SAP plans on terminating its maintenance support for SAP ECC in 2027 so SAP customers will be required to move to S/4HANA. This change is not only recommended but will be necessary. For most companies, it’s an expensive and lengthy project, often spanning years. Initially, applications from the software suite would be supported until 2025. Now that the deadline has been moved to 2027, companies will have extra time to prepare and migrate to the next generation ERP: S/4HANA. This migration project can take a lot of time, resources and consultancy costs. There is likely no initiative in your business today that is more central to business operations or more complex than a digital business transformation of your SAP landscape. Any migration error could be disastrous. So how can you ensure success? And what does it take to get there?
Process mining technology is a data-driven approach to understand how your IT systems really work. The software can support you both with the current situation (AS-IS) and with the implementation in S/4 HANA (TO-BE). With its ease of connection, data processing capacity, and ability to display inefficiencies and potential risks in an intuitive manner, process mining is a powerful solution for bringing transparency to operations to counter the complexity of an S/4HANA migration. The inherent benefit of this extreme process transparency is how it reduces risk and enables a quick ROI. With Process Mining every company can make sure they can deliver a successful migration project. In this blog is explained how an S/4HANA migration is set up and how process mining can help with this.
What is SAP S/4 HANA and how is it different to other SAP versions?
After R/3, SAP S/4HANA is the fourth version of SAP Business Suite. In 2015, SAP completely rebuilt SAP ECC to take advantage of SAP HANA’s performance and data analytics capabilities. S/4HANA can exclusively run on SAP HANA while SAP ECC can run on a third-party database.
S/4 HANA is designed to solve complex problems and manage larger amounts of data than SAP ECC and R/3. It aims to deliver a better user experience through SAP Fiori and makes a shift from transactional systems that record data to real-time data from internal and external sources. This is a transformation from hard disks to RAM, and from row-oriented to column-oriented. SAP S/4HANA can simplify your IT landscape and reduce cost of ownership by reducing your data footprint. Working with larger data sets in one system saving hardware costs, operational costs, and time. In addition, SAP S/4 HANA is the first ERP application by SAP to be offered entirely as a cloud solution. The faster your company can make the transition, the sooner you will be able to start taking advantage of the new system.
Why are some companies hesitant to move to S/4HANA? Most companies will have to completely review and adapt their existing business processes. SAP S/4HANA Finance has become a stepping stone for this transition because S/4HANA Finance allows users to move accounting and finance processes to S/4HANA while keep using SAP ECC or other SAP products.