Is Everyone in Your Organization Ready for SAP S/4HANA?

Develop a readiness plan to get everyone on board and working toward an efficient transition

The move from ECC to SAP S/4HANA is inevitable, with ECC now reaching end of support in 2027. S/4HANA offers many advantages that are understood by IT directors and SAP administrators. However, others in the company may be resistant to changes involving ingrained processes and familiar interfaces, as well as moving data to the cloud.

It all starts at the top: C-level executives must champion the transition and it’s advantages while quelling anxieties and encouraging a change-resilient attitude that gives the company a competitive edge. Buy-in by all departments within the company is required for optimum efficiency.

SAP S/4HANA is a more efficient, flexible, and feature-rich ERP for almost every business that uses SAP, so how can all departments across your organization prepare for the transition to S/4HANA and make the process as orderly and as painless as possible?

Make a readiness assessment

Your S/4HANA readiness assessment will be unique to your organizational vision and business requirements. But all SAP evolvement projects have much the same framework. To mitigate risk and ensure a successful project, use these six pillars:

1. Get strategic and executive alignment

Before you start an SAP S/4HANA transformation, you need the answers to the big questions:

• Why are you doing this?
• What do you intend to accomplish?

The answers to these types of questions are critical components for strategic and executive alignment and to bring clarity to the project. It also translates executive vision into executable project goals and objectives.

Upper management should set the tone for employees to understand that change is business’ “new normal.” Show staff how SAP S/4HANA will make both large and small software changes, and new technology faster and easier.

2. Make sure you’re operationally ready

As a game-changing project, S/4HANA implementation will bring changes to your business operations. These require strategic operational decisions, and they should be made prior to implementation.

3. Make sure your people are ready

Your internal staff is essential for success. Assess the skills and competences of your organization as it currently is and what you’ll need in the future. Once you define skills and competencies, you can form a change team who will create a plan to make sure everyone in every department begins to prepare.

And current cloud implementation methods notably reduce each part of the deployment process. This means you’ll be able to manifest business outcomes more quickly, but you’ll also need to speed up your training and change management.

4. Assess your infrastructure and data hygiene

Put together a plan after assessing your infrastructure. How will you decommission legacy systems? Or will you migrate them over to S/4HANA? Define the go-live architecture and formulate a plan not only for data migration but data readiness.

Analyzing appropriate data relationships and building agreement is time-consuming, says Deloitte, but it’s an essential part of successful implementation. Don’t wait to start profiling, cleansing, and transforming data. Whether it’s a financial system or a Salesforce CMS, it’s important to start with clean data to avoid compounding errors.

5. Develop your governance and planning

Establish the project organization, working structure, your approach for managing risk, and complete your project and resource plans.

6. Find the best integration platform

Enosix is the only integration platform that runs inside SAP. All API calls, database queries, etc. are made inside SAP, and all the logic that combines the results is in SAP, too. This means we only need to pass on the data the front-end system needs to perform its tasks, and not all the intermediate results. This greatly reduces the number of needed API calls, bandwidth, and run-time.

Why SAP S/4HANA readiness is important

Failed projects can often be traced to a lack of preparation, which makes the readiness stage vitally important. Execution of a readiness plan for your SAP S/4HANA implementation gives you the following benefits:

• Optimized resources: By spending time and resources on implementation readiness, you’ll streamline project execution and won’t waste time later on things that should have been addressed at the readiness stage.

• Mitigated risk: Your readiness assessment will give you a broad overview of your entire implementation project, which gives you the opportunity to spot possible problems and potentially address them. If you can’t take care of them during the assessment, you’ll at least be able to develop a contingency plan.

• Assured alignment. Your readiness assessment provides the best opportunity to ensure executive team alignment on the execution and detailed technology decisions that are essential for success.

It’s essential that executives and staff prepare to adapt quickly to changes in both business and business technology. The speed of development is unprecedented, so people and organizations must prepare and be agile and flexible.

enosix: Your implementation partner for SAP S/4HANA

enosix takes the complexity out of SAP integration to let you get up and running 70% to 90% faster than competing approaches, while still providing secure, scalable, reliable connections between your front-end systems of engagement and your SAP ERP core.

Our platform runs in the application layer of your SAP ERP and replaces IDOCs and the JCo connector (we know – it sounds like magic). Our pre-built Rapid Integration Objects encapsulate the most common queries and transactions.

No more calling standard SAP BAPIs/RFCs and piecing together the results in middleware or on the front end. The end result is significantly reduced load on your SAP system compared to traditional approaches. It also means far greater code reusability across different front-end systems (nearly 100% vs. typically <40% for PI/PO or iPaaS solutions – and 0% for solutions that live in the front end).

And because our pre-built solution covers the most common use cases, your implementation will be done in 80% less time than a custom project. Schedule a demo today or reach out with questions; we’ll get you the information you need — fast.