With solely about one quarter of SAP clients having moved from their present ECC environments to S/4HANA, it’s clear companies are searching for steering 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 practical change.
Meaning IT leaders are interested by extra than simply the prices of shifting and the timing of workload migration. They’re additionally confronted with creating a method 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 any case, the actual driver for shifting to S/4HANA isn’t a deadline, it’s the enterprise worth of modernizing one’s code, information, processes, and infrastructure. Put one other manner, if clients are going to make a major funding emigrate to S/4HANA, they wish to do it within the smartest doable manner.
A clear core methodology can decouple ERP environments from customization that has elevated complexity and made such environments far more tough to improve. Particular to SAP, clear core means maintaining S/4HANA freed from customization, making a system that’s manageable, straightforward to improve, and extensible to satisfy 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 elements:
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 comprise the SAP extensions. Throughout migration to S/4HANA, extensions requiring customized growth needs to be achieved on the cloud-native platform and built-in to the digital core by way of 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 in a position to make use of superior expertise native to cloud environments, together with machine studying and AI. As well as, code modernization lets companies incorporate new information sources into their functions. Think about, for instance, the impression of including climate information 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 in a position to run your extension workloads on any main cloud supplier, the pure alternative 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 trendy cloud companies for enterprise workflows, integration and analytical eventualities.
As well as, many organizations have already chosen a cloud supplier and used the cloud-native companies obtainable to create revolutionary options. Many have a most well-liked cloud-native DevOps platform, supporting a “develop as soon as, deploy wherever” functionality, comparable to Pink 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 with 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 out there, Pink Hat Openshift has a powerful management place with almost 50% of the highest Fortune 100 corporations utilizing it.
Knowledge high quality and conversion
As companies plan their transfer to S/4HANA, it’s vital to find out if the present state of information helps deliberate enterprise outcomes, and to automate remediation of information errors to cut back total information complexity and footprint. One in all SAP S/4HANA’s greatest modifications is the consolidation of grasp information and transactional information databases throughout the varied 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 always synchronized for consistency.
As well as, a migration to SAP S/4HANA supplies a chance to cleanse and archive information that has accrued in SAP for years. Generally, there are duplicate, incomplete, out of date, and outdated data which can be now not wanted. Examples might embrace 5 completely different buyer file entries for a single buyer, or bill data from 12 years in the past.
An S/4HANA migration supplies an ideal alternative to consolidate and cleanse this information. As a result of SAP S/4HANA requires the HANA database to run in-memory on the server, lowering the info footprint can present important 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 might be graphically designed and documented, however there isn’t any course of runtime engine that ensures SAP customers comply with that course of move as they use SAP.
A migration to S/4HANA supplies a chance to research 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 expertise in place that may automate and monitor processes in SAP. That offers companies the chance to realize real-time visibility into energetic processes and to proactively handle inefficiencies by way of automation.
Infrastructure modernization
Infrastructure modernization includes introducing cloud native capabilities to ERP environments whereas extending the worth of present 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 present investments and supply infrastructure capability that may scale in granular increments. This helps you keep right-sized environments and pay for less than 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 may also be deployed by way of an SAP licensed cloud supplier. Nevertheless, most who select to modernize their SAP surroundings with cloud IaaS will decide to license SAP as a subscription service.
With a purpose 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 totally managed subscription service that comes with a pre-defined set of service-level argreements (SLAs) for parameters comparable to utility availability, efficiency and backup retention. Organizations can use their most well-liked cloud supplier for RISE with SAP S/4HANA cloud non-public version, together with IBM cloud.
HANA database sizes, and whether or not S/4HANA databases must run on a bare-metal surroundings, also needs to be thought-about, 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 greatest when all the database is absolutely contained within the system’s reminiscence. Some {hardware} platform choices have limitations of how massive of a HANA database might be supported whereas virtualization is enabled. When purchasers hit the reminiscence limits of virtualization on x86 platforms, they’re pressured to change to bare-metal environments, which cut back the worth/advantages of cloud and may contain a multi-year dedication to the precise bare-metal server. Instead, 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.
