In case you missed it on our events calendar SAP are now running a 5 part webinar series on how to transition to S/4HANA. After attending the first two of these webinars, I have to say that I am positively surprised, by the structured approach and the clear, straightforward messages delivered by Gerd Danner from SAP, the principal presenter and his team of supporting presenters. Of course, there is a strong emphasis on SAP’s preferred tools to help and accelerate these transitions, but if you look beyond the SAP partner labels, I think you will find that it all makes sense and provides some really useful, advice, tips and practices to help you plan and execute your S/4 HANA move.

The first webinar introduces us to the six-stage concept that SAP are using to define S/4 HANA transitions. These are:
1.    The data transformation journey
2.    From costly customisations to future-proof extensions
3.    Optimising your business processes
4.    Optimising your application lifecycle and landscape management
5.    Integrating S/4 into your legacy estate and cloud line of business solutions
6.    Modernising data warehousing to help reinvent your business

The second webinar goes deeper into data migration, which SAP users in North America voted as the highest risk associated with an S/4 HANA transition, which should not be a surprise for the vast majority of our members. A speaker from Syniti (previously known as BackOffice), presents a useful, eight essential steps, approach for efficient migrations, which is the basis for their SAP Advanced Data Migration platform and tool. This tool can be used to accelerate and seriously improve the quality of your data migrations. I have personally had some experience of BackOffice from my time in GE and I can vouch that it is a very good tool though you should check out the price especially if you are working under strict budgetary, constraints. A key message from both SAP and Syniti is that data is not a one off exercise but requires ongoing data governance. The reality of this is undisputable and provides SAP with an opportunity to highlight their Master Data Governance tool.

Anyway, despite the commercial advertising for certain key, add-on products, the webinar series so far seems to be helpful, reasonably incisive and a good investment of time for member companies looking to transition to S/4 HANA. The series continues until the end of October and, if you have missed a webinar, they are available as on demand recordings.

Finally, for those of you interested in S/4HANA and the move to S/4HANA, please do not forget our SBN Conference on October 23rd/24th where we have a number of really high quality presentations on S/4 HANA. Here is a link to the main conference page and do not forget it’s still not too late to register!

Register for the SBN Conference 2019!