In the first part of our blog series, we looked at the differences between Public and Private Cloud ERP offerings and explored how the various SAP Private Cloud offerings compare.
In Part 2, we explore managing change in Cloud ERP, particularly during the transition period between existing on-premises systems and the Cloud destination.
Most large enterprises will land on some version of Private Cloud ERP. The most common reasons why relate to the size and complexity of migration projects for these firms:
- There are often more than just one or two landscapes to migrate
- There’s often significant customization that cannot be abandoned just yet
- A purely Greenfield implementation of Public Cloud on a perfectly clean core, while perhaps the ultimate goal, is impractical as a first step
Going to a Private Cloud, however, creates some challenges.
Do you have a place where I could change?
Do you have significant existing customizations? Do you have significant external integrations, especially to other on-premises systems?
Most migrations take months or even years. During that time, business doesn’t stop and neither does SAP change. So, outside of a system-wide change freeze for the duration of the project, changes in the Production business system (ECC) during the project will need to migrate to the new system (S/4HANA) before go-live to prevent functional regressions.
This is a common change management challenge in complex SAP environments. New releases, upgrades and migration projects often require more time than is acceptable for a change freeze to production. So, there will be ongoing business support in parallel with the project. If regular business support changes are not properly integrated into the project systems, regression errors will be re-introduced at cutover.
A good change management solution automates much of this effort, seamlessly moving change between existing Production and project landscapes and managing traceability and compliance requirements of change when transformation or redevelopment is required. Complex SAP customers are likely to require change management across multiple landscapes operating in on-premises and Cloud environments concurrently, so ensure your approach is capable of this requirement.
ABAP code from ECC systems is often compatible or easily modified, therefore transportable between ECC and Cloud ERP with capable change management tooling. Some changes will require more complex transformation from ECC to S/4HANA, or even redevelopment from core ABAP to BTP solutions.
In either case, traceability becomes the primary concern. It is crucial to properly document and track each change to existing business systems and ensure that the appropriate migration, transformation, and deployment steps are performed for the new system during the migration project.
If your SAP estate is more than a couple of landscapes, or you are managing a significant amount of custom code and remediation, ensure you have a change management automation solution in place that’s compatible across legacy and Cloud ERP. Manual change management in a complex project is asking for a change-related outage – don’t do it.
Change management is critical
With the right change solution in place, it’s now time to get moving and start migrating. Change management plays a key role in any complex ERP migration project, and the best automation solutions solve for the ongoing management and final delivery, too:
- Identify and manage all customization and migration
- Move build components between Development, QA, and staging systems during the project
- Stage, order, and orchestrate import changes into pre-Production and ultimately Production environments, ensuring correct import order, object versions, and dependencies
- Deliver change to existing and new systems concurrently, supporting any mix of BTP, S/4HANA, and ECC at the same time from a single viewpoint
- Manage incompatible change with traceability, ensuring customizations are developed in the target platform consistent with the functionality of existing customizations
- Ensure any changes in existing business systems during the project are properly retrofitted to the new system before go-live, preventing functionality regressions
Forecast: Clouds?
What happens if you don’t take this seriously? The biggest risk is making a mistake – the wrong code, old versions, functionality loss in the new system, compliance issues and even defects or outages. Even with perfect execution, managing such a large volume of change across multiple systems is time consuming and inefficient – automation will pay for itself.
The typical migration involves thousands of changes and transport handling events. Microsoft Excel does many amazing things well, but automating SAP change isn’t one of them. It is easy to get retrofit and project landscape management wrong when managing complex change and large SAP estates. So, take this aspect of your project seriously.
The calm before hybrid landscapes
In Part 3, we will examine the challenges and requirements of successfully managing change across hybrid landscapes, which is exactly what you will have during the migration project from today’s on-premises ECC to tomorrow’s Cloud ERP. It won’t surprise you to learn there are gaps in standard tooling. Stay tuned.
