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Are you “Fit” for S/4 HANA?Impact Assessments to help companies understand the process, functionality and technical impact of migrating to or implementing S/4 HANA sqs.com

The Challenge The Benefits

SAP Business Suite 4 SAP Hana (S/4 HANA) is SAP’s fourth-generation ERP business application, a fully optimised, in-memory computing platform. Before CxOs and ERP leaders can exploit the S/4 HANA functionality, resulting in significant business benefits, a great deal has to happen. In particular, CxOs and ERP leaders have to:

• Identify if and how S/4 HANA fits their ERP strategy, and update their strategy accordingly

• Evaluate the business impacts and benefits of S/4 HANA, and build these into a convincing business case

• Identify transformation strategy of their current SAP solution landscape including customisation into the S/4 HANA

• Update their application integration strategy

• Select expert consulting service providers

• Secure the necessary internal business and IT resources

• Build an implementation plan and deployment timeline

There are many technical changes in S/4 HANA that will impact the business, particularly around business processes and functionality (standard and customer specific). SQS can provide you an Impact Assessment, which supports both business and IT decisions. Get clarity on the technical and functional impact of migration:

• What’s configured and customised in your current SAP landscape

• Identify all 3rd party systems that interface with SAP in your E2E IT landscape

• Gain a detailed perspective on the critical business processes which are affected to avoid business disruptions during or after migration

• Defined guidelines on what should be included in your enduring assurance solution

• Manage expectations from your system integrator(s) for the actual migration through our assessment report

Gartner have estimated that by 2020 – 35 % of all users would be live on S/4 HANA, with transformation and implementation plans ranging from 18 months to 5 years in length. In many organisations business cases are still being put together or planned. The strength of any business case would indeed benefit from a strong business and IT impact assessment.

Know your fitness level

1 SQS provides an in-depth impact assessment

Get in perfect shape

2 SQS enables business transformation 3 SQS ensures post

migration maintenance and continuous quality

Maintain your fitness

Fit for Now Fit for HANA Fit for the Future

What was the problem?

Having not applied regular updates to their SAP systems (SAP ECC, CRM, ISU, BI, PI etc.) for many releases over more than a year, the organisation had reached a stage where all planned change had to be halted until this requirement had been resolved. The changes were technical in nature and unspecific in functionality and therefore left the business with the uncertainty of applying changes to their systems with no view on how much assurance to apply and where to apply it.

What were the outcomes?

The programme responsible for the delivery was able to go live with the changes, confident in the readiness of their systems. The business confidence levels were higher, further adding to the confidence and smoothness of the implementation. The business are now able to progress their wider objectives from these necessary foundations. In addition the exercise allowed for assets and insights to be created which will continue to add value to the accuracy, cost and efficiency of future change development.

How did we do it?

SQS enabled the delivery of these enhancement upgrades through a risk-based strategy which assessed end-to-end business processes spanning the whole of their operations. SQS worked with their business teams to assess and prioritise their processes and with their IT teams to assess the associated system components. Having established the required levels of testing, SQS managed the delivery of that testing to ensure the outcomes were achieved on schedule and to plan.

What was the problem?

The customer, a US bank, is using SAP ECC 6 to manage the financials using modules like GL, AP, AR, AM, Planning & Budgeting and Profitability Analysis. It is also integrated with several core banking & other applications. The business as well as IT teams managing this solution are aware of the benefits of using the S/4 HANA Simple Finance solution, but are unsure of what needs to be done technically and functionally to migrate, which functionality (standard and customised) & interfaces will be impacted and how such a critical migra-tion can be quality assured. Testing for previous upgrades was done in a less organised way and test case formats were in several basic forms.

What were the outcomes?

The Impact Assessment resulted in SQS producing a detailed report on functional business processes & inter- faces would be affected directly or indirectly. Certain customer specific programs are obsolete in the new S/4 HANA Finance solution but the business wanted to retain them. Certain new features in S/4 HANA Finance were added for better business use. Along with the report SQS also de-livered a list of end-to-end business process scenarios that would be developed & used for comprehensive regression testing post migration ensuring high business assurance.

How did we do it?

SQS is a strategic partner to SAP and has access to S/4 HANA, simplification lists and best practices. This helped in identifying all possible processes that could be impacted. The SQS framework tool assisted in performing the comparison of the customer’s source configuration, customisation and interfaces. We identified all possible end-to-end scenarios which would be useful in ensuring the migration was successfully tested and quality assured.

An energy supplier asked SQS to shape their assurance approach for a substantial SAP landscape upgrade

A leading bank sought help from SQS to perform an Impact Assessment for its SAP ECC migration to S/4 HANA (Finance)

Transforming the World Through Quality

The Solution

SQS’ highly experienced business analysis team will deliver this impact assessment, highlighting potential change, in addition to the impact on both your business and IT users.

An Impact Assessment should be an integral part of the business case for any S/4 HANA upgrade programme.

For the business we provide insight that will enable decision makers and stakeholders to see the overall risk to the business, in addition to the impact on business growth and stability. It can include:

• The impact on critical functionality & business processes change to align with new functionality

• The impact on upgrade/migration timing to the business and opportunity loss

• A detailed perspective of the critical business processes affected by the migration, that may cause business disruptions

For IT teams we will review the SAP & IT landscape for customisation and migration scope, it can include:

• The impact of moving custom code from your current SAP landscape to S/4 HANA

• The interfaces with 3rd party systems that may cause data breakdown in your end-to-end IT landscape

• Regression testing pack reviews to enable maximum test coverage before, during and post migration

Are you struggling to balance the early adoption risks against the potential benefits of S/4 HANA due to the rapidly evolving scope of the solution?

For further information, or if you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to send us an e-mail: info@sqs.com

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“ 76 % of the world’s transactions run through SAP… The next 5–10 years will be more disruptive than the ones we have just lived through.”Bill McDermott, CEO, SAP