Technical activities as Pre Projects to shorten SAP S/4HANA Conversion Project timelines

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Focus here is to list down certain key technical activities which you can plan as Pre projects for Conversion which are generally missed out and can increase your efforts during actual Conversion project .

In this blog post ; we are not going to talk about Assessment and Pre checks execution which we all know by now that need to be executed during Prepare and Explore phases of  Conversion Project.

Customers who have decided their roadmap as S/4Conversion are generally looking for answers to

• What can be done today as Pre projects that would shorten their actual Conversion timelines


• What are mandatory and optional activities that can be done

Some of the activities might help in accelerating project duration. Out of the following list few are mandatory to be carried out to avoid issue during conversion phase and few are optional ones that you can be taken up before or during the project phase.

Mandatory Activities

1. Deprecated Domain and Data Elements:
   Some domains and Data elements used in your Custom Objects might not be available in S/4HANA ; so your custom objects will be in syntax errors after Conversion . We advise you to fix such cases before Conversion ; where deprecated Domain and Data elements should be replaced by the ones available in S/4HANA. This list you will get as part of your Technical assessment .


2. Add-Ons Compatibility Check: Many Customers would have third party Add on’s installed on their ECC system which might not be compatible with S/4HANA EM ; so the compatibility should be checked beforehand .Customers should initiate to get compatible versions from third party vendors before they start conversion. Non compatible Add-ons can cause issues during Conversion phase and may impact the timelines .


3. Unicode Errors: In case existing ECC system is Non-Unicode ; customers would be required to do Unicode Conversion and fix Unicode Errors before starting their Conversion Project . This is mandatory activity to be carried out as ECC Non Unicode to S/4Conversion can be done in 2 steps only .


4. CVI Enhancements: Since in S/4HANA we have BP rather than customer and Vendors and transactions XK*/XD* are obsolete .So in case you have added Custom fields in Vendor and Customer Master ; same need to be adjusted before your start Conversion .

Optional Activities

1. SOH issues:
   Any Customer who is on ECC AND plans to move to S/4HANA ; custom code requires adaptation for HANA DB and Simplification issues .For fixing HANA DB issues you need to check your custom code against FUNCTIONAL_DB SCI variant . Some of patterns like DB Hints can only be fixed after HANA DB migration . But you can fix issues under category ‘Search problematic statements for result of SELECT/OPEN CURSOR without ORDER BY’ in your ECC system itself .


2. Archiving: HANA sizing report analyzes the size of existing data base tables and reports the top tables that are consuming the maximum space .You can review those tables and can plan for Archiving as Pre project to archive the old data ; this would help to reduce your overall DB size before the conversion .


3. Clean up Objects: Some of your existing objects in ECC development box might be in syntax errors ( like test programs ) ; you can cleanup such objects before the Conversion .Also you can plan for cleanup of Unused Objects in case you have Usage log of minimum 1 year . This would help to reduce the Code Remediation efforts since you can exclude the unused objects from efforts.


4. Clones: You might have created some clones in your ECC system ; you can review the same and evaluate if they can be mapped to any Standard processes after Conversion .

Based on complexity of the ECC system; you can plan Pre projects which can be carried out and would help you during actual Conversion Journey.

Please share your thoughts and any additional points you think we can add to the above list.

Thank you!