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One of the most famous quotes from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is “What’s in a name?”. In today’s blog post, let’s examine that question.
Over the years, SAP has changed its recommended approach to S/4HANA migration several times, from Brownfield to Greenfield, and back again to Brownfield! Their Clean Core, RISE, and GROW offerings are leaning customers back to Greenfield approaches. And with SNP’s patented Bluefield strategy and other bespoke hybrid strategies, the ‘color palette’ of S/4HANA Conversions has become more diverse over time.
Each migration strategy takes a very different approach, with its unique set of advantages and disadvantages. But over these years, while working with dozens of companies assessing, planning and implementing their S/4HANA migrations, I have seen one immutable fact: the risks are real and have a significant impact on organizations.
Whatever the strategy’s name – Brownfield, Greenfield, Bluefield, or anything in between (Can I vote for “Hazelfield”?) – SAP S/4HANA implementation delays and go-live errors can, and often do, happen. And they are costly issue that impact a customer’s bottom line and an IT professional’s reputation. An SAP S/4HANA migration, by any name, is fraught with risk.
How can a company avoid these risks? The answer is simple: with accurate, proactive risk intelligence.
Proactive Risk Intelligence Is The Key To S/4HANA Conversion Success
Migrating all your business processes, workflows and data to a new environment is a significant undertaking. But the more comprehensive information you have about a planned course of action, the easier it is to identify potential issues and plan for them accordingly. At Panaya, we call this “Change Intelligence” and it is the key to an accelerated and successful implementation, helping reduce the risk of unexpected issues, delays and errors. Besides offering deeper and broader risk analyses – identifying risks that no other company does – Panaya also offers a built-in auto-code correction capability that addresses at least 95% of SAP-identified issues. Simply put, companies using Panaya go-live faster, with less risk. And our fully integrated, AI-powered enterprise test and defect management capabilities, both manual and automated, further accelerate these initiatives. Just ask the hundreds of happy testing customer who have ranked us #1 on g2.com, for 18 straight quarters. That’s what I call icing on the cake.
I believe that every company embarking on an S/4HANA conversion – no matter which migration strategy they choose – cannot have enough proactive change intelligence. These details play a critical role in business planning, project planning, and innovation prioritizations. It can even help justify your chosen migration strategy.
Panaya makes complicated changes easier, by both identifying precisely what areas will be impacted, and by saving time on those that won’t. For example, will a Greenfield project need a list of every technical risk factor common to a Brownfield project? Perhaps not. But SAP’s Simplification Item List does not identify every T-Code you are using in ECC6 that SAP has deprecated in S/4HANA (many with no replacement!). Panaya’s change intelligence platform does. And if you are assuming that these Tcodes will be available in your Greenfield sandbox, you are in for a rude awakening.
If you have custom packages in ECC that will work just fine in S/4GANA, do you really need to rebuild them in your target environment? Perhaps a ‘lift & shift’ effort is in order so you can focus your re-engineering efforts on the business processes that must be refactored. Panaya even has companies going Greenfield that are using its auto-code corrections to further accelerate their lift & shift initiatives, and focusing on the re-engineering efforts that truly matter.
Change Intelligence Is Power
The deeper and broader your change intelligence, the more you can know – ahead of time – about every potential technical risk factor and every critical business process that will be impacted. You can then plan precisely for any necessary re-engineering or remediation, and confidently embark on even the most complex SAP S/4HANA migrations.
Your project’s deliverables will be truly prioritized, you’ll encounter fewer bumps in the road (during UAT and after go-live), and you’ll save time and money – whether you’re a Brownfield, Bluefield, Greenfield, Capulet, or Montague.
Shakespeare would definitely be on board with that.
