Transcript and slide deck
Gustav Botha
Yeah, good morning everybody and thanks again for joining us on this webinar. We're with myself and Kieran, from Centiq. We've spoken about how to save you some time, how to save you some money, how to access innovation and today I want to talk about how to reduce your risk and what we found that works for quite a lot of our clients is looking at... And this is specifically for clients that are looking to migrate from ECC... Sorry, not the migration to the Cloud but looking at the conversion of ECC to S/4HANA. Typically, what we like to do with those clients is we will always start with an initial engagement around an assessment to help them understand what the best route to the Cloud is. But then if you wanted to have more insights into the feasibility, the conversion of an ECC to S/4HANA, we would recommend looking at the pilot.
I'm going to talk through today some of the benefits that you can get from looking at the pilot and using a case study that we've had for one of our clients in Asia. So let me just share my screen. Like I said, today is about how to reduce your risk with the pilot programme. Just to set the scene for this specific client, it is somebody who had already migrated from On-Premise to Cloud and we see that a lot because the first step of the journey to S/4HANA is typically taking the step into the Cloud because that will really releases and realises so much benefit, all the stuff that Kieran has covered before. But we then start looking at is the conversion from ECC to S/4HANA going to be technically feasible.
There are two ways that you can look at that conversion process. It could be a Greenfield or a Brownfield or a Bluefield conversion and typically the Greenfield implementation is a lot more expensive. So what this specific customer was trying to understand is, is it feasible? What's the impact going to be on my custom code? What's the impact going to be on my data? What's going to impact on my business processes? And in particularly they were wondering what's going to be impact on my enterprise warehouse management? So different clients have got different challenges but this specific one was around the extended warehouse management and what the impact of that is going to be.
So what did we do? I just move on to the next slide. We agreed to scope. Sat down and looked at what the scope of the project is and because it's a pilot, we can't typically look at the whole piece so we were trying to zone in on a specific area that you're interested in or a specific part of the business process where you think you are adding a lot more value and it's going to give you a bit of an advantage against some of your competitors. But we would deploy an Azure platform. We make a system copy of your SAP production system and then do a technical conversion of ECC to S/4HANA. As part of that conversion, we will look at the impact on your custom code. So we'll do some Abacode remediation, have a look at the impact of your data and also enable Fiori. And I'll get onto the Fiori enablement in a second. And again, just the Abacode remediation is not across the full list of all of your custom code.
We would typically agree your scope. Look at some of those processes, probably the more complex ones and have a look at what the code remediation impact is. So what are the benefits that the client, well, the specific, but I guess a lot of this would be transferable to other clients. What are the main benefits? So, firstly demonstrates that it is actually feasible to do a Brownfield conversion. Again, a lot cheaper than going through a Greenfield implementation approach and although these projects are typically two to three months for a pilot, the insights that you gain and the cost savings compared to going to a Greenfield implementation is significant. The second thing is that you get a much better understanding for the conversion process, the impact on your data, the impact on your custom code, the impact on your business processes and it allows you to make certain preparation steps before you then move and move on to S/4HANA.
I like to talk about this a lot but preparing and taking those first steps to S/4HANA is so important. I've worked on a lot of conversion projects, a lot of S/4HANA projects where you start the process and as soon as you started, you realised that your data could have been cleaner. Your code could have been better managed. Your business could have been better prepared for this. This is the opportunity to gain those insights and get better visibility across the costs, the benefits and the risks converting to S/4HANA. And again, it's a bit of a two or three month project. It might feel like it's a slowdown but actually slowing down to accelerate the overall conversion process is extremely important. The third benefit that this client has seen and unique to them is that we really solved the problem. Right. We had a look at what the impact on the enterprise warehouse management was and we were able to show that the feasibility of that conversion is going to be possible.
And then the fourth one is really starting to get the support from the business stakeholders. Quite often, it's difficult to articulate the value to your business stakeholders. When you say we need to do the conversion from ECC to S/4HANA but because we deploy Fiori, we giving the business this opportunity to play around with the system, to actually see how they would interact with SAP using Fiori and it really is a bit of a game changer. We've lost the grey and blue ugly screens that most of us probably love and have worked with for many, many years but really the way that the Fiori screen and the way that the data is presented to the end user is completely different. Giving them the opportunity to see that product and put their hands on the product is so beneficial in terms of getting that business buy-in.
So, overall you get the better visibility for the cost that you're going to have to undertake, some of the preparation activities that you need to do and some of the risks that you going in, in terms of the conversion process. So we've had a lot of success with this pilot programme and we actually think that by going to the pilot programme, we will significantly reduce the risk of your ECC programme or ECC conversion programme to S/4HANA. So thank you again for joining us today and hope to see you all soon on some more discussions around ECC and S/4HANA. Thank you.
