This statement of the question is due to the fact that December 31, 2025 * SAP company completes support for SAP Business Suite, or, in other words, SAP R / 3, SAP ERP, SAP ECC and other versions with all the modules and submodules that we are with implemented and used in Russia for the past 27 years.
After that, SAP will only support business applications on SAP S / 4HANA. In this article, I would like to consider how IBM helps other companies prepare for this deadline by proposing three solutions that simplify and accelerate the transition to SAP S/4HANA.
IBM SAP S / 4HANA Impact Assessment – Estimate Disaster Size
Impact Assessment ( HANA the Impact Assessment – HIA ) provides an action plan based on your specific business needs. This thorough and detailed assessment gives an objective idea of how the transition can affect your business processes, basic and transactional data, system configuration and all kinds of developments, including interfaces.
IBM HANA Impact Assessment Overview
This tool provides analysis in five key areas.
Functional assessment. This step identifies the processes currently used in your SAP ECC system and the expected innovations that will result from the transition to S / 4HANA. You will learn what’s new, what’s going to change, and what’s out of date.
Technical Assessment. During the technical assessment, an “inventory” of the user code of your SAP system will be carried out. The assessment describes whether the code is used or not, and also determines the impact of the new HANA database code on your existing system. This step shows which parts of the user code will require adjustment and/or refinement.
Evaluation of changes due to simplifications in SAP S / 4HANA. At this point, the Simplification list is used to highlight programs and code that are affected by the new data structure. This process also determines the areas that the transition will affect most. With this information, your organization can prioritize resource allocation during implementation.
The decrease in project volume. This step analyzes application versions and infrastructure requirements. The statistics on the use of transactions in the product are also considered. This information allows you to reduce the volume of the project to what needs to be fixed and tested most urgently. For example, you can only perform targeted testing in areas that have changed.
Formation of requirements for (re) training. IBM also offers training recommendations for this assessment. Using this data, you can understand what kind of expert knowledge the company will need in the future, which will help in planning. A business can fill gaps in expertise by attracting additional staff or training existing teams.
As a result of this HIA assessment, you will receive a summary of all key findings and will be able to access benchmark data from hundreds of other IBM evaluations.
HIA is available in three versions, and depending on the detail of the report you need, the project to evaluate the transition to SAP S / 4HANA can last from two to ten weeks.
IBM Impact – Preset Industrial Solutions
IBM Impact Overview
SAP offers the SAP Model Company, a complete, comprehensive industrial solution that customers take as their base reference model. IBM became the first SAP partner to expand the SAP modelling company to include cross-industry and industry content, defined as IBM Impact Industry Solutions. IBM Impact Industry Solutions offers specialized accelerators that combine and leverage existing IBM and SAP services. Such solutions combined with the IBM HANA Impact Assessmentsimplify the transition process and accelerate the implementation of SAP S / 4HANA. IBM builds and complements these solutions based on its work with more than 200 customers. IBM Impact contains process documentation, test cases, training materials developed by SAP Fiori, analytic applications, data migration artefacts, and customized user roles.
IBM Rapid Move – the middle ground between Greenfield and Brownfield
For many companies, an important question: why switch to SAP S / 4HANA with a working, say, SAP ECC 6.0?
I highlight several types of causes. There are, for example, enterprises that switch to S / 4HANA for the technical acceleration of working processes and transactions (that is, in fact, switch to S / 4HANA for the transition to the HANA database); there are enterprises that for political reasons need to move away from infrastructure/solutions, for example, the “parent” company (during the separation of assets); there are enterprises that, on the contrary, want to combine several ERP instances into one, now S / 4HANA; there are enterprises where the so-called “technical duty” of the system is much more useful customization (in other words, R3 / ERP / ECC has been introduced for a long time and the number of “crutches” exceeds all possible limits, and therefore there is no talk of any system architecture) and It is urgent to switch to a new version of the system.
In addition to these “qualitative” (let’s call them so) reasons, there is, of course, a quantitative assessment of improving business processes and KPI – this is the way through a business case with which our company can also help your company.
Examples of the results of building a feasibility study for SAP S / 4HANA
This path is long – from three to six months, but it can help you formulate a solid feasibility study and prioritize the transition to S / 4HANA.
One of the results of building a feasibility study from IBM is the choice of the transition to SAP S / 4HANA. Two extremes are well-known: Greenfield (“we will redefine everything from scratch!”) And Brownfield (a technical transition, when, in fact, customization is lost). But, as you know, the truth is always somewhere in between, and IBM just offers this middle ground – the approach of IBM Rapid Move (formerly known as “Bluefield”).
Migrate to SAP S / 4HANA with the IBM Bluefield Approach
IBM Rapid Move for SAP S / 4HANA enables an enterprise to leverage existing SAP investments to make a one-step transition to SAP S / 4HANA from any source. The solution uses automation to speed up the transition process with minimal risk. This automation performs S / 4HANA configuration, code correction, and data alignment to reduce the complexity of the deployment process. IBM Rapid Move is strategically focused on redesigning and standardizing processes only where necessary, so companies can transform current investments in SAP without having to completely redesign their legacy systems.
IBM Rapid Move for SAP S / 4HANA includes the SAP Value Assurance program and the SAP Model Company service. IBM Rapid Move helps organizations accelerate digital transformation and leverage the new platform much faster than traditional transition plans. The result is increased productivity of complex and time-critical business functions, including real-time planning, execution, reporting, analytics and forecasting based on operational data, as well as personalized and simplified user interaction.
Also, IBM Rapid Move perfectly closes the scenarios of n source systems (SAP ERP) and/or m target systems (SAP S / 4HANA).
Conclusion
For over 40 years, IBM has been helping its customers transform with SAP solutions. During this time, more than 5 thousand implementations of SAP ERP were made. As for SAP S / 4HANA, at the moment we have completed more than 150 implementations of SAP S / 4HANA in the world and advised more than 200 companies on the transition to S / 4HANA.
In conclusion, I want to note that in Russia, the urgency of the transition is also due to the limited number of SAP specialists. In simple terms, everything that we have implemented over the past 27 years must be “reintroduced” by the same forces over 5-7 years. But judging by the number of requests from the market in the fourth quarter of 2019, all professional SAP teams will be fully occupied by the end of 2020, and in a year the resources will be significantly more expensive and with less experience. So if your company is thinking about switching to SAP S / 4HANA, I urge you to contact us to work out the best option for the transition with the greatest benefits.
