Migrating a global technology company to S/4HANA using Selective Data Transition (SDT)

"We got involved with that client because they were looking at bringing only certain parts of their business into S/4HANA first. So their approach was a function-by-function migration to S/4HANA, if you like, where you're looking at Central Finance and related functions first, connecting those to a series of ERP environments globally that will eventually move to S/4HANA. And what this company realised was that they had a lot of businesses created for group. There is an SAP environment. Only some of those businesses were still active or needed to move to S/4HANA. So there's already a selective element to the data they had to transfer that was quite significant.

They also wanted to benefit from the innovation in the process. For example, transactional analytics using Fiori, using new capabilities in treasury management, using the power of S/4HANA Central Finance to also simplify and standardise their finance processes.

And this meant a lot of changes to the data. So we had to bring in the data and put a new general ledger key structure, merge controlling areas, change currencies on companies, and even bring in group and global level currencies, which don't exist in the ECC world, but do in the S/4HANA world.

While they migrate from the current SAP systems into the new S4 system, they want to bring the data and the processes from the legacy also towards S/4, of course, in a transformed way, to make sure that they can take business advantage of it. That Brownfield+ approach requires a very tailored data migration and, you know, data cleansing approach, where EPI-USE Labs comes into the picture.

So by designing the changes on the data to meet the needs of the S/4HANA target system, they were able to both be selective in their approach to data for the S/4HANA project, but also achieve their goals of transforming the business from day one on S4, which without a data company, they wouldn't have been able to do.

I see the benefit of, you know, our combined go-to-market by bringing this proposition early on to our customers, which will result in, you know, having then a right-first-time solution approach and make sure that their transformation objectives are met at the end of such a programme.

And that was very successful, primarily due to the collaboration that we had together with EPI-USE Labs with the client on clearly defining the business ambition and then working relentlessly towards achieving those ambition as part of the project.

There's a larger, much larger number of clients with an awful lot of history and data accumulated over the years, where any change to the target system affects the data migration.

So if it's not selective, you have a lot of problems to fix. If it's not transformative, you can't change the business on the target environment. So by bringing in a data company, you remove that problem and can focus on building the S/4 environment you want."