Seeing is believing: why you need to trial S/4HANA

May 20, 2021

IT
operations
finance
SAP

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With still more than six years to go until SAP support for ECC software comes to a halt, what’s the pressure to move now? Large scale IT migration projects can be costly, time-consuming and if not managed effectively, result in significant downtime.

But if we were only ever to review the risks, we’d never reap the rewards. Legacy systems are often cited as the key problem for business struggling with stagnating growth. In ever-growing markets and under the pressure of an always demanding customer base, there is a desperate need to closely connect customer data to operations in a closed loop.

Debunking the myths

There are often three major concerns why companies are so afraid to make the move: lack of platform stability and maturity, adoption of the new Fiori user interface and the impact of migration on custom development. We explored this in more depth in a previous blog, but lets debunk some of these concerns here.

SAP S/4HANA is certainly not just another iteration of the same product. The HANA platform has been around since 2010 and has proved a stable and performant platform, remember it’s more than just a database. S/4HANA has been around since 2015 and has been optimised and developed over the last four years with improvements and new features being continuously added as the product has evolved. In summary, though S/4HANA is relatively new, it is built on mature foundations and will evolve as the digital core for the future.

Your current system has been developed and custom made over many years and the fear when migrating to SAP S/4HANA is that all of this could be lost. However, none of this hard work and effort will be wasted when you move to S/4. There’s a range of tools that come with migration designed to make to move as pain-free as possible. An S/4HANA migration assessment is an opportunity to review your code, highlight potential issues and explore the benefits of standardisation. Understanding what custom code is useful and which is causing administration headaches can save a great deal of time in the future when it comes to implementing the latest release.

Building the business case

Your ERP system is the digital core of your business. It integrates your supply chain, operations, customer data and more. When this technology works effectively, it can solve business problems, enable growth and provide a platform for innovation. But of all the benefits of migrating to the new system now, the one that stands out, is the ability to improve decision making.

Bringing together structured and unstructured data from a multitude of systems enables advanced reporting and efficient operational decision making. The valuable insights gained through SAP S/4HANA is empowering senior leadership to act fast; which ultimately, should be the objective of any new technology implementation.

See it for yourself

Ready to give it a try? Check out delaware’s S/4HANA Proof of Value

What if there was a secure environment where you could explore the possibilities of S/4HANA for your business without taking any risk? Well, that’s exactly what delaware’s S/4HANA Proof of Value is. It allows you to explore the suite: