Will your migration to S/4HANA cripple your business?

Don’t delay! Although SAP recently extended the deadline for the S/4HANA migration to 2027, there is no point in postponing. If you have not done so yet, create your upgrade strategy now. And make testing an integral part of your migration strategy to prevent risk to the business and production downtime.

The cloud is no longer an option, it’s an imperative

When talking about moving to the cloud, we no longer discuss the ‘if’ and ‘why’, the key questions are now ‘when’ and ‘how’. Most organizations have now recognized that the cloud is a key driver of digital business. Cloud will be the new normal one day, but not yet. ?Some business functions have only just begun the shift: order management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and supply chain management are still at low cloud adoption rates. There are many good reasons why organizations are dragging their feet: the skills shortage, the massive task of migrating custom code and the sheer volume of work a migration entails.

Don’t hamper your own growth

Independent SAP user groups in both the US and Europe confirm SAP’s own statements that S/4HANA helps organizations grow and scale the business and adapt faster to changing market conditions. Top benefits that come from adopting S/4HANA include better process optimization, better setup for faster innovation, improved speed and performance and improved efficiency. Yet half of the organizations involved still have to start their move. Fear of the unknown is causing them to defer an initiative that they know will advance their digital transformation. So how can we help these businesses to overcome their cold feet?

Honey, I shrunk the elephant

As the saying goes, you eat an elephant bite by bite. And that is also the way to tackle the elephant in the room, aka your S/4HANA migration. You probably don’t need to migrate everything. Over the years, organizations have developed massive amounts of custom code in their SAP systems, to adapt the system to their way of working. This is what drives these organizations' most critical business processes. But we all know that some of these custom systems and specific integrations to other applications are perhaps no longer in use. They were developed to solve a specific, sometimes temporary problem but have, over time, become a dead weight in your SAP environment. That’s why it’s important to correctly assess what you will migrate and what you will leave behind. In that sense, the migration is akin to spring cleaning, giving you the opportunity to toss out the programs you don’t use. Doing this will not only shrink the volume of work in the migration, it will also massively reduce the number of tests you will have to run. Making this assessment will also help you understand the impact of changes. You will better understand the differences between your current environment and S/4HANA early on in the migration process.

Beat the skills shortage – automate

To make a migration even easier to digest, this may be the right moment to start automating your testing. You can do that by developing test cases that have a high level of reusability across both ECC and S/4HANA and that are resilient to system changes. That means you can simply reuse these tests after the migration, without requiring you to rebuild tests. Doing this will save you valuable time, not only speeding up the migration process, but also freeing up resources for more strategic tasks.

Slow is the new downtime

The ultimate aim of migrating to S/4HANA is to turn your organization into a digitally transformed enterprise that can react to market changes fast and offers customers a better digital experience. We live in an era when customers don’t have patience when accessing digital channels. They require instant gratification, so let’s deliver that to them.

That’s why I can only recommend not to procrastinate: don’t be slow about starting your migration, get cracking now. By taking the right steps immediately, you will be able to please customers faster and get your testing strategies modernized at the same time.

Needless to say, Tricentis can assist you in this process. Tricentis Live Compare uses Artificial Intelligence to help you analyze the impact and make the migration elephant easier to swallow. Tosca will intelligently automate your testing. Tricentis Data Integrity helps ensure that your data arrives intact and fit for purpose as it travels between your source systems. And Neoload will take care of any performance issues.

Want to make a quick start? Contact us first.