Although SAP announced a shift to S/4HANA in 2015, about 70% of SAP customers still rely on SAP ECC, the previous generation ERP system that SAP will no
longer support after 2027. And you can easily guess why: updating a running core business system is always a huge risk. But what if we say that there's a safe strategy to migrate from SAP ECC to S/4HANA without interrupting your running processes? You get all the benefits of the cutting-edge ERP system while preserving your well-known routines and custom developments and saving historical data – all within a limited time and budget!
Why S/4HANA?
According to Bill McDermott, SAP CEO in 2002-2019, S/4HANA is the business suite reinvented for the digital age. Just imagine: with S/4HANA, you get the ERP system based on the most modern design principles – with a friendly Fiori UX optimized for both desktop and mobile devices. Being a simple and innovative system, S/4HANA relies on SAP's 40+ years of experience and best practices across industries. It's available for both on-premise and cloud deployment. And there's even more: thanks to the HANA in-memory database, you get real-time data insights – instead of waiting for hours as it was in ECC. Let's take an in-depth look at the benefits of S/4HANA:
- Simplification. SAP S/4HANA allows you to restructure your IT landscape to simplify its management and administration. The system ensures the centralization of hardware and network resources, resulting in more efficient workflow and business processes.
- Improved performance. With S/4HANA, you can plan, execute and generate reports in real-time and get overall faster access to your data. For example, it took hours for SAP ECC to create an accounting report – and a massive load to the whole system resulting in a significant slowdown in all applications' performance. With S/4HANA, the same report is available in less than a minute. Big data analysis is no longer an issue: S/4HANA empowers data-driven decisions and allows you to perform complex transactions in no time.
- Friendly user-experience. Unlike SAP ECC, S/4HANA supports SAP Fiori for all its applications, which provides an intuitive yet customizable and highly responsive user interface. Prompting questions and accessing required details has never been that easy – no matter the device or deployment.
- Flexible deployment options. You can host S/4HANA on-premise – or choose a public, private, or hybrid cloud solution.
- Innovation support. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotic process automation, or the Internet of Things (no matter device or OS) – you can smoothly integrate all these technologies with S/4HANA.
- Rely on industry best practices. With S/4HANA, you can easily implement your industry's best practices: integrate any of the specific modules providing you with the functionalities tailored to your line of business – or customize them to your business processes.
- And more!
Do not hesitate to contact us for more details on how S/4HANA helps you increase performance and transform your business – we'll provide you with real-life examples (from your line of business) and estimates about terms and conditions.
Move to S/4HANA – without changing your processes
Now that you know the benefits of the latest SAP ERP solution, we have another great news: you can migrate to S/4HANA without changing or major interrupting your business flow. Choose Brownfield Conversion!
To avoid interruptions of the business flow, our team will copy the existing solution and historical data, migrate these to S/4HANA and thoroughly check if everything works correctly. We perform all tests in a so-called sandbox: no interactions with your actual solution before making sure everything works exactly as required. This approach allows us to reduce all possible risks. When we are ready, we update the prod version.
Good news: the downtime period caused by migration takes only about 3-5 hours and can be performed on weekdays or at night. If a 3 hours interruption to the business flow is not an option, we can reduce it to 5-20 minutes – with SAP Near-Zero Downtime technology.
Technically, Brownfield Conversion is migrating your business processes and historical data to the SAP HANA database. You retain your well-tested and proven business processes and gain a mix of new features that weren't available in SAP ECC. If you had any custom code in your previous ERP solution, no worries: Brownfield Conversion methodology allows you to adapt the customizations created for legacy ERP solutions to S/4HANA. The same goes for integrations: you retain all apps you worked with in your legacy ERP system. And remember that while migrating to S/4HANA, you can switch from on-premise to the cloud solution!
Scope of the Project (SAP Activate Methodology)
Benefits of Brownfield Conversion
Reduce risk
The migration process has a shallow impact on your day-to-day business processes, and the downtime is near zero.
Save resources
You retain your existing business processes (while gaining all the benefits of S/4HANA!) – so there's no need for complicated onboarding training and management changes. The UI is simple and user-friendly, and the same operations take less time – you save your team's time and, eventually – the company's money!
Control the process
With all tests performed in the sandbox, you gain complete control over the conversion process.
Why ACBaltica?
Our team has been working with SAP products for over 20+ years – we know all product versions existing since the early 2000-s.
We've implemented hundreds of SAP solutions for dozens of industries – and we know the best practices for all of them.
We have a diverse team of professionals: in addition to our consultants' perfect knowledge of SAP products, our developers can help migrate the custom code you had with the legacy solution or even create new modifications if needed.
With the delivery center in Eastern Europe, we can guarantee the price-quality ratio that will fit your needs.
Have more questions? Contact us!