4 Challenges Companies Face When It Comes to S/4HANA Migration

Get ready for the SAP S/4HANA transition by tackling these common implementation obstacles

As an SAP customer, you’re probably aware of the SAP S/4HANA advantages — enhanced user experience, more efficient transactions, real-time data, and new functionality, among other benefits — that make it the next logical step in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

But implementation challenges have led some businesses to hesitate, even with the end-of-support date for SAP ECC looming in 2027.

Technological transformation always presents risks and potential headaches for the entire company, and IT in particular. Successful implementation depends on choosing the right partner and laying the groundwork to make the transition as smooth as possible.

The challenges

It’s estimated that IT downtime costs companies $1.55 million annually. Migrating to a new SAP creates new financial hazards in technical errors and increased IT downtime that could affect your bottom line.

enosix decreases downtime and errors with real-time integration, and overcomes many implementation challenges, including some of the most dangerous:

• Data corruption and validation issues: Maintaining data integrity is the first challenge when migrating to S/4HANA. So how do you mitigate corruption and validation problems?  You can confirm data with sampling, subsetting, or a record-by-record comparison, or just start over. Neither are practical solutions.enosix has the optimum solution: Instead of importing and exporting, or just syncing fields like middleware products do, we virtualize the data and allow for CRUD bidirectional updates of the information in both systems. It’s a faster, streamlined, high-value process that fully solves the data problems of SAP migration.

• Buy-in from stakeholders: Change can be difficult, especially for the estimated 60% of companies using legacy systems that are more than 10 years old. Then, there’s the migration cost, possible downtime, and other risks. This is why you need a reliable, tested integration partner to inspire confidence in the people who need to sign off on the migration.

• Customizations. Your legacy system is customized for your company’s unique needs, and these changes could be so extensive that you’re afraid they’ll make it difficult or impossible to add those features to a new framework.

While it’s always a good idea to review your overall tactical direction, at enosix the core of our highly-scalable technology sits inside your SAP system — allowing it to leverage all your existing SAP processes, custom fields, business logic, and security without the time-consuming and risky need to reproduce those processes repeatedly in middleware or front-end applications.

• Know-how.  You can’t just migrate and implement SAP S/4HANA overnight. The migration and implementation processes need careful planning. Many IT managers don’t have the knowledge to effectively and efficiently implement a full SAP migration project with the resources currently available to them. For most companies still on SAP ECC, this project calls for outside help.

4 criteria for choosing the right implementation partner

Migrating to S/4HANA is probably the biggest, most complex project your IT department will confront in the next few years, so choosing the right partner is crucial for an efficient, successful implementation. Here are four criteria to look for in the companies you screen.

1. Experience

Many companies have IT experience that can help with standard IT tasks, but this migration calls for a partner who not only knows SAP inside and out, but also has experience with full-enterprise migration and integration.

enosix products were created by former SAP executives with a vision for smarter integration. We’ve developed patent-pending integration solutions we believe are instrumental in the customer experience economy, and our solutions can help you deliver on your customer promise. Our proprietary framework integrates and automates complex business processes across boundaries, resulting in accelerated implementation and immediate value for enterprises.

2. Effective tools

Your migration partner should have the right tools and approach to make sure the project delivers on schedule and within budget.

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

3. Great references

A trusted partner should be able to provide references from a variety of current and past clients.

Recently, enosix produced a webinar with Stephen Driggs, Head of CRM at Stanley Black & Decker, who shared his perspective on the importance of reducing complexity, delivering a unified customer experience, and how enosix is an important part of Stanley Black & Decker’s enterprise move to SAP S/4HANA.

Driggs is among more than 40 business leaders who realize that middleware is, basically, old technology. This webinar also offers important lessons from global leading brands on integration and delivering customer expectations.

4. Empowerment

Many IT consulting partners make money by complicating the delivery of technology. This means you must work with them on all updates and changes. While this is a great deal for them, it’s not so great for you.

enosix empowers you to work autonomously, so you only work with us when it brings value to your business.

Make migration and implementation easy

Our SAP-certified integration platform uses a patent-pending communication protocol and framework of purpose-built advanced ABAP objects. Once installed at the SAP app layer, enosix provides real-time, bidirectional access to SAP data natively within today’s modern, front-end systems of engagement.

Because the enosix framework runs in both ECC and S/4HANA, and the enosix platform uses the same interface for your front-end applications in both cases, moving to the new SAP is easy. When you’re ready to upgrade from ECC to S/4HANA, your applications that have been integrated via enosix can be upgraded without the need to rework them as part of the move. That means you can use the years before a move to start doing your SAP ECC integration work while you have time, rather than all at once during the crunch of transition.

Schedule a demo today to learn more about why enosix makes the perfect S/4HANA integration partner.