SAP has said that until December 31, 2025, it will continue to offer support to its customers on legacy software. 2025 might seem some time away but it’s advised to start preparing now. Particularly large enterprises with scattered data from multiple sources need to act as soon as possible.
As a matter of fact, market leaders and Fortune 500 companies have already started their adoption plan for SAP S/4HANA. Besides the deadline, these leaders see the business values in adopting SAP S/4HANA such as faster data processing speed, agility to render insights, simplicity in management and administration, reduced total cost of ownership, and flexibility to support innovative products.
Many enterprises see a lot of work with migrating to SAP S/4HANA despite the benefits or the deadline as S/4HANA requires HANA as a database and HANA requires Linux. But with change inevitable for the current state of ERP, they must start setting up a proof of concept to map and prototype critical business processes.
In this article, we explain what industry challenges can be resolved by SAP S/4HANA, how AWS and SAP S/4HANA together can enable business value, and how you can accelerate migration of SAP to S/4HANA with AWS implementation.
Challenges With The Current ERP
With increased pace, organizations often falter in delivering great customer experiences with crippled bottom-lines. The current ERP systems are not scalable for growth causing you to burn investment into legacy platforms. To cope with sudden growth, companies facing IPO, international expansion, M&A, can’t depend on these platforms with no scalability and agility.
The poor performance of existing ERP platforms compel organizations to look for other alternatives that communicate with different silos, departments and teams within the organization. This complexes the network of systems due to poor integrations.
Apart from this, businesses also have to deal with the rise in different technologies that are cropping into the industry sector. To match industry-specific needs, technologies are customized. These customizations need a different speed for execution and understanding for real-time operation.
To overcome these challenges, businesses need to look for a single solution that can allow integration and increase speed of operation internally and externally. SAP S/4HANA is that single solution. Let’s look into the potential of SAP S/4HANA and how the migration can be leveraged with AWS.
Benefits of SAP S/4HANA and AWS
SAP S/4HANA is meant to achieve value-driven results across lines of business (LOB) and various departments. It is developed to simplify the management and administration of the IT landscape; provide a very convenient user experience; enable businesses to leverage the opportunities of new emerging technologies; increase collaboration; provide access to real time information which enables more efficient decision making processes; increase efficiency, increase productivity; and foster improved performance. It can be deployed on the cloud or on-premise.
It provides further business value by pruning the IT costs — enabling cost efficiency, allowing easy transition to the cloud, thereby setting the stage for future innovation, and minimizing the challenges associated with their SAP landscapes.
AWS with S/4HANA enables low cost of implementation. AWS provides easy access to data, unleashes mobility, and keeps data secure. While AWS is adopted at a fast pace by many businesses, there is a need to juxtapose this with industry specifics and uniqueness.
The combination of these two can enable you to adopt best industry and technology practices for better outcomes, and lower the risk of delay with the use of accelerators.
Here are the four primary benefits for your business with migration on AWS:
- Speed to Value: You could offer rapid delivery of services, stay flexible with on-demand capacity, and reduce procurement lead times.
- Improved Agility: Equate SLAs to the business solutions, and proactively respond to dynamic business environments with zero hardware lifecycle management.
- Cost reduction: Pay-per-use consumption based billing, reduced or eliminated CAPEX, and shared allocation of management and operations
- Increased reliability and security: Multi-tenant and dedicated options, secured and compliant solutions, and availability of resilient and redundant infrastructure
A Roadmap — How You Can Get Started
To optimize value for your business and reduce the complexity, here is a suggestive roadmap for SAP migration on AWS:
- Technical migration: Focus on migrating to S/4HANA which involves virtualization and cloud transition
- Business Process Optimization: Combination of custom code optimization and business process improvement
- Lines of Business: Specific to hospitality, finance, banking, manufacturing, supply chain, retail or any other sector
- Adoption of next-gen cloud practices: Matured integration and formulation of business systems
For implementation, we recommend a simple in input-process-output framework that is put on rapid pace. This includes different stages of preparation for migration and other smaller sprints.
Preparation phase: Create an overview of what you have and assess the magnitude of migration. This involves creation of a backlog, evaluating sprint plan, scrum processes, and tools.
Sprint Phase: All sprints will revolve around a process of documentation, verification, interview and analysis. Sprints put together will be categorized to:
- Build Customer UPMs
- Map S/4HANA
- Implement Rapid Migration Pilot
- Confirm Roadmap and benefits.
The acceleration of migration is closely dependant upon roadmaps, migration test program, and certified path solutions. The rapid migration test especially has proven to reduce time and cost that gets invested in the migration process.
While AWS minimizes infrastructure costs, and increases speed with agility, SAP S/4HANA enables collaboration and integration among business systems.
The Key Acceleration Differentiator
In the entire cycle of migration on AWS, the key differentiator of acceleration remains in choosing an expert implementation partner. The team stepping on board to help your business migrate must make the most of both technologies. The implementation partner should be SAP certified and qualified to be among the AWS partner network.
Savantis as a SAP S/4HANA implementation accelerator has already delivered the expertise of migration for multiple clients. This includes migration implementation for companies in industry sectors such as finance, entertainment, retail, and others. We help you deal with multi-location migration; integration with business systems like invoice management, supply chain management, procurement, inventory management, finance and accounting systems, and more; reporting and mobile apps.
We take an activate methodology to deliver business value for our clients:
Our pre-defined offerings serve as implementation accelerators and simplify the path to successful SAP deployment. These packages are based on SAP best practices and industry needs, allowing you the flexibility to select the right functionality and scope based on your business needs.
To name a few, customers such as ArcLight Cinemas and Sports Basement have been able to get started and focus on the implementation without having to invest in the infrastructure or resources management. This helped us as partners to start with the implementation right away and focus on business process and value.
Get in touch with us today to realize how we can meet your industry-specific migration needs and accelerate your SAP migration to S/4HANA on AWS.
