The Right Integration Approach For SAP S/4HANA Cloud

[Former Member]

Integrating installations with SAP S/4HANA Cloud sounds a lot more complex than they really are. Depending on how your current ERP system is set up, migrating to the cloud can be done in a number of different ways. Changing a company's ERP solution into the cloud allows for the business to experience decentralized serving of data, simplified administration and scalability to name a few of the more common advantages. A business is likely to see a marked difference in how their data is handled when they move over to the cloud. Each business has their own individual demands, but luckily there are methodologies for migrating each type of business onto the cloud.

1) SAP-distributed Pre-Configured Integration

SAP knows that their clients are going to want to use the cloud to benefit their businesses and as such comes with a ready-to-use solution for migration of data. There are a number of iterations that these preconfigured installs take into account. Among these are installations where SAP ERP runs at the headquarters while SAP S/4HANA runs at a client location, or where businesses need to have cloud solutions of business services installed, like SAP Hybris or SAP Ariba. SAP offers a tool called the SAP Best Practices Explorer which allows a company to do research into what other companies have done in their installation scenarios in order to develop an idea of what they personally need for their own SAP S/4HANA migration package. It's the fastest return on investment from any migration process and is ideal for customers that simply want an upgrade to the current standard procedures without any requisite customer-specific edits thrown in.

2) Templates Generated from Content

While the out-of-the-box standard scenario does have its attractiveness, the truth about many SAP installs is that one size most definitely does not fit all. It's because of this customizability that SAP has such widespread usage. To cater for customers that need this extra layer of flexibility but still conform to the basic setup of a SAP install, a template can be generated based on the existing content of an install and then used to aid migration to the cloud, especially if you are running solo ads. This gives a customer the best of both worlds, since they can still use the standard integration packages as a template to make their migration faster than if they were doing it manually. The process is fairly simple. First you must look at the preconfigured systems that are being migrated and make note of those that you need to adjust the process for. From there it's a simple matter of using the configuration features provided for self-service that come bundles with SAP S/4HANA Cloud to adjust and redefine the standard content to suit your needs. This approach is great for companies that have mostly kept their SAP installs as is and have only done minor changes to some of the processes involved therein.

3) Doing the Entire Process from Scratch

Out of the three migration scenarios, this one offers the most control over the movement of systems onto the cloud as well as the most flexibility. On the downside, this migration technique is the most time consuming one. This migration scenario is best suited to companies that have put a lot of time and effort into making SAP into a system that fits their business well, having custom code included into the system to aid its function across a number of different areas. The initial step is to figure out how the end-to-end process that will be used over the entire integrated system will work. SAP Best Practices Explorer can be useful in determining a generalized flow for this, based on the success of other clients with similar installs. After we determine this, we can now move to figure out which processes included within the system are already covered by SAP S/4HANA Cloud and which need to be integrated separately through the use of an API. Once we've determined this, we have to locate and integrate the API's necessary for the migration to be successful. SAP API business Hub is a priceless tool in finding the API's that relate to the processes we've already defined.

An Easy Method of Integrating with the Cloud

While SAP can be complicated, migration to the cloud is a relatively simple and painless process. Moving onto the cloud is one of the most effective ways of modernizing a company's data model and should be one companies look into, especially if they don't want to curtail their overall growth. These options for migration cover all SAP installations, from the ones that small businesses utilize to the ones that are used by multi-state companies which require lots of custom code be migrated onto the cloud. SAP has managed to cover all their bases with these migration protocols.