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Our Webinar, Optimizing & Reducing Risk During the Migration to SAP S/4HANA was a success. For those of you who attended and didn’t get all your questions answered, we’ve put together this blog post. It covers the most frequently asked questions, answered by our S/4HANA domain experts, Zinette Ezra, and Stuart Bierig.
1. What is the Meaning of Simplification Items?
One of our webinar participants commented: “I don’t know if everyone knows them. In all the conversion projects I have participated in, the simplification items have been called “complication items.” Here is our answer.
Everything in SAP S/4HANA is meant to be much simpler under the hood and so, ‘Simplification Item’ is SAP speak for a task you must complete to simplify your business processes.
For your convenience, SAP has put together a Simplification Items list, consisting of many tasks. There are almost 1000 items on the list. They are categorized according to your target S/4HANA version. Not all items on the list are relevant to all SAP customers. The ‘Simplification Item Check’ is, therefore, an SAP-provisioned tool designed to identify the simplification items most relevant to you. The output of the Simplification Item Check is also critical for successfully running the SUM (Software Upgrade Manager).
The Panaya Release Dynamix for S/4HANA solution uses the Simplification Item Check output as part of its S/4HANA system conversion analysis. The simplification items are added as tasks required for the S/4HANA system conversion project, it is being correlated to other related corrections and to relevant tests as part of a complete S/4HANA project blueprint.
Need more help with the Simplification Item Check? Follow these simple guidelines put together by Panaya SAP experts to easily set up and run the Simplification Item Check: How to Install the Simplification Item Report.
2. How Complex is Data Migration from SAP ECC to S/4HANA?
Depending on your migration approach, we would have different recommendations regarding data migration.
For example, using SAP landscape transformation, you can perform selective data migration to SAP S/4HANA or consolidate your business landscape into one global system. This means that you can first select the process that gives you the best—and fastest—ROI to be migrated to S/4HANA.
If you choose to go for a new implementation (the greenfield approach), there is an entire methodology called SAP Activate that explains each step required.
After the preparation phase, you can start the conversion to SAP S/4HANA. This step includes database migration and data conversion. In the Realize phase, a Data Consistency check is critical, especially for financial data. As SAP S/4HANA collects all relevant components from Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling (CO) into one data pool, called the Universal Journal, it is imperative that you perform reconciliation between your accounting components. In this way, the data can be merged correctly into the Universal Journal. Panaya can help you with that. Contact us to learn how.
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3. Are Customers Finding Any Hard ROI in Moving to S/4HANA?
One of our webinar participants commented: We’re struggling to find ROI. We’re already on a global single instance of ECC with standard processes. Here is what our experts had to say.
SAP currently boasts 13,800 S/4HANA customers such as FGC, that are already leveraging simplified ERP business processes, financial management and HR modules, as well as SAP Fiori® applications in-memory databases and real-time analytics. For the first time in four years, according to a 2020 DSAG investment report, investments in S/4HANA now exceed investments in Business Suite, marking a clear transition.
Still, for many, innovation alone is not a strong enough incentive to forgo all of their Business Suite 7 (BS7) investment and brave the complexity of an S/4HANA migration. Creating a coherent business case is critical for any business move, and even more so for one as far-reaching as an S/4HANA migration. Before considering migration, you’ll need to allocate sufficient resources– both human and financial. This, of course, needs to be based on a clear-cut calculation of the actual effort required and a realistic evaluation of the overall expenditure.
Our advice? Start building a viable business case well ahead of your move. Though this may sound obvious, waiting until the last minute, means you will have to pay the cost of indecision; higher prices for S/4HANA licenses and experienced resources, market share loss to competition and eventually, a rushed, insufficiently resourced migration project.
4. Is SAP Fiori 2.0 a Must for Doing S/4HANA Upgrade?
One of our webinar participants asked: Is all functionality available on SAP ECC available on Fiori? We answered.
FIORI is required for S/4HANA but many of your existing processes can still be run in the traditional SAP GUI interface. One of the big advantages to using S/4HANA is the HTML5 based Fiori 2.0 user interface. There are more than 10,000 Fiori applications available. How can you tell which ones are relevant to you? Based on your current ECC system usage, Panaya S/4Assess provides a list of Fiori applications relevant to your needs. Panaya S/4Assess also reports the number of progression tests you need to run in order to validate the Fiori applications’ functionality.
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5. How Does Panaya Compete in the SAP Space with Accenture/PWC?
Panaya is a SaaS software company that is wholly owned by Infosys. We operate as a separate company and sell our products directly to customers and to many System Integrators (SIs), including Infosys, for them to use with their customers. Our products and capabilities compete with the capabilities offered by SAP and other companies. Thousands of customers use Panaya’s products because they provide best-of-breed capabilities in ERP change acceleration and go-live risk elimination. Your migration to S/4HANA is arguably the riskiest SAP project in history, since Y2K transformations. Panaya quickly and proactively identifies more issues than all other alternatives, ensuring a faster, smoother, and less expensive conversion.
We hope this was useful. We’d love to get your feedback and more questions, of course. To learn more about SAP change projects and S/4HANA, please contact us.