Why you should NOT delay an S/4HANA migration
Blog written by Ivo Koehorst, Senior Business Consultant and Yanick Smits, New Business Account Executive SAP/Mendix
Many customers find the switch to SAP S/4HANA a hot topic. The current pandemic has not made this any less. Nevertheless, the 2027 deadline is slowly approaching and the farewell to ECC will only get bigger and more complicated as you continue to develop on it for years to come. The faster you transition, the better it is for your organization. It now gives you the opportunity to approach it as a complete business transformation instead of a technical migration. Now every situation is different and therefore also the reason for migrating to S/4HANA or not. In addition to company-specific reasons, we also see many general reasons for migrating or not in these uncertain times. These reasons arose from conversations with our customers, peers and the experiences of our consultants in which we specifically looked at the pros and cons of whether or not to migrate now. In this blog we discuss the pros.
6 reasons not to delay your S/4HANA migration
- 1. Availability of resources in the market. Where we normally have to deal with an overcrowded labor market in which expertise is difficult to find, we now see a lot of expertise available. Major deployments are being completed and new ones are being postponed. Now is the time to act and get the best project managers and consultants on board
- 2. Investments in the current SAP ECC system are short-lived. It's no secret that we have to switch, preferably before 2027. This means that every investment you make now in your ECC system has a maximum lifespan of 6 years and these systems reach their end-of-life while supporting S/ 4HANA will continue at least until 2040.
- 3. Time Flies: 2027 seems a long way off with 6 years to go, but it's coming sooner than you think. The average S/4HANA migration process can take end-to-end months to sometimes longer than a year, then it is quickly approaching.
- 4. The corona pandemic: turn a disadvantage into an advantage and gain the advantage over your competitors and optimize your processes for the future. Agility, flexibility, differentiation and innovative capacity are essential in this day and age. The faster you can innovate on the S/4HANA system, the faster you can take advantage of all the benefits of S/4. Think of possibilities around Ai, IoT, ML and robotization. The speed and the large amounts of data that the system can handle can also quickly reach the limits at the ECC. If you are completely over to S/4 as soon as the economy picks up, you will be 2 steps ahead of your competition!
- 5. Consolidation and cost savings, something that is very welcome in this day and age. Because you go back as much as possible to the SAP standard in S/4HANA, use best practices and examine your entire process and systems, you will find out that you no longer use a lot of customization or can capture it in other standard products or that your systems and consolidate processes. It is also the time to examine which customization you need to get out of your core and transfer to Mendix, for example. An easy-to-maintain core frees up time, resources and budget for innovation instead of management and support.
- 6. Real-time control information is not possible now, while it is crucial at this time to be able to respond in real-time to events and changes.
As you can see above, there are several reasons to start that S/4HANA migration. Of course, the company depends on whether these reasons apply to your specific situation. That is precisely why it is good to be able to draw a professional conclusion by means of a correct analysis.