S/4HANA : Migration options for an effective transformation

Right. I still see a few people coming in, but let's kick off with our webinar today. Happy Friday. I'm glad to see you all here. It's, it's really good. We've had a lot of interest in this webinar. So we're really looking forward to talk a little bit about S4HANA and what are your migration options, for an effective transformation. My name is Maria Robinson. I'm the team lead for marketing here in Europe. And today with me, I have my colleague Juan Malero. Juan Malero is our service associate for Southern Europe, and he is an HCM, HXM, SME. As well, he has participated in many migrations, to ECP. So he is, the right person today to talk to us about migrations to Aspuhana. Just a little introduction about who is EpiUS Labs. So, as you know, EpiS Labs, we like to help our clients to transform their SAP landscape and solve business challenges with our products and services. We have more than one thousand five hundred and fifty clients worldwide, and we operate in forty nine countries. We have a very diverse team, which makes it so we have a multilingual global support team that can help you in a wider range of, languages. We're a proud member of Group Elephant, and all the companies in Group Elephant commit to donating one percent of their annual revenue, to help, endangered species, and communities in South Africa. Right. So the content of today's webinar, we're gonna, Juana is gonna talk to you about the four main steps in your path, to S4HANA. We've acquired this knowledge working really closely with our clients in their migrations, So it's really, really good information that we're gonna share. We're gonna look at the benefits of having a tool like DataStickManager during your migration and after your migration to S4HANA. And then we're gonna talk about our offering Prism for S4HANA. Juana is gonna dive into what does that entail, SDT, and all sorts. We're gonna finish off, sharing a couple of success stories, giving you examples of different migration methodologies that we've, helped our clients with. We're gonna talk about Powerlink, a company a utilities company in Australia, and we did a brownfield migration with them. And then we're gonna talk about, an international technology company here in Europe where we did a hybrid migration. If we have time at the end of the webinar, we're gonna open the floor for some questions. So you have a control panel at the right side of your screen and you can add your questions during the webinar as they come. And like I said if we have time we're gonna answer them live if not we're gonna make sure to reach out via email after the webinar. One last thing I would like to highlight when the webinar is over, you're gonna see a survey that is gonna pop up on your browser. So if you could donate one minute of your time today to give us some feedback about the webinar, about the content, and what you would like to see in the future. It would really help us put together the content that is valuable for you. So that's it. So without further ado, I will hand over to my colleague, Juanma. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today, and I hope you're gonna find this content valuable. Thank you very much, Maria. Hello, everybody, and welcome to, the webinar. We're gonna go ahead as, Maria has already explained, starting with those, main steps in terms of your road to, s four, hammer. Now, one of the few activities that customers can start already doing, as with their current, on premise, ERP installation is starting to take a look at how their, current environments are working, what type of optimizations can already be done in preparation for potential less for migration. Like, for example, taking a look at a custom report that they may need to, migrate and make sure that they are, operative to on a handle database or even, you know, if they want to make sure that everything is still operational or they want to make ensure that these processes are still val valid on on our Nest four system, they can start thinking about maybe, like, upgrading the database to, to something kinda compatible or HANA to be more precise before they move over to s four. And, obviously, taking a look at exactly what type of systems, they would like to see built on the on the new, landscape. But the real important, step is defining the entire strategy itself, not just preparing the current environment, but also knowing or defining exactly how do you want to go to s four HANA. Because it's really important to know what you don't know. And normally, when it comes to knowing exactly what you want to do with your current ERP system, this could become something, not very intuitive to do or not such a such an easy task. Like, for example, what type of, considerations do I want to make in terms of data volumes? Do I want to migrate the whole lot of information? Do I just want to bring in the latest information, a subset? What do I want to do with certain areas of the business as well? Do I want to currently let's figure, as a sample. Let's say that I do have, for example, HCM and finance altogether within the same environment? Do I want to, first of all, decouple HCM and I want to manage that separately, so that it's not affected, like, to something like, for example, the customer vendor integration, which is something mandatory that you need to do when you go to S4HANA as well. All those considerations are important when, defining, obviously, what your path is and how you want to migrate. And, obviously, not only identify all these items, but also make sure that if risk is, potentially, if something cannot be developed, that it's correctly tracked during the correct, risk management procedure. And then during the implementation of the migration itself, once you know how you want to go there, obviously you need to count with the correct, toolset and correct expertise to put in motion everything that you need to do that migration. So it's not obviously as simple as, for example, just doing a regular upgrade that you used to on the ERP. We're not talking about something like upgrading from an HP seven to an HP eight. The leap obviously is way bigger, and there's significant changes on the s four platform, which will involve probably a lot of transformation and conversions on the datasets that you already have on the legacy system, and that you will need to, of course, enforce if you want to go over to s four HANA. So thinking about having a correct toolset that would allow you to modify this information or transform the information before going into the s four platform and into the new, finance data model would be something, very important to take care of. But it's not just only about the migration itself. It's also about making sure that business as usual operates under the correct, circumstances. So making sure that you keep, of course, control of your landscape costs, migrating to S4HANA will involve, of course, different ways where the systems, would, have, of course, an impact in your in your finances for maintenance. And also the occupancy of those HANA databases will also may have a significant impact. So making sure that you keep exactly control on how much you're spending on on or sorry. What value on what volumes of information you're going to manage on the on target system will also be, very important. But it's not only just the production system as well, making sure that, of course, that you complete comply with all current legislation in terms of data quality and security as well, making sure that your data is completely, for example, completely anonymized on non production environments and making sure that you have, easy ways of refreshing data on your nonproduction, environments to make sure that you have the ability to be able to do, accurate testing is also something that you also want to, think about when defining your strategy over to s four. And this is something that, already, with within EP use apps, we have sort of like a very good, way of assisting customers with all of these, all of these tasks even without the even if you're if you, for example, if you're already on HANA and you want to take a look at taking care of these, refreshed environments, we can assist you with the provisioning of the RPHA data system manager solution, which will allow you to create new clients and also be able to refresh datasets on non production environments in a very fast and secure way. We can assist with reducing data volumes on nonproduction environments, anonymizing data. So in case there's data privacy concerns, we can assist, with some of our data privacy solutions to manage all that information. And then as well, we can make all of this optimized, automated, and standardized. All of that with the benefit of dealing with a solution that is completely, SAP certified for s four HANA as well, meaning that you would not have any issue in deploying these on, s four HANA installations, independently if they're on premise or private cloud. But going a bit back into the migration strategy for s four that we mentioned, earlier and that point about knowing, what you don't know. Let's start talking about, for example, how what you can actually do to be able to understand how complex a potential migration to s four can be. Now it's normally very difficult, to really understand by just using the toolset that, you may have already, embedded within your current ERP system about how complex or what considerations you need to make that, will help you, you know, make the leap and come over to s four, HANA. So one important tool set that it's, important that you get your, get your hands on when thinking about, these type of migrations is making sure that you have a very good, assessment, report or assessment, tool sets that will allow you to do an analysis of all the important parameters that would that you would need to be that you need to consider when leaping over to, to s four. Items like, for example, your current data volumes, how many, transactional data you have on your logistics, on your logistics module, on your finance. How many, company codes, are there that are going to be transitioned? Is there any, company code that is now obsolete that because it's maybe a company that was sold to another, to another buyer and, therefore, that data is not relevant. Is there operations that we can do to exclude that from the, transitioning to the new it's formal model. All of these is information that, a good assessment report, like the one that APUs, provides free of cost, can certainly, assist you with. All the customer information, for example, as well, all the custom tables. Is that something, that you already have in house that you can, run already a custom report to build on that. The answer will probably be no, and this is where our assessment report can, come very handy for this type of operations. Our report, essentially, runs directly on your on premise system. We provide normally via transport, and then we read all this metadata information and provide it to you in an interactive, web based format so that you can consult and then analyze, of course, the findings, of this, assessment. Okay? Right. So in terms of transition into to s four, there has been, difficult types of approaches that, SAP themselves and, partners have, promoted, over the last couple of years. So from the greenfield approach where you would basically just start, anew if you're if you were, existing finance installation, for example, is too bespoke, not very optimized. The greenfield migration is essentially the radical approach to great with everything that you already have and essentially start anew and build everything as as you speak and just copy maybe some bits and pieces of data that are, mandatory from the Lexus system. The other approach here is the brown brownfield migration where you essentially just take a copy of your free system. You put it on s four compatible technology and then do the upgrade. So all your historical data, all your historical processes would be then upgraded into the s four category. One of the most, quick, ways to get to s four, although it may not be entirely, optimized, if you do not if you're depending on how the system was originally built. So it could be another concern there. And then probably one of the most, popular options that it has, that has risen over the last, couple of years is to be a bit more adaptable in terms of your migration to s four. This being what is being commonly labeled as a hybrid migration or a selective data transitioning migration, which is also the language that SAP likes to use in this type of scenario. Where what you would do in this type of hybrid migration is not really an exact either brownfield or greenfield, but really more something like a spectrum of in between at different degrees, which you would adapt what you currently have and then migrate only the parts that you would really want to keep on the new s four environment and then redefine anything that is not really fit for purpose from the original legacy system. So you can think about, for example, keeping all those pro processes that would be, for example, completely compatible with the new s four system, redefine processes that would not work with the new finance, simple finance mechanism or simple finance, procedures that you have now on on Sfour. And then in terms of the data itself, you can think with this selective data transitioning of, for example, redefining or transforming data that would align better with the new configuration, but also convert the data or transition it to the new data models that are available now on Sfour, making sure that they would be, in this case, completely compatible and, therefore, you would be able to proceed with the new operation within the same, dataset. However, if you're still or if you still want to keep things simple and you still want to, you know, either, aim for a brownfield conversion or a greenfield conversion, With, our solutions or our technology, we'll still be able to obviously, assist you with, these operations, providing you with our, PRISM technology and our PRISM procedure for migrating to, s four. But as if we want to go with that hybrid approach, we do have the IAP to make that operation way more simplistic. We can assist customers in migrating a very behemoth system of, of twenty, thirty terabytes and migrate that into a target s four system with the reduction of their data. So instead of bringing all the history, bringing all the old, financing for which we can do a conversion, we can, adapt all that data and migrate it into the s four system, making it a much more lightweight and much more prepared, system for the, for the new S4, environments. But it's not, only about data reduction, but also what else can we do in on the on the new landscape? What can we do with the new system, that is going to be, put into production? Well, apart from those solutions that we already mentioned, the ability to create a data refresh with client sync or trans or doing, for example, shell sync to create a new system channel for first four data anonymization. One other point I would like to touch briefly on on this slide is thinking about well, if we are only bringing maybe three terabytes of those twenty terabytes that we have on the legacy, system, what else can we do with those that existing information that we may not want to lose? Do we keep the legacy system as sort of like a, an archive repository with all the costs and concern that may, that may, that may result in? One thing that we can do with our solutions is provide you with, an option to extract all that legacy data that is not going to be migrated into the new s four platform and put it onto a also very powerful yet cost effective lightweight archiving solution called Archive Central where you would be able to keep the repository of historical information that is no longer relevant, that is no longer required on the s four system and put that onto a client environment, which would have a visual capability, display capability with no modification. Obviously, it's an archiving system, but it would be over up there, available for consultation on a much more, cheaper, solution than, of course, keeping it all entirely in the new s four, environment. So that's another area where, we can assist in terms of, making sure that data is not left, or completely unattended as well. As for the migration capabilities ourselves, well, we have our Prism technology that will allow you to migrate, your current on premise system to any of the existing new, offerings of, of, SAP, s four, HANA. Not only, for the traditional ERP part for the finance and logistics, the controlling, But also the new options are available for, also for S4HANA for HCM as well. So, solutions like, for example, cloud payroll and, PCE private cloud edition for HCM is also on SAP, s four HANA technology, and we also have mechanisms there to assist customers in their trip to any of those solutions. Going into a bit more detail, one of the most important parts of, the migration to s four HANA is making sure that the data is correctly also, adapted into the new, environment. During these projects, the possibility of an upgrade, obviously, upgrade is always going to be the part that is going to be, mandatory when going from ERP to Sfour, obviously. But then there's other bits and pieces that depending on how the hybrid adaptation is going to be, we can assist with different elements of that, of that journey. So, slicing, for example, some of the datasets sets if we're talking about only transitioning part of the business to the new environment. We can do slicing per company code, per other elements like controlling area or other types of elements so we can move smaller subsets into s four and keeping only the relevant data over there. And then, again, as we said before, the ability to be able to adapt data to the new s four environment with the transitioning, of to the new data model. There's gonna be existing tables that you have on ERP that are not going to exactly match what you have on the s four, platform. Taking that into the consideration and also adaptation, like, for example, CBI where there's going to be needs to integrate a all the mass data as business partners, this is also, something that we can work on, in terms of adapting some of that data so that it's probably recreated, supporting both the new, FI model and also the CBI integration as well. Or if you're simply also converting some of the values because there's new config, being applied on the new environment because you're not inheriting all the configuration coming from ERP, then we can use our conversion technology to be able to adapt those values so that company codes become other company codes, controlling areas are merged into other controlling areas, or for example, if you're migrating company codes or other types of elements, we can adapt those to the new values as they as you see fit. We can also do a lot in terms of minimizing one of most critical parts of a huge migration which is, of course, the go live transitioning and the downtime minimization during the go live. So normally, obviously, business needs to be still be running and we want to minimize the downtime in which processes are put on pause or to a halt if you prefer to see it that way. So what we try to do with our within our, prison projects is to optimize and reduce the amount of time where the systems would not be obviously operational and therefore minimizing this downtime in a very intelligent manner. So for example, all the creation of the of the new systems would be done way, way we had before time in several cycles where we'll build the new, the new landscape, development, quality, production, building, moving, migrating the repository, building, of course, the nonproduction environments. And for production itself, what we do is we have the ability to be able to do batch imports and exports of historical data that will be required on the new system but is not going to be modified in the period of time that the project is going to be, running. So, for example, we'd be maybe be bringing a batch of one year of data prior to the current fist fiscal year we're currently operating and upload all of that, in the target system. And then once we get to the go live, focus only on the real data that is really required for the for the final, cut over. So if we normally, what we try to do is to aim so that the most important slice or the data that is really a bit more mutable, fits within a weekend where we can essentially say we stop processing on a Friday, then do the transition in during the weekend. And the idea is that by, Sunday evening as latest, you'll be able to turn on the switch and that would be that would mean that your new system will be ready for operation on, Monday, morning with these activities. Okay. In the final minutes that we have remaining, we're going to quickly take a look at some of the, projects that we've, worked, so far here in, FPU's labs. First, of all, the migration test for HANA twenty two, it this was, essentially a greenfield approach where, there was only a partial migration of, master and transactional data that was done in progress. And then there was, adjust adjustments of certain mass data adapted to, the new, data model. So the essentially, all the customization, everything else was built entirely from scratch. And what we did was assist with our solution to migrate those parts of data using, simple, extraction programs available within our system that would extract data into Excel CSV format, to be more precise, and to be able to use that to be uploaded into the target system using the, s four uploading, default technologies available. Other, projects, ground field approach with Powerlink where we, did a transition or assisted with a transition of an ECC six point zero system to SAP S4HANA. We assisted with an upgrade project where we have an upgraded runbook where we prepared during a proof of concept conversion where we demonstrated, out of, out of the blue how we could assist in building a new landscape and then just, having our trusted partners to upgrade the system to a NetSupport system effectively. And we managed to, essentially complete this project in a very also short time. And another, finally, to finish an example, of a hybrid approach where we assisted with the migration of s four HANA to twenty, but with adaptation of legacy data being transformed into to matching a target contour configuration where we essentially dealt with several company codes, and we had to do adaptations of controlling areas, but also currency adaptation. So certain controlling areas would have charge of accounts who are in, US dollars. Later onward changed to be, euro, and therefore, we adapted some of those, controlling areas and those accounts so that they would be now, be all in, US dollars, going, forward. So we merged some of those controlling areas, changed those currencies, and, also, we set up global currencies as well as, addressing some data quality issues with the new chart of accounts and the, general managers as as well. Fifty company goes from an EHP seven into s four HANA twenty in, record time. Right. And, we are now at the end of our session today or at the, it's already, thirty minutes past twelve. So from my side, the final message that I would say is going back to that assessment report, if you are really interested in knowing exactly how a potential s four HANA project could potentially or an s four HANA migration could potentially look like, let us know we have the ability to provide you with this assessment report completely free of cost that you can essentially deploy on your landscape, and then you can run it for us. And we can provide you with a copy of this report, with this interactive report, and we can walk you through it and explain to you how complex or what options you would have in terms of making sure that your migration, will be successful and also what the correct path, be as well. And that's, everything from, my side. So I hope that you found the, this, interesting. And it's, now back to you, Maria. Thank you. Thank you so much, Homa. As we can all see, we are a little bit running late, so we won't open the lines to answer question live. But if you have a question, please insert it in the question box as I'm speaking now, and we will make sure to reply to any cons any questions, via email. And just a last reminder, we're gonna send a recording of this webinar as well as the link to request an assessment, so we get all the information together for you in one place. And please please, complete the survey once this webinar is over because this will really help us create relevant and interesting content going forward. I hope you all have a wonderful Friday and enjoy the weekend. Thank you very much for your time.