S/4HANA is a hot topic these days with SAP’s 2027 deadline on the horizon. If your company hasn’t gone live already, then you are most likely considering what approach to adopt for your S/4 journey.
A mistake many organizations make is that they assume S/4HANA is a straight replacement for ECC 6.0.
Yes, there are common functional capabilities between the two products.
However, moving to SAP’s newest ERP system involves significant changes to functionality and business processes.
Whatever method you choose Greenfield, Brownfield, Bluefield or whether you decide to run the system on-premise or in the Cloud, there are architectural considerations that you have to take into account.
Our customers mostly choose either a Brownfield or Bluefield approach for a phased migration to S/4HANA.
Adopting a phased transition rather than a ‘big bang’ approach enables organizations to run business as usual during the migration.
In this scenario, successfully managing the parallel development of SAP changes is crucial.
Manage parallel development to speed up your S/4HANA transition
Managing dual streams can be challenging. SAP IT teams need to consider many factors besides change and release challenges.
- Identify ECC changes, which are candidates for re-application into the new system and vice versa.
- Spreadsheets are traditionally used to drive SAP change management. However, these mostly manual processes are inefficient and risky, particularly in complex SAP environments with more than one system and different platforms.
- Manage SAP change transports through parallel environments.
- Now, you have identified the magnitude of changes to be transitioned. The next step is to manage parallel development while maintaining system stability.
- Again, manual effort can be fraught with danger. Remember, we are not only moving the SAP change within a single environment. Another SAP landscape is added to the mix, further complicating the task.
- Identify, protect and maintain templates which your ECC and S/4HANA systems may use.
- Addressing this critical but often forgotten task is essential. It eliminates SAP teams making changes to a critical configuration in each environment.
How Rev-Trac helps your S/4HANA journey
Automation is key to successfully managing parallel development and avoiding unscheduled system shutdown.
Eliminating error-prone manual tasks helps SAP IT teams to easily keep legacy ECC systems and the new S/4HANA platform updated and in sync during the transition.
Rev-Trac 8.1 Platinum – An automated SAP change management solution – provides the automation, control and governance required to transport properly tested changes to production while the new system is created.
It identifies changes deployed in your legacy environment and ensures their consideration for application to the S/4HANA system.
Once you are on S/4HANA, Rev-Trac can help to meet your audit and governance requirements for minimal cost and support SAP DevOps initiatives.
The SAP change automation tool even ensures BAU changes arrive at their destination in order and without risk to systems.
For more information about parallel development and your S/4HANA transition, visit or request a demo with one of our change management experts.
