At SAP Sapphire in 2024, Stefanie Kuebler, global head of Business and Data Transformation Solutions at SAP, and her team announced the eagerly awaited lean selective data transition for SAP S/4HANA in SAP Business Transformation Center.
Here, she shares about how the pair work together to help supercharge customers’ digital transformations.
Q: Can you give a little background on SAP Business Transformation Center?
A: SAP Business Transformation Center was envisioned as a one-stop shop for customers that want to transition from SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ERP) 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA. The challenges to such a transformation are, of course, numerous and daunting. Customers need to cull current data, pull together fragmented tool sets, line up the right human resources, and keep an eye on time to value.
With SAP Business Transformation Center, we’ve done our best to bring together the latest functionality and expert guidance to smooth the way – in a single, powerful software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. And SAP Business Transformation Center is easily accessible, deployed on SAP Cloud ALM atop SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). It comes with any implementation of RISE with SAP or any cloud solution from SAP and can be ready to use in less than half an hour.
Q: Where can customers go for further details?
A: The support materials at SAP Business Transformation Center include a quick summary of features and benefits, along with the introductory video.
Q: What does SAP see as the core mission of SAP Business Transformation Center?
A: Kilian Carolan from the Premium Hub – CoE Ireland Data Management has described the mission this way: “To play an active part in the SAP S/4HANA adoption journey by supporting key data management and data migration topics and to serve as the trusted advisor for our customers.” He continues to explain that we do this through end-to-end support, including hands-on execution, optimization, transformation, upgrade, and migration of Big Data and data platforms. In short, we apply our vast portfolio of enterprise information management and landscape transformation tools, methodologies, and processes to the customer’s unique transformation scenario.
Q: Where are we in the ongoing evolution of SAP Business Transformation Center?
A: Our first step was to help customers fully understand the structure of their SAP legacy systems through the digital blueprint. This supplied the background they needed to begin scoping the transformation project. And now we’ve completed the second step for moving data across to the target system – with lean selective data transition for SAP S/4HANA.
Q: What exactly does the lean selective data transition for SAP S/4HANA do?
A: Data transformation is traditionally a highly complex undertaking, and we’ve made a huge dent in that complexity. Right at the start, lean selective data transition for SAP S/4HANA helps radically reduce the decision-making efforts involved in choosing data to migrate. The underlying principle is to provide smarter suggestions and fewer difficult choices through market-leading services and tools – and end-to-end advice on making the most of them. That approach helps customers ensure that they only move data that will continue to be useful, reducing the volume of data for the testing and go-live phases and accelerating the transition exponentially.
With lean selective data transition for SAP S/4HANA, customers can pare down SAP legacy data and bring the target system live with a clean data foundation. In combination with the digital blueprint, lean selective data transition for SAP S/4HANA can give SAP Business Transformation Center the power to do all the heavy lifting of accessing source systems; extracting, transforming, and loading relevant data; and validating data for completeness, consistency, and correctness.
Q: What types of data can customers choose to exclude from the transfer?
A: For example, they could decide to completely ignore obsolete company codes, such as data for companies they have since divested or which are no longer in use.
Q: What does the wider market see as the single most revolutionary aspect of lean selective data transition for SAP S/4HANA?
A: For the very first time, SAP provides standard functionality not only for complete rebuilds, greenfield implementations, system conversions, or brownfield implementations, but also for projects somewhere in the middle. This is a third path, if you will, and it’s a holistic approach to the big transformation from SAP ECC 6.0 to SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Private Edition.
Q: Can you take us a little deeper into how lean selective data transition for SAP S/4HANA works and how customers can benefit?
A: With the SAP Readiness Check tool for SAP ERP usage and data profiling, we can collaborate with the customer to read the data from the source system and identify legal entities that are no longer in use or will soon be obsolete. SAP Business Transformation Center then can propose that these entities and the associated data are “removed from the scope” before starting the data transition and can provide clear instructions on how to do this. It can also help to identify customer-specific data in the SAP legacy system. Here, too, the customer has the option of leaving this data behind on the way to SAP S/4HANA to support its clean core strategy and move closer to the standard again.
Both these jobs would previously have meant time-consuming manual work for the solution architect – and higher costs and longer time to value for the customer. With the addition of lean selective data transition for SAP S/4HANA to the already popular functionality for digital blueprinting, SAP Business Transformation Center can now provide optimal support and transparency in each phase of the transformation project. It helps customers analyze the source system, define migration scope, create migration cycles, and finally transform the leaner body of data they’ve elected to move across. From strategy to execution, we serve as a trusted partner, helping to ensure that every step of the way leads to meaningful insights and sustainable results. And that lowers both total cost of implementation (TCI) and total cost of operation (TCO).
Q: What have customers been saying about lean selective data transition for SAP S/4HANA?
A: Long-term partner BMW Group, for example, has told us, “This feature significantly speeds up our evolution into an intelligent enterprise by applying sustainable and efficient solutions and methodologies.”
Karin Baeumler is part of Go-to-Market, Business & Data Transformation Solutions, at SAP.