cover those features in separate articles.

Meanwhile, if you like what you read and want to see what KTern has in store, you can visit Getting Started to access our free demo or to sign-up for your free trial and put KTern to the test. Please do send us a message at Contact Us.