This question, which Volker Gaese and his colleagues asked themselves in view of the expected effort and the planned migration time from SAP ERP to SAP S/4 HANA, will certainly be heard in many companies in this or a similar form. It is also evidence that timely involvement of the service provider can save many concerns and significantly simplify the overall process of SAP S/4 HANA migration.
The food family has been relying on SAP plug-ins from dbh for some time, with which numerous processes related to shipping, customs, goods export and trade compliance are simplified for food family employees. The food family chose the Brownfield migration variant. According to the customer’s specifications, all processes should be available in the new S/4 HANA system environment just as the Josera team has come to know and appreciate them in SAP ERP. In this respect, dbh was able to alleviate the customer’s concerns from the very beginning, as all dbh plug-ins are already fully prepared for S/4 HANA.
Close collaboration as the most important prerequisite for a successful migration
Nevertheless, migration is a topic whose time and organizational scope should not be underestimated. Because in addition to migrating the actual ERP system, it also had to be ensured that business-critical processes such as sanctions list checking or exports did not come to a standstill. The actual migration of the dbh standard plug-ins to SAP S/4 HANA is not the problem in itself, and even a larger number of plug-ins used does not significantly increase the effort. Rather, topics such as the transition to Business Partner presented the food family with new challenges, as the data base was not the same in different places in the company. Accordingly, close coordination between the Procurement, Accounting, Sales, and Customs Processing departments was required. Numerous data had to be cleaned up and business processes had to be reorganized in a short time. In addition, there were always special cases in the processes that had to be taken into account during the migration.
This showed that it is advantageous to appoint specialists in the respective departments who act as contact persons and work closely with their counterparts on the service provider’s side. Stephanie Rimpler, responsible for the plug-in conversion at the food family, emphasizes this point in particular: “This way, we were able to be specifically advised by dbh technical experts and focus on our specialist topics, while the project management maintained an overview of the overall project and coordinated all the threads,” she says in retrospect on the successfully completed project. When it became clear during the course of the project that especially the customizations of the existing system at the customer were causing challenges during the migration, these could be quickly remedied thanks to the close cooperation between the food family and dbh. “Additional and custom developments should be discussed early on,” Ms. Rimpler therefore recommends to all companies that will face an S/4 HANA migration in the future.
A demanding but smooth transition thanks to collaborative cooperation
The overall project of migrating all dbh SAP plug-ins to S/4 HANA at the food family took approximately eight months from the first kick-off to go-live. For the customer, the expected time commitment was surprising because it only became apparent on closer inspection how many steps a migration really involves. Ms. Rimpler explains: “In addition to the actual system migration and the conversion of the plug-ins, we reviewed individual processes as part of the project and placed special emphasis on a thorough test phase to ensure that everything functions exactly as we are used to after the go-live.”
