Planning your System Conversion to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition following SAP Activate

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We just launched an independent Roadmap Viewer for SAP Activate for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition - system Conversion. In this blog post, I want to give you an overview what you can find there.

Let’s begin with the basics: What is SAP Activate?

SAP Activate is the methodology used to implement SAP solutions. It follows an Agile approach and simplifies project management by breaking it down into manageable tasks across various workstreams, such as Project Management, Solution Adoption, and Customer Team Enablement. While many of these tasks overlap no matter how you approach the move to SAP S/4HANA, others are specific to the transition path selected.

This blog post series intends to provide a comprehensive overview of the specific activities to address at each stage of a system conversion project. By effectively mastering these tasks, the project team will be better prepared to navigate the complexities of a conversion project, thereby facilitating a smooth transition to the new system.

This graph gives a quick overview of the task I am talking about:

Let’s take a closer look at the planning phases. It means Discover and Prepare.

Discover Your Solution

The Discover phase is about what happens before you officially kick off your SAP S/4HANA project. By the time you finish this phase, your organization should have a clear digital transformation strategy and a solid roadmap or plan for moving to SAP S/4HANA, supported by a business case. During this phase, you'll also pick your partner and decide on the transition approach—whether that’s a new implementation, system conversion or selective data transition.

You’ll start with strategic planning, where you’ll outline your innovation strategy and high-level roadmap. This step also involves making some initial decisions about security and analytics. Next up is the fun part—trial system and application value and scoping, where you’ll assess how much value SAP S/4HANA can bring to your organization and check your readiness for taking the leap.

Here are some key tasks to focus on during this phase:

Let’s check them out a bit more closely:

Experience SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition

To really understand the potential benefits of SAP S/4HANA during the Discover phase, it helps to have access to an actual SAP S/4HANA system. You can set up a 30-day trial system pretty quickly using the SAP Cloud Appliance Library. It’s hosted on Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, but keep in mind that hosting costs apply, and you’ll need an account with the cloud provider.

If you've already signed a deal with RISE with SAP, you might qualify for a Starter System for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. This 90-day trial comes with the fully activated appliance template, managed by the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services team. It’s a great way to explore the system and run fit-to-standard workshops.

Identify the Value of SAP S/4HANA on Existing Business Processes

As you dive into strategic planning, your business process experts should create a more detailed solution mapping at the business scenario level. To pinpoint issues in your processes, you can request the SAP Signavio Process Insights report. This report also provides personalized recommendations for improving the processes and highlights the right innovations for your transformation journey.

Conversion Readiness Assessment

As you're moving from an existing SAP ERP solution, you'll want to evaluate what it will take to run a system conversion to SAP S/4HANA. The SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA is a super useful, automated tool that helps you assess your current SAP ERP before your transformation project kicks off. It identifies simplification items that could affect your system, as well as analyzing custom code, add-ons, business functions, and suggested SAP Fiori apps. Some issues might be significant roadblocks you need to address before you get started.

This tool also tells you about compatibility features still in use, which are functionalities created for SAP ERP. Just a heads up: usage rights for these features will expire soon. So, it’s essential to replace these features as part of your system conversion.

The results of this analysis will give you a list of pre-projects you need to handle in the next phase.

Prepare your System Conversion

The primary focus during this phase is organizing all the planning details. This is when your project officially begins. This includes defining your objectives and creating a detailed plan. Additionally, you assign members to the project team.

One of the big technical points to nail down is the system conversion strategy. You’ll be figuring out the best way to convert the system, setting up conversion cycles, and planning for any dual maintenance that might be needed. It’s also the time to wrap up any tech prep tasks and set up fit-to-standard workshops for some specific business processes.

Here are some key tasks to focus on during this phase:

Let’s check them more thoroughly.

Technical Project Preparation

Technical project prep means handling key tasks in the existing SAP ERP before diving into the main SAP S/4HANA project. Here’s what you need to focus on:

• Check Interoperability: Before you start, you need to make sure that all SAP systems talking to the future SAP S/4HANA system are on compatible versions. This will help you spot any issues that could pop up during the transition. If so, you should add any extra tasks needed to the project plan.
• Go for a Clean Core Approach: This is the time to find chances to shift any custom code to more standard options. It helps keep things stable, cuts down on maintenance costs, and opens the door for more innovation. Using the Cloud Readiness Check from the ABAP Test Cockpit can help you see how the custom code stacks up against the ABAP for Cloud Development standards. You’ll also need to figure out when to make any code changes, either in a later phase or together with custom code fixes.
• Define Data Validation Tools: For the S/4HANA conversion, it’s key to ensure that the business data is migrating accurately. You’ll need to pick the right tools to keep everything consistent and check the data’s integrity before and after the conversion.
• Know the Technical Team's Role: In an SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition project, the tech team has slightly different responsibilities compared to those working on an on-premise SAP ERP. The SAP Enterprise Cloud Services team usually handles infrastructure and maintenance. However, your tech experts and your partner are still important. They will manage the system configurations, performance, user roles, and integration with other systems. They’ll also take care of SAP Fiori and SAP BTP administration and act as contacts with SAP for any technical issues or service requests.

Getting Pre-Conversion Projects Done

Before you kick off the first conversion cycle, it’s crucial to wrap up all pre-conversion projects identified in the Conversion Readiness Assessment. Some examples of these projects include:

• Managing data volumes
• Syncing customers/vendors into business partners (CVI)
• Reconciling financial data
• Checking add-on compatibility
• Cleaning up unused custom code
• Unicode conversion
• Running a full sandbox conversion

Transition Planning

This activity is all about figuring out the scope and execution plan for the upcoming SAP S/4HANA transition project. The end result will be an initial action plan, which will lay the groundwork for a more detailed project plan. You’ll keep fine-tuning this plan throughout the project, especially during the Prepare and Explore phases, as part of the project management efforts. The main tasks here are

• Defining Scope and Objectives: You’ll put together a scope document that clearly outlines the IT and business goals. This will include:
  • Success Criteria: What does success look like for this project?
  • Starting Point: Which SAP solutions are you keeping, replacing, or updating?
  • Target Solution: What new features and releases are you aiming for, plus any quick wins?
• Cutover Strategy: You’ll document your strategy to move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. Since the cutover activities need to happen on a tight schedule, it's super important to plan the cutover strategy early and get everything ready. That way, you can avoid any delays down the road.
• Custom Code Analysis: As you convert to SAP S/4HANA, it’s crucial to analyze the existing custom code. Here’s the plan:
  • Get familiar with how you’ll manage code changes.
  • Understand the SAP clean core strategy.
  • Use SAP tools to flag any unused code for cleanup.
  • Identify which custom ABAP code needs adjustments.
  • Figure out what can be moved to one of the new extensibility options or replaced with standard SAP features.
  • Estimate the work involved, aiming for quick fixes wherever you can.

• Technical Architecture and Security Update: you’ll need to revise the current technical architecture to align with the scope document, possibly switching to an SAP HANA database and incorporating SAP Fiori components. It’s also important to document new security requirements, especially around roles and SAP Fiori. A self-check on technical security will be part of this.

• Data Volume Planning: Before your transition, you need to manage the data volume to minimize conversion time and hardware costs. This means identifying which data can be cleaned up before you start the real work.
• Assessing Interfaces and Integration: you’ll look at the existing documentation to pinpoint external systems and business objects that need to integrate with SAP S/4HANA. It’s also important to assess how moving to SAP S/4HANA will affect the current interfaces. Standard interfaces should remain stable, but you need to watch out for any custom interfaces that might be impacted.

System Conversion Planning

Let’s break down what you need to do for the system conversion. This phase is all about figuring out the technical approach to the conversion, including how many times you’ll need to convert and setting up a dual maintenance strategy. Here’s what you need to focus on:

• Choosing the Right Conversion Approach: SAP has different methods for system conversion and ways to minimize downtime, depending on what you need (like an in-place conversion or moving things to a new infrastructure). It's super important to look at these options early on and pick what works best for your project. This decision can really affect the project plan, timelines, and costs, so make sure you evaluate everything.
• Planning the Conversion Cycles: To make sure everything goes smoothly when transitioning to SAP S/4HANA, you need to set up a solid conversion process. This means deciding how many conversion cycles you’ll have and in what order. A good rule of thumb is to plan for at least five cycles: a sandbox, development, quality assurance, a dry run, and the final production. If you run into any issues or choose a specific conversion method, you might need to do more cycles.
• Considering Dual Maintenance: During the conversion, there might be times when the business needs to make changes to the production environment before everything is finalized. This means you may need a temporary setup to handle these changes while the main system is converting to SAP S/4HANA. Also, any changes made will need to sync up with the newly converted systems. So, it’s important to figure out if you need a dual maintenance process.

User Experience Planning and Workshops

The UX planning and workshops are here to help you manage and boost your UX adoption over time. Since UX covers a lot of different areas, the goal is to get business and tech teams working together more effectively. You can take advantage of the recommendations you'll get during and after your move to SAP S/4HANA whenever you're ready to ramp up your UX adoption and add some real value to your business.

This includes information on SAP S/4HANA and the related RISE with SAP extensions on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). You’ll find a User Experience Strategy Workshop and a handy template for nailing down guiding principles and governance. There are also workshop templates to help you establish business value, outline future goals, and brainstorm high-value apps and features as you update your UX adoption roadmap. Plus, you'll get tips on how to select apps, check if they fit your needs, explore extension options, design launchpad layouts, and communicate changes to users.

Fit-to-Standard Prep for Specific Features

First things first: you’ll want to get to know the fit-to-standard framework and prep for the fit-to-standard workshops. When you’re doing a system conversion, these workshops are a direct result of the Conversion Readiness Assessment, specifically the Conduct Functional Review Workshop task during the discovery phase. The simplification items you’ll review in these workshops generally fall into three groups:

• Group 1: Needs functional/technical fixes 
• Group 2: Needs fit-to-standard workshops 
• Group 3: Not applicable

In this task, you will focus on Group 2, meaning those items that need fit-to-standard workshops. Here are a couple of examples:

• Features in SAP ERP that aren’t in SAP S/4HANA: For instance, you’d implement Settlement Management instead of using SD rebates processing.
• Features available in SAP S/4HANA; but are in compatibility scope: For instance, you’ll want to switch to Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) instead of Warehouse Management (WM).

Don’t forget to include functions you’re not currently using that you’ll implement during your system conversion project.

The fit-to-standard analysis and design includes the following activities:

During Prepare, you must focus on the first two:

• Workshop Preparation: These workshops are divided up by Lines of Business (like finance) and end-to-end solutions (like accounting and financial close). When doing a system conversion, the focus is on where the solution changes. You’ll start with an initial fit-to-standard workshop and, if needed, follow it up with a design workshop. The project manager will handle the workshop schedule and make sure everyone knows the boundaries and integration points. You'll have a standard set of documents to guide both input and output.
• Select the right system: It's super important to choose the right system for these activities. You’ll want to consider several options, like the Starter System for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, the SAP S/4HANA Fully-Activated Appliance, or a previously converted sandbox system (if you have one). Don’t forget to wrap up any pending tasks, like enabling SAP Fiori, so everything is set for the workshops.

Once you've wrapped up those activities, you’re all set to start your system conversion. To get ready, check out the second blog post in this series: Running your System Conversion to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition following SAP Activate.

We've come to the end of this blog post.  Just a reminder, this was a quick overview of the tasks you can find in the SAP Activate Roadmap Viewer for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition—System Conversion. Check out the details in the Roadmap Viewer to help you plan your system conversion project.

I hope you found this blog post helpful. If you did, please give it a "like" or share it. I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback, so feel free to leave a comment. If you have any questions, just drop them in the Q&A section with the tags SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. We'll try to get back to you as soon as we can.

Thanks,

Brought to you by the SAP S/4HANA RIG team.