When legendary professional cyclist and two time Tour Du France winner Fausto Coppi was asked the secret to his record-breaking success, his advice was simple: “Ride a bike, ride a bike, ride a bike.”
There’s no substitute for just getting on with the task at hand, whether training for the first leg of the Tour Du France or crossing the actual finish line. But getting on with it also requires preparation and planning, including the benefit of advice, insight, and experience. It is the same when plotting a digital transformation journey.
Like any multi-stage event, each of us will take our own route, change gears at our own pace, and make pit stops along the way based on our own specific circumstances and environments.
In the same way that there are multiple stages and routes to get each of us across our own finish line, the multi-stage journey to SAP S/4HANA is unique to each company.
This is why SAP has been running a comprehensive how-to webinar series, outlining the step-by-step map for transitioning to the modern digital platform of SAP S/4HANA at your own pace.
Leading authorities on making the move to SAP S/4HANA came together to help ensure each transition is as straight-forward as possible, regardless of IT landscape or legacy overheads. This five-part series shows how to make the transition with less risk and at a higher speed, as well as the best ways to tackle common issues around data quality and data migration, carrying over custom code and business partner conversion — all within budget and timeline constraints.
The data transformation requirements that help get data clean — including data preparation, quality, and migration — before you go live with SAP S/4HANA are explained in depth, as well as how to keep data clean in day-to-day activities and operations through master data management once live.
Protecting and moving customizations, integrating the landscape, and managing extensions and innovations in the cloud with low code development are all looked at. And the series shows how to modernize a data strategy and platform, factoring in the data lake, as well as reporting directly from within applications.
To grease the digital wheels of business automation, new ways of integrating enterprise data with disparate types of Big Data across different data stores are mapped out, while preserving data security, integrity, and consistency.
But SAP knows there is no substitute for customer experience. So three customers — all at different stages of their own digital journey toward SAP S/4 HANA — share their experiences, tips, and advice.
- Tetra Pak outlined its successful data Transformation journey around mastering automation and data efficiencies, which is now the foundation for the next stage.
- Neste discussed how it is becoming an intelligent enterprise through real-time analytics and automated business processes.
- Vinci Energies showed how it has embraced data-driven innovations in SAP S/4HANA, such as robotic process automation, next-generation analytics, and mobile business processes.
The response from customers who have watched the webinars and implemented the advice has been hugely positive. If you did not catch the full series the first time, you can watch them on-demand here.
In addition to how-to steps from SAP experts, partners, and customers, you can also see just how easy it is to create intelligent, mobile-ready applications to better serve customers, modernize business processes, and compete more effectively.
When the world is busy transforming around you, it’s never too late to start but it’s always too late to wait. Have a great journey!
Gerd Danner is vice president of the EMEA Center of Excellence for Information Management and Intelligent Suite Surround lead at SAP.