System Landscape Optimization (SLO) for SAP Landscapes

Quite often people use this terminology via logical separation or physical separation in ERP systems transformations. And this is where we use our PRISM for Business approach to helping companies transform more effectively. And here a logical separation is where you are forming new companies or merging companies into your business, but you're doing that within an environment. So quite often a group, a corporation has many legal entities or companies making up the business, and those all exist within a single ERP environment, commonly. So quite often what a business needs to do in order to prepare for selling off part of itself, for example, is to create new legal entities and then move assets within the ERP system from one entity to another. So you are carving data from one place and moving it to another, but within an environment. And that's where our capability in PRISM to transform data in place is so important. And the thing we brought in the last few years that made this especially effective was the ability to post finances. The physical separation, on the other hand, is normally about building new IT environments, and building them with only the data that's required for part of the company or group that's separating. Commonly, we think of this as the divestiture space, which is where we started out in this area, where you want to build a new IT environment for a company, but you don't really want to take a full company at the source system and start deleting data because it's inefficient in terms of the platform infrastructure. It's also very bad for data privacy as you tend to be copying vendor details, customer details, bank account details that the buyer isn't entitled to have and then trusting that the technical teams will delete that data effectively. So in that case, we apply a PRISM for Business approach to selectively extract very accurately only the data related to the company the environment is being built for. So logical separation is internal to the existing environment to meet a need for business change, perhaps even to prepare the business for sale and acquisition. The physical separation is where you build a new IT environment, carve out only the data required for the company or companies that will own that environment ongoing.

How should you align your SAP landscape before, during and after business transformations?

Significant business decisions – such as mergers and acquisitions, divestitures and splits, business consolidations, re-organizations and restructuring – have a far-reaching impact on your SAP landscape.

Whether you are buying or selling part of your business, restructuring to improve efficiency or expanding your business, changing your SAP system to align with business changes is a complex task requiring specialist expertise.

System Landscape Optimization (SLO) addresses a wide range of triggers that affect your systems during the transformation process.

Many SAP SLO solutions follow similar technical routes. Our SLO approach is different: PRISM for Business combines our proprietary software – including our SAP-certified Data Sync Manager™ (DSM) Suite – with specialised consultants, resulting in a much quicker, flexible and more secure process.

Our unique approach feeds knowledge gleaned from multiple global projects back into the solution, making the next execution of similar projects significantly quicker and more robust. The benefit of bringing templated project solutions integrated into our technology is an automated, reliable and more efficient process for our clients.

Divestitures and splits

Mergers and acquisitions

Technology modernization

System and business consolidation

Reorganization

Restructuring

SAP HCM splits and transformations

Divestitures and splits

Divestitures and splits

Divestitures and splits involve the proper isolation and extraction of the data related to the business being divested or a functional area being split off from the core system in question. These carve-outs must be done in such a way to ensure that the resulting target systems retain data integrity and are operational.

EPI-USE Labs provides:

Data-driven blueprints
Company code carve-outs
Sub-company code carve-outs
HCM splits from ECC systems

Mergers and acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions

The complexity of business systems means that the integration of systems due to a merger or acquisition can be a significant challenge. Best practice is to start with an analysis that can compare systems across different layers. Based on this information, strategic decisions can be made about what the best approach is.

EPI-USE Labs provides:

System analysis and comparison
Data strategy advisory services
Data migration
Repository comparison and harmonization

Technology modernization

Technology modernization

Support your business with the latest enhancements. Modernizing your technology platform has the potential to not only save by leveraging open-source stacks, cloud offerings and in-memory databases, but also re-imagine your business under a far more flexible and powerful set of technologies.

EPI-USE Labs offers:

Migration to S/4HANA
Re-platforming
Database size reduction

System and business consolidation

System and business consolidation

Organic growth and legacy decisions can lead to complex distributed systems and inconsistent business processes, which not only limit scalability but also increase operational costs significantly. At some point, it is better to harmonize and consolidate these systems to grow again.

To assist with this decision, EPI-USE Labs offers:

System analysis and comparison
Data strategy advisory services
Data migration
Repository comparison and harmonization

Reorganization

Reorganization

Reorganizations have become ubiquitous events in companies because of managerial changes, business strategy and portfolio changes. Human Resources changes are typically managed in-house; however, more complex changes can require outside help.

EPI-USE Labs is known in the industry as an HCM specialist, and our tools have been built to handle SAP’s unique HCM data model.

HCM employee transformations
'PD Org' transformations
Elastic Scalability

Restructuring

Restructuring

Restructuring, unlike reorganizations, is a result of an enterprise deciding to change its legal, financial, manufacturing and/or supply-chain structures. These are referred to in SAP as the ‘Enterprise Model’. Most of SAP’s data references and contains elements of the Enterprise Model. Thus, changes to the enterprise model also require changes to all data that refer to the specific changes.

SAP’s tripartite architecture (Enterprise-Data-Function) is reflected in EPI-USE Labs' model-driven software. So, we can provide:

Company code consolidations and/or splits
Plant consolidations and/or splits
Plant reallocations

SAP HCM splits and transformations

SAP HCM splits and transformations

Many companies have deployed HR functionality within their SAP ERP (ECC) system, but HR systems require more frequent changes because of legal, financial and business reasons relative to other ERP components.

By decoupling HR from ECC, companies can achieve a number of company-wide benefits:

Increase business agility
Automate testing
Prepare for the future (Move to the cloud, outsource)

Alternatively, you may want to migrate your on-premise HR and Payroll to S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition (PCE) for HCM, or SuccessFactors' Employee Central Payroll. PRISM for HR and Payroll is our turnkey solution to help you transition quickly and easily, with minimal risk.

Our experience is quite unique in that everyone in our professional services unit in EPI-USE Labs works purely in the data and transformation space. We don't offer a wide range of technical and functional services, we really focus on the niche of data and transformation. And we've not started in a traditional body shopping or services place. We started as a software company and built up a large portfolio of clients who would use our software to effectively do selective data transitions but into test environments with our software where our focus was more high level of automation, high level of data consistency where very few people were needed to build a test system selectively. And the way we train our people is through working in that test data domain first and then to go into more complex areas of privacy or transformation using our software technologies. So people that work for EPI-USE Labs have gone through a very unique kind of training and experiences. So not only do they understand our software well, they can foresee and understand issues very early on. So we'd always encourage clients not just to see us as a potential aid understanding how these technologies work, but to even involve us in an early stage of planning so that we can tell them how plans they're making might affect what solution they could use. To give you one example, recently I've had clients ask us about not taking history into the target, taking master data and open items and their assumption was that would be simpler than taking a time-slice of data to the target system. In actual fact it's far more complicated because when you take a time-slice with a software technology you automatically get almost all your open items over into the target system. Without taking that approach master data, is not too complex but to find all the open items in the business from all different areas whether it's projects, logistics, finance is quite a complicated endeavour and it ends up being more of a manual project and that's just one example where the assumption is quite reasonable. But if you haven't worked in this domain of slicing and moving around SAP data en masse, you will likely understand what the software is doing, but not understand all the repercussions of your choices.

Why does EPI-USE Labs stand out in the SAP transformation space?

"Our professional services colleagues in EPI-USE Labs really focus on the niche area of data and transformation. During training, our team members understand the test data domain first, and then expand into more complex areas of privacy or transformation using our software technologies, which means they can foresee and understand issues very early on. So we encourage clients not just to see us as a potential aid in understanding how these technologies work, but to involve us in the early stages of planning so that we can tell them how the plans they're making might affect what solution they could use."

Jamie Neilan, Managing Director of PRISM Transformation projects Global Service Line (GSL)

Working with IECISA (now INETUM), and EPI-USE Labs was a very good experience. They were 100% engaged with us; they reacted immediately to any problem or change of scope, and reassured us about any doubts we had.

Ismael Barceló Serrano, REYSER Group Systems Manager

This was an exciting project to work on with EPI-USE Labs. The project was very successful, and delivered within the anticipated end-to-end timeframe. We were able to deliver this project in a very short period of time at a much lower cost than we have traditionally done.

Project Lead Architect for multi-national oil and gas company

In terms of our divestiture project, the landscape transformation team together with Data Sync Manager LT was able to exactly carve out the required company codes. I’m a technical person and, for me, it’s important to understand exactly how the team is handling the project. Communication is key: overall we had a good experience.

Erik Bollens, SAP System Engineer, Agfa

Data Sync Manager is very good at taking selective pieces of data that we need, and slicing that into different sizes. So for each environment, you wouldn’t necessarily take the same amount of data, because you don’t need as much data in a sandbox system as in a test system. So DSM is good at slicing and dicing the data as you need it, to reduce size.

Steve Ross, Leiter der technischen SAP-Dienste, Dunelm