Jump into S/4HANA #1 — What is it?

For sev­er­al years already, S/4HANA has been a buzz­word in SAP user orga­ni­za­tions. Few years ago, the dis­cus­sion themes were only at the lev­el of thought, but this year, tran­si­tion to S/4HANA will be real­i­ty for sev­er­al enter­pris­es. First S/4HANA tran­si­tion projects have been eye open­ers for many deci­sion mak­ers. Soon it is time to make deci­sions also in your organization.

We decid­ed to start a blog series where we describe the avail­able sce­nar­ios for S/4HANA tran­si­tion. We will walk through the three dif­fer­ent tran­si­tion sce­nar­ios in detail and inves­ti­gate, what each sce­nario entails from the orga­ni­za­tions and from their exist­ing SAP systems.

”Many orga­ni­za­tions won­der how to take the first steps towards the S/4HANA gen­er­a­tion. There are sev­er­al options and there­fore it’s not easy to make the deci­sion. How to trans­fer the cur­rent sys­tem to S/4HANA? What about the cur­rent SAP process­es, do we trans­fer them at all? Do we want the solu­tion to run on on-premise infra­struc­ture, pri­vate or pub­lic cloud or per­haps in a hybrid land­scape? What is the most suit­able option for our orga­ni­za­tion and how can we get a grasp on all the dif­fer­ent options?

Future busi­ness needs, exist­ing busi­ness process­es, tech­nol­o­gy and sys­tem archi­tec­ture deter­mine most­ly the right choice of tran­si­tion sce­nario. The orga­ni­za­tion must select how exten­sive­ly the cur­rent process­es will be kept and delib­er­ate on the new oppor­tu­ni­ties, that the sys­tem change unleash­es for the organization.

The scope and scale of the project must be under­stood thor­ough­ly before mak­ing the first deci­sion. How exten­sive will the project be and how it should be resourced inter­nal­ly? What are the risks in the project and how can we mit­i­gate these risks? What are the things we must con­sid­er from busi­ness point of view and what are the tech­ni­cal pre­req­ui­sites for the project execution?

One of the major fac­tors behind the deci­sion mak­ing is the organization’s future vision. What are the busi­ness needs that will define our future busi­ness and there­fore also the solu­tion? Fur­ther devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties need to be com­pared to select the sce­nario, that will ben­e­fit the busi­ness the most.

Tran­si­tion to S/4HANA is not only a tech­ni­cal tran­si­tion. It enables busi­ness dig­i­tal­iza­tion, the renew­al of exist­ing busi­ness process­es and the imple­men­ta­tion of new busi­ness areas.

As our CEO Jan­i­na Luo­to wrote in her previ­ous blog, after its 1709 release, S/4HANA has for the first time more func­tion­al­i­ties than its pre­de­ces­sor SAP ERP. Sim­u­la­tion and ana­lyt­ics are now embed­ded in to the sys­tem and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence com­po­nents are includ­ed to replace for­mer time-con­sum­ing man­u­al processes.”

In our next blog, we will intro­duce dif­fer­ent tran­si­tion sce­nar­ios in more detail and walk through, which sce­nar­ios fit best to which situations.

Con­tact information:
Tom­mi Luoto
Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Office
tommi.​luoto@​isletgroup.​fi
+358 40 574 1261

Buzz­words: #SAP #S4HANA #con­ver­sion #cloud­ser­vice #islet­group