Transferring off ECC environments to SAP/S4HANA

With solely about one quarter of SAP clients having moved from their current ECC environments to S/4HANA, it’s clear companies are in search of steerage on the easiest way to handle such a transformative migration. This hesitancy is comprehensible – SAP S/4HANA represents greater than a technical improve, it’s a serious useful change.

Which means IT leaders are serious about extra than simply the prices of shifting and the timing of workload migration. They’re additionally confronted with growing a technique for taking full benefit of S/4HANA’s radically completely different, cloud-optimized utility and database environments, and utilizing the transfer as a chance to undertake a clear core methodology. In spite of everything, the actual driver for shifting to S/4HANA isn’t a deadline, it’s the enterprise worth of modernizing one’s code, knowledge, processes, and infrastructure. Put one other means, if clients are going to make a big funding emigrate to S/4HANA, they need to do it within the smartest potential means.

A clear core methodology can decouple ERP environments from customization that has elevated complexity and made such environments far more troublesome to improve. Particular to SAP, clear core means preserving 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 modifications of their markets, and innovate at a tempo that may delight their clients.

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

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 functions complicated and gradual innovation. Step one in code modernization is to make sure there’s a cloud-native DevOps platform in place to include the SAP extensions. Throughout migration to S/4HANA, extensions requiring customized growth ought to be achieved on the cloud-native platform and built-in to the digital core via internet service APIs.

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

When selecting a cloud-native DevOps platform that’s inherently capable of run your extension workloads on any main cloud supplier, the pure selection for SAP extensions is SAP’s Enterprise Know-how Platform (BTP).  SAP BTP facilitates the mandatory connectivity setup  that should exist between the extensions and the S/4HANA core by way of customers, authorizations and entry to APIs. Moreover, SAP BTP comes with a number of fashionable cloud providers for enterprise workflows, integration and analytical situations.

As well as, many organizations have already chosen a cloud supplier and used the cloud-native providers obtainable to create progressive options.  Many have a most well-liked cloud-native DevOps platform, supporting a “develop as soon as, deploy wherever” functionality, reminiscent of Crimson 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 utility throughout the enterprise, not simply SAP.  Additionally, along with having the ability to deploy workloads to any cloud, a runtime and administration tooling is supplied to deploy cloud-native workloads to an on-prem datacenter.  Of the enterprise multi-cloud DevOps platforms obtainable available in the market, Crimson Hat Openshift has a robust management place with almost 50% of the highest Fortune 100 firms utilizing it.

 Knowledge high quality and conversion

As companies plan their transfer to S/4HANA, it’s essential 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 greatest modifications is the consolidation of grasp knowledge and transactional knowledge databases throughout the assorted utility 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 consistently synchronized for consistency.

As well as, a migration to SAP S/4HANA gives a chance to cleanse and archive knowledge that has accrued in SAP for years. Typically, there are duplicate, incomplete, out of date, and previous data which are now not wanted.  Examples might embody 5 completely different buyer report entries for a single buyer, or bill data from 12 years in the past.

An S/4HANA migration gives a fantastic 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, decreasing the info footprint can present vital financial savings on {hardware} or cloud IaaS subscription prices.

Course of optimization

Course of optimization affords a technique to simplify and optimize enterprise processes to enhance outcomes. SAP is historically a transaction-driven utility, not a process-driven utility. SAP has a repository the place processes will be graphically designed and documented, however there is no such thing as a course of runtime engine that ensures SAP customers comply with that course of stream as they use SAP. 

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

 Infrastructure modernization

 Infrastructure modernization entails introducing cloud native capabilities to ERP environments whereas extending the worth of current investments. When shifting 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 current investments and supply infrastructure capability that may scale in granular increments. This helps you preserve right-sized environments and pay for under 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 via an SAP licensed cloud supplier.  Nevertheless, most who select to modernize their SAP setting with cloud IaaS will choose to license SAP as a subscription service.

As a way to assist clean the transition of working SAP workloads within the cloud, SAP launched RISE with SAP in the beginning of 2021.  RISE with SAP is a completely managed subscription service that comes with a pre-defined set of service-level argreements (SLAs) for parameters reminiscent of utility availability, efficiency and backup retention.  Organizations can use their most well-liked cloud supplier for RISE with SAP S/4HANA cloud personal version, together with IBM cloud.

HANA database sizes, and whether or not S/4HANA databases have to run on a bare-metal setting, also needs to be thought of, 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 entire database is absolutely contained within the system’s reminiscence.  Some {hardware} platform choices have limitations of how massive of a HANA database will be supported whereas virtualization is enabled.  When purchasers 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 may contain a multi-year dedication to the particular bare-metal server.  As a substitute, the IBM Energy platform doesn’t have any limitations related to HANA database measurement and virtualization and affords higher scaling in granular increments as database measurement grows.  The last word aim is to not must pay for greater than what you want within the cloud.