Maximise value from SAP S/4HANA ,Leverage Solution Extension capabilities

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Maximise value from your SAP S/4HANA Investments

As organization continues the transition of its ERP operations from the existing SAP ECC environment to SAP S/4HANA, the benefits that this transformation can deliver are starting to shape up. To follow through on its ERP modernization strategy, organization needs to re-design key business processes in a way that enables new business models, delivers long-term productivity and cost-efficiency improvements. It also needs to implement the required changes while minimizing any disruptions to business operations.

Maximizing the benefits of the SAP S/4HANA transition program requires continuous collaboration both across the company’s internal and external partner ecosystem. As an eco-system partner it is incumbent upon us to lead and support our client efforts of driving a simpler and more agile enterprise leveraging SAP S/4HANA in multiple ways, from delivering a seamless transition of existing capabilities to introducing new ones that support our client's strategic goals and maximises value.

SAP S/4HANA- Transitioning digital content

The sheer scale of the SAP S/4HANA transition program and its central role to enable business transformation to make it critical to ensure business continuity. Transitioning digital content, Can you go to SAP S/4 HANA without including your digital content on the journey? Probably Not!. Data and content derive insights that makes better digital solutions.

Challenges of Preparation and Migration Phase

• The size of ERP systems, database and repositories is significant , migration complexity further added by ageing data and content  residing in multiple locations, large data and document footprint leads to increased infrastructure costs.


• How to migrate data that is scattered across multiple instances or repositories? How do deal migration challenges of  multiple historic versions of document records? And what do we need to move? Do you really want to move them? And if not how do you offload data that should be disposed because of GDPR or other regulatory requirements?


• S/4 systems have to be adjusted to local regulatory requirements and should be designed to minimize both compliance risks and costs. Maintaining multiples content silos with no GDPR compliant records management in place is for sure not the right approach to meet regulatory requirements


• Inefficient or Irrelevant information extraction from existing archives and inbound documents and manual content processing drives costs, induces error, and prevents digital transformation.


• Transitioning existing integrations of each business unit from ECC to SAP S/4HANA while minimizing the impact on trading partner experience and business process continuity.


• Are you putting the right building blocks (technical, infrastructure, functional) for scalable solution to maximize the business value out of SAP S/4HANA transition after the migration is over?

Whilst the above challenges need to be resolved with clear strategies and enabling technologies, the real benefit to move to SAP S/4HANA is transformation, digitalization and innovation. You need data, content and intelligent  technologies to achieve desired business outcomes  in your realisation phase and beyond that.

 SAP S/4HANA Solution extension and Value enablers

• Establish Content Archiving strategy and enable archival by significantly reducing the data and document footprint of to-be-migrated ERP systems through SAP content archiving. SAP Archiving and Document Access helps to simplify, consolidate and accelerate content migration and implement seamless UI  data and security-integration, reduces risk and  minimize operations costs.


• Derive intelligence from both data and content and also bring the two together to generate a 360 degree view of the customer, asset, or service case for instance. Increase the value and outcome of S/4 applications in sales, asset operations, production, or procurement through xECM (SAP Extended Enterprise Content management)


• Looking at transactional processes, SAP Digital Content Processing is facilitating the conversion from paper to data to information combining automated processing, flexible configurations and autoadaptive machine learning to minimize manual tasks and error.


• Continue leveraging the benefits when the S/4 migration is done. Solutions like SAP Archiving and Document Access , SAP xECM (Extended Enterprise Content Management)  and Digital Content Processing support sharing S4-data, drive insights and deliver on applications too. They have a positive impact on  the customers bottom line KPI‘s (e.g. productivity, cycle time, quality and error minimization)  linked to document-driven processes like sales-order processing, accounts payable, shipping notification and goods received.


• A key benefit of transitioning to SAP S/4HANA is that it provides new capabilities particularly around analytics and real-time data processing that organisations are looking to leverage and enable new business workflows. Content Analytics highlights critical deviations, visualizes trends, and points at valuable or reusable content.


• Modernizing and improving performance of process automation by leveraging the new API capabilities that SAP S/4HANA offers through the SAP API Business Hub

Organisations  should explore all opportunities to re-design processes in a way that meets the needs of individual business through  right data and relevant content migration that provides insights and  augment SAP S/4HANA solution extension capabilities  to enable intelligent business processes that  maximises return on  investments.

References:

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) | SAP

Document Management in SAP S/4HANA Cloud | SAP Blogs

Simplify Migration to SAP HANA and S/4HANA - OpenText Blogs

Learn how OpenText eases SAP S/4HANA migration with modern integration - YouTube

Rethink SAP integration | OpenText