SAP S/4HANA Migration Overview
After releasing SAP HANA in-memory platform, SAP has redesigned, its ERP application to take an advantage of HANA platform. Migrating from ECC to S/4HANA is not a traditional upgrade (e.g. upgrade from ECC 5.0 to ECC 6.0). That is the reason, why migration / upgrade to S/4HANA required a different approach.
In this article, we would like to share our experience and important aspects of S/4HANA transformation and migration initiative. Key area for a successful S/4HANA projects are:
- Planning
- Migration Approach
- Infrastructure strategy and sizing
- High Availability and Disaster Recovery
- Training and Communication
- Planning implementation Partner
S/4HANA Migration Planning
The most important key to success. Planning includes Deep Dive Assessment: The assessment includes:
- discovery and review of pre-requisite for S/4HANA
- Business Processes
- Custom codes and enhancements
- Availability of current functionality in S/4HANA
- High Availability & Disaster Recovery planning
- Integration and compatibility of 3rd party applications
- Infrastructure, Cloud strategy and sizing
- Migration approach and down-time requirement
- Review and selection of SAP and 3rd party tools
S/4HANA Migration Options:
There are 3 options to implement S/4HANA transformation, Greenfield (New Implementation, Bluefield and Brownfield (In-place conversion. Following is high level overview of these options.
S/4HANA Migration Approach
Depending upon, current release of your legacy SAP system, level of custom enhancement, pre-requisite matching and other criteria, there are more than one path you can take to reach your S/4HANA transformation/migration goal.
Some customer have chosen “two step approach”. Migrate ECC to HANA in step 1. Then migrate to S.4HANA in step 2. There are pros and cons of each migration path. We will continue this further in next blog.
