SAP's announcement to prolong mainstream maintenance until the end of 2025 will reassure SAP customers, that they receive adequate time to migrate to the new S/4 HANA digital platform. Taking into consideration the pressure on companies to ‘digitalize’, this seems like a fair amount of time. On the other hand, experience of past and current business transformation initiatives left many stakeholders uncertain about if or how to proceed with current deployments of SAP’s Business Suite and when best to change to the new technology. Considering this, 2025 seems nearer than you may think.
This will be the reason why many customers are currently evaluating S/4 HANA and rethinking their business transformation strategy.
During evaluations many questions relate to the major shift in technology such as
To answer this, SAP and implementation partners such as Steeb offer ‘value maps’ with pre-scoped solutions for various industries.
As a starting point we believe this approach is of great value. Nevertheless, one must consider that simplification as proposed by SAP and the shift to new technologies can result in companies neglecting the requirements of their existing organization and processes.
Taking the magnitude of the strategic shift into consideration, we believe the evaluation needs to go deeper in order to answer questions such as
What are the core business drivers we want to excel in and how can SAP’s digital platform help us achieve these targets?
How much simplification can the company afford and in which areas do we need to stay ‘complicated’?
Which deployment strategies fit to my companies setup?
How are organization and people impacted by the new technology?
We recommend to focus on 3 elements in preparation of your S/4 HANA evaluations:
Scope your core operating models by defining E2E scenarios
Define strategic Business Drivers and map them to the scenarios
Define your enterprise structures and deployment entities (regions/countries/sites) and create sub-scopes of your processes
In Business Flows we offer accelerators for this preparation.
Comprehensive E2E business process reference model for industrial enterprises
Business/Value driver library
S/4 HANA Capabilities (mapped to Scenarios)
S/4 HANA Simplifications (mapped to Scenarios and Processes)
With this prepared, you can engage with business functions (experts) from your organisation and S/4 HANA experts (typically SAP or system integrator) to identify fits and gaps of the S/4 HANA solution, elaborate answers to the above mentioned questions as well as define a high level migration strategy.
In our webinar we would like to present to you our approach to S/4 HANA evaluations based on Business Flows and show examples on how to define feasible scenarios for your migration and identify the key opportunities and threats.
On the bottom line, we believe in the context of 2025 the End of R/3 is Near but you can Keep Calm if you go about it the right way.
