Category: Common

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SAP S/4 Transitions — acceleration of SAP Business Technology Platform activities

With the flood of SAP projects hitting the SAP system integrator community (see other article), S/4 transitions are facing risks beyond the standard list we encounter in any S/4 implementation. SAP resource shortages could lead to unanticipated project extensions. Project extensions in turn lead to deferred benefit realization and additional implementation cost, and in this case, additional maintenance cost for not hitting SAP’s 2027 deadline.

An environment such as this forces us to think about mechanisms to derisk projects by accelerating no-regrets activities and see resource availability as ‘a’, if not ‘the’ critical success factor.

One opportunity is the acceleration of technical content migration and creation.

Technical work is usual seen as supplemental to the functional work of an implementation, and therefore successive to a business blueprint. In contrast to a net new implementation, a substantial amount of the technical work of a transition from ECC to S/4 is the migration of existing logic into a new IT paradigm.

In analyzing past and present S/4 projects, we determined that each project contains approximately 35% of technical tasks. Further analysis determined that 65% of those technical tasks could be executed ahead of the S/4 transition. This number contains activities such as the migration of ABAP Add-on’s into a side-by-side model, moving integration scenarios to the Cloud and providing insights to decision makers by developing Analytics Cloud and Data Warehouse Cloud-based dashboards.

Sample resource demand for SAP S/4 migration.

The activities must be triaged to determine a ‘no-regrets’ status.

  • Technical objects supporting a static business process receive the status right away.
  • Objects related to an improving business process are evaluated to determine if the technical objects stay consistent across envisioned business process changes or can be developed in a way that can accommodate the envisioned improvements
  • All other objects should be evaluated to see what prerequisites exists to assign them a ‘no-regrets’ status.

If the S/4 transition is taking place soon, the simplest way to structure the segmentation is by pulling the movable BTP tasks forward into a ‘Phase zero — BTP work’ whose end coincides with the start of the S/4 transition program.

In case the S/4 transition is not scheduled for a few years, you can create a program to move the component as outlined above with one adjustment. The components you move out of ECC are replacing existing non-BTP component and reduce the necessary transition work that would occur during the S/4 transition timeline.

Sample resource demand for SAP S/4 migration after acceleration of BTP activities.

The benefits are plenty:

  • SAP’s Business Technology Platform is gradually introduced into the organization to get developers and operators comfortable with it
  • Technical challenges are less likely to impact the critical path of the overall implementation, thus derisking the project and with it the benefit realization timeline
  • Higher likelihood of achieving the planned go live prevents paying incremental maintenance fee or worst-case working in an unsupported system
  • Reducing the BTP resource demand in the high demand/high-cost phase we are expecting in the coming years
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The impact of 2027 on SAP customers

For all of us that are working in the SAP ecosystem, December 31st, 2027, is the date that will drive us and our industry for the next years.

SAP is committed to provide mainstream maintenance for Business Suite 7 — the release that a lot of our customers are still using — until the end of 2027. Companies have the option to buy a maintenance extension until 2030 for an incremental 2% in maintenance fees. The prior 2025 support deadline was pushed to 2027 after customers requested more time to move to the new release in 2020 making it unlikely that the 2027 deadline will be moved yet again.

When assessing the current installed base of Business Suite 7, Gartner estimates that 70 percent of Business Suite 7/ECC customers have yet to migrate to S/4 HANA, but SAP S/4 HANA sales are growing at record levels based on SAP latest financial results and comments from SAP CEO, Christian Klein.

Combining these factors, we will see a wave of Business Suite 7 to S/4 migrations hitting the SAP System Integrator community in the next few years. We always knew it was coming, but the pandemic took 2 years out of our planning cycles.

Projected SAP resource demand over the next 10 years

So, here we are at t-5 years with countless customers that have yet to make the move. For IT practitioners, 5 years sounds like a long time, but everyone who has been working on large enterprise initiatives knows: you must create a business case, allocate funding, work with SAP on a license agreement, select an implementation partner, perform the implementation itself, roll it out and ultimately drive adoption of the solution to collect the business benefits you originally committed to in the business case.

If you are a small organization and don’t mind big bang rollouts you might be able to execute this in a year, but for most enterprises we work with, you easily look at an average 2–3-year timeline for transforming from ECC to S/4.

Working in the SAP implementation space, we are equipped to handle a steady stream of SAP projects, ranging from small add-ons to large implementations. We are also equipped to handle ebbs and flows in demand, but the wave we see coming is more analogous to a Tsunami hitting us on all fronts. Business process experts need to re-assess what improvements and benefits S/4 implementations can bring, functional experts need to configure S/4 and various technical teams must migrate interfaces, extensions and any other customer-specific content into the new Cloud-based paradigm.

For SAP customers that means you should start the journey as soon as possible, build your business case, estimate your implementation duration and certainly find and lock in your implementation partner as resources will get sparse and potentially more expensive as demand will undoubtedly outpace supply. Depending on your estimated implementation duration, you might have an alternative to delay the implementation and use the option of paying a premium to SAP. Most companies will likely want to use the 2027–30 timeline as a contingency, though.

To make the S/4 business case more attractive, the industry is continuously working on improving both factors (benefits and cost) of the equation.

New SAP applications and technologies open additional areas of benefit realization, but our teams, as well as our customers, must be equipped to see the potential, implement the changes in the system, processes and most important of all, take their people on the journey to increased efficiency.

Compared to the standard, consultative approach used in the past, cost reductions in the implementation effort can be achieved by standardizing and harmonizing business processes while following and utilizing best practices.

In the SAP implementation space, we are working hard to add capacity and ensure our implementation resources are trained up and ready for the hard work and long hours.

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How do we get people to move?

It has been a year and a half now of me coding again. I can honestly say it has been a steep learning curve, but fun and exhilarating.

The question that haunts me when I have 10 minutes to think about all the things I have learned is: “How do we get all the people like me to move?”.

I have a fairly unique position in that it is my job to dig into new paradigms, approaches and languages. But there is a whole SAP industry out there whose job it was and is to write RICEF’s (Reports, Interfaces, Conversions, Enhancement and Forms). They are busy 40 hours a week of delivering on projects and have very little time to catch up on new functionality. The most they learn is the 6 new commands that were added to ABAP.

That whole community, the thousands of them, might struggle to make the jump without a major re-education of certain concepts such as:

  • Storage of code in a repository that is not internal to SAP
  • CI/CD – Continuous Integration and Delivery
  • Cloud approaches such as Blue Green Deployments
  • Containerization
  • … and others

I don’t have the answer, but it is a question that keeps me thinking.

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The summer is here

It has been a while since I posted last. As the world has gone crazy, I was locked up at home with the family and kept working.

The good news is I have made a lot of progress on various subjects.

I finally get used to the asynchronous JavaScript execution model and how to use Promises.

The SAP Cloud Platform is not a mystery anymore but building and deploying cloud applications is routine.

SAP in general has had their shareholder meeting and made the press on several subjects. I believe that SAP made the correct decision over the last few years in acquiring the Cloud companies they have. I also believe that it is time now to clean up the lack of commonality and integration. If anything I fear that the integration and the cleanup will not reach deep enough.

Over the next few weeks I will dive into the individual services and topics and outline what I found.

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The journey back into the fray

After a long absence from hands on programming and configuring systems and solutions, my current job allows or even requires me to get back into fray.

There are several things I want to dive into starting from machine learning to augmented reality and IoT, but it becomes obvious immediately that my background in HTML, JavaScript, SQL, Java, and Visual Basic is a start, but everything today is Cloud based, requires JavaScript and Python and without understanding HTTP better than basic POST and GET in my days in connection with OAuth and SAML I will not make it very far.

So let the journey begin…