A smooth migration to S/4HANA

For a global manufacturing company we successfully used our data migration service to improve data quality and minimize project risk.  This company currently operates 5 factories in Europe and Asia and holds 11 sales locations throughout the globe.  Like many other companies, they faced the issue of migrating from legacy SAP systems to S/4HANA.

The migration to S/4HANA is a complex procedure, yet one that yields a variety of benefits, ranging from the improved speed of transaction processing and reporting to data model simplification and innovative new features like analytics. Next to that, migration is a perfect opportunity to improve data quality.

Before collaboration with Zenit, the migration had been scheduled for 18 months. Due to the migration methodology of standard migration consultancies, the migration was to be sequentially realized plant by plant and would take a lot of time from project managers and workstream coordinators. So why did they decide to change its plan for such a big project?

Data migrations are usually not the most eagerly anticipated innovation projects. People with experience in data migrations often recall overly complex and stressful projects with little benefit for business. That is the case mostly due to the methodology used by the classic migration companies. The entire process is usually carried out in spreadsheets, which is not suited for data management and transformation. The business and cleaning rules are sequentially applied with obscure formulas. As anyone working with spreadsheets (e.g. Excel) will know, sustainability and audibility of a cascade of inter-related formulas are almost impossible. Handling large datasets or streaming data are suboptimal to say the least and for more intelligent functionalities (e.g. ‘fuzzy match’ deduplication) that can improve data quality, one must move to other tools.

All these factors lead to higher costs, more errors, and stress for the company doing data migration.

At Zenit, we take the data migration from the critical path. After inspecting the project, we planned and realized the migration of the master data in 6 months. The collaboration was smooth thanks to Zenit’s automated, continuous data flow that eliminates manual labor and makes use of reusable cleaning steps.

We believe that the audibility and transparency of the process are key to a successful migration. By visualizing the data flow and providing the automated data runs, we were able to prevent many errors from going into the production environment.

Upon successful migration of the master data, we started with the migration of the transactional data.

Various kinds of data pose different challenges, but the bulk of the process involves the same steps that must be customized on a project basis. Because our data flows are highly automated and learn to utilize the experience obtained in previous projects, we were able to speed up the transactional data migration significantly.

If you would like to know more about our data migration services, feel free to reach out for a demo.