When converting traditional ERP systems to S/4HANA, it is important for the execution team to be well-versed with business-criticality, system dependencies, and integrations. This understanding can enhance the quality of the  S/4HANA conversion, including SAP RISE or moving to a hyper-scaler cloud platform.

Infosys, with its vast implementation experience in helping organizations successfully modernize to S/4HANA, has put together a list of some key best practices used by its teams to streamline such S/4HANA conversion programs. These insights have enabled:

• Seamless S/4HANA conversion execution
• Smooth cutover with no P1 incidents reported
• Adherence as per the planned business downtime window

Here are some of our business, technical, and SAP-RISE specific recommendations for any S/4 HANA conversion project.

Business recommendations

• Delete unwanted business clients in the system to reduce the remediation effort and administrative overheads. Start this deletion process right from the proof of concept (PoC) or sandbox run stage.
• Check third-party add-on compatibility to the target S/4HANA version and consult with these vendors before beginning the project. Some vendors may need several weeks or months to deliver packages that are compatible with the target S/4HANA version.
• Maintain routine data housekeeping and data archival strategy to reduce the database footprint and keep it lean.
• Check simplification items to ensure there are none with ‘return code => 8’ during the run. Discuss with key business users/stakeholders before making any exceptions.
• Plan for the migration of interface-related business data that may be stored at the OS level. This data must also be migrated from on-premises to Cloud/RISE and needs to be included in the cutover plan.

Technical recommendations

• Consider the expected business downtime when choosing the right S/4HANA conversion approach. With the latest technologies in database migration option (DMO) such as downtime-optimized DMO (DoDMO) and Downtime Optimized Conversion(DoC), technical downtime hours can be reduced to single digit. However, certain pre-requisites must be met. Moreover, the team must apply deep analysis to optimize the database migration process.
• Validate the transport sequence based on development execution run till the mock run, with a focus in identifying sequencing, errors, and dependencies. Such transports may be related to implementing OSS notes, code remediation, SPDD/SPAU etc.,
• Plan to ensure the network latency to below 20 milliseconds .
• Create an inventory of OS scripts that are being deployed in the production system and make a plan to migrate these or find a better alternative solution.
• Update the cutover plan with all the findings and issues faced right from the sandbox phase till the mock run, so they can be addressed in the production system. We recommend that organizations start building the cutover plan starting from the sandbox execution rather than waiting for the mock run to begin.

SAP RISE-specific recommendations

• SAP RISE/ECS post-processing run-time during production cutover usually takes about 14 hours, which may be high for a production cutover. If this does not align with the agreed business downtime window, it needs to be discussed and negotiated during early project phase.
• Snap backups may be planned to save backup execution time. Plan for the point-in-time recovery as a worst case scenario during production cutover in the target system starting from beginning of the SUM execution till end of post S/4HANA conversion steps.

Conclusion

Whether executing S/4HANA conversion (irrespective of on-premise or SAP RISE, or hyper-scaler platform), the above insights and best practices can greatly help organizations accelerate migration while reducing cost, time, and effort during S/4HANA conversion. Reach us at SAP_MKTG@infosys.com for support in implementing these best practices for your transformation projects.