Facilitating Migration to SAP S/4HANA

Are you a new or existing SAP customer and looking for an easy and smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA?

SAP can support you with the following three main transition scenarios: new implementation, system conversion, or landscape transformation.

In addition, customers may want to combine some of these scenarios or have specific migration requirements beyond the scope of these options. In this case, SAP can also provide support with the service offerings from the Data Management & Landscape Transformation team.

In a series of articles, we’ll inform you about the various transition scenarios and offerings, beginning with the new implementation.

SAP S/4HANA Migration Cockpit for New Implementations

To newly implement SAP S/4HANA, you need to think about how to migrate legacy data from the source systems to SAP S/4HANA.

“We have developed the next generation data migration solution which is the SAP S/4HANA migration cockpit,” states Wolfgang Gutberlet, senior vice president, Products & Innovation. “It is easy-to-use and contains a comprehensive set of new functions for the data migration to SAP S/4HANA.”

As part of SAP S/4HANA Cloud and on premise, this migration cockpit is the tool of choice for migration to SAP S/4HANA.

Preconfigured SAP S/4HANA-Specific Migration Content

To facilitate migration, the cockpit uses predefined migration content specific to SAP S/4HANA: migration objects such as customers, suppliers, and open items to identify and transfer the data. For each migration object, the cockpit provides a template file with necessary SAP S/4HANA fields that customers fill with the source data and then upload it into the target system.

High Data Quality and Consistency Due to Automated Mapping

The cockpit contributes to high data quality and consistency by providing automated mapping between the data coming from the source systems and the structure of the target systems. This means the cockpit checks whether the values from the source systems – which you have entered in the template file – are compliant with the customizing values for SAP S/4HANA.

Flexible Migration

You can easily extend and adapt the standard migration scope delivered with the SAP S/4HANA migration cockpit to your requirements. Also, you can include custom-specific data using the inherent migration object modeler. You can either create your own migration objects from scratch or adjust standard migration objects to your needs; for example, add new fields to these objects.

Easy-to-Use and Safe Migration Processes

The migration cockpit efficiently guides you through the migration process and offers a simulation functionality. When you have uploaded the template files with source data, you get guidance through the various activities of the migration.

At first, the cockpit automatically checks the mapping between the uploaded template files and the target structure. If there are incorrect values, you can easily change them so that they fit the target values. Before the actual data migration, you can simulate the transfer without any update in the target system. When this finishes successfully, you start the data migration to SAP S/4HANA.

Outlook: End-to-End SAP S/4HANA Migration Solutions for SAP Applications

“We are currently working on more functions to facilitate and accelerate the migration,” Gutberlet articulates. “With SAP S/4HANA release 1709, we provide a staging solution on a project basis, which allows customers to connect third-party or SAP systems to SAP S/4HANA. This makes mass data transfer much quicker and easier to handle.”

“In a next step, we will deliver end-to-end SAP S/4HANA migration solutions for SAP applications. These cover various migration scenarios and include preconfigured packages for business data of SAP applications such as SAP ERP,” he continues. “Through direct connection between SAP Business Suite and SAP S/4HANA , we can extract the relevant business data using predefined selection criteria. This will help reduce customers’ efforts to extract data from SAP source systems to almost zero.”

After the extraction, the migration cockpit maps and migrates the business data to the SAP S/4HANA target system, as described above. For the testing of the migration results, we are planning additional functionality to automatically validate migration results. For example, we are including SAP standard reports to compare business data between source and target systems.

“To summarize the benefits of the SAP S/4HANA migration cockpit for the future: With the planned end-to-end SAP S/4HANA migration solutions containing preconfigured business data packages for SAP applications and automated validation of the migrated data, we will substantially lower customers’ project cost and effort,” Gutberlet concludes.