Simplify and speed up your migration to S/4HANA
SAP is one of the most popular ERP solutions till date. Organizations migrating from their existing ERPs to S/4HANA face several challenges. While the ideal time for migration is 12–18 months, in reality, the timelines extend way beyond.
Embracing test automation enables teams to ensure higher quality applications during migration and speed up the process. The improved confidence and enhanced productivity of teams help businesses become more agile.
This ebook discusses the step-by-step process to achieve this.
The Most Talked About ERP Solution: S/4HANA
SAP has emerged as one of the significant and most talked about Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions to companies focused on digitally transforming their operations across departments. And SAP S/4HANA is by far one of the most popular intelligent ERP solutions out there.
The business benefits SAP S/4HANA brings are notable, which is why many enterprises are working towards migrating their existing ERPs to S/4HANA.
How does SAP migration benefit you
With SAP setting the year 2025 as the deadline for businesses to migrate ‘from existing SAP ECC versions’ to SAP S/4HANA, it is more prominent than ever to now focus on a swift and smooth migration.
According to SAP, moving from traditional SAP systems to SAP S/4HANA should take between 12 and 18 months. However, research from Gartner suggests that companies that have already started the migration process have reported a longer time. Therefore, 2025 is an achievable deadline, only if you start your migration journey today¹.
Let’s take a look at the benefits this migration will bring to you.
Improved Performance
S/4HANA offers decision-makers an easy way to track real-time reports and analytics, allowing business managers to plan, execute and track critical projects more reliably. Access to project planning and reporting tools helps improve processes and gain higher operational efficiencies.
Increased Agility
Processing large amounts of data in real-time has become essential for decision-makers who wish to stay informed and act on business-critical insights quickly. Company-wide deployment of an ERP Solution like S/4HANA offers improved visibility of key metrics to aid decision-making on the go.
If there is one word that rightly defines the experience of using S/4HANA, it is simplicity. With an end user interface completely driven by SAP Fiori, which offers a simplified user experience and high-quality, teams get acquainted with the changes easily.
Reduced Expenditure
A single instantiation of the SAP S/4HANA database platform can significantly reduce your expenses. It streamlines hardware usage, helps you cut down resources and time spent on operations, and saves storage costs. Due to data being collected in a single repository, the time taken to perform routine analytical and transactional tasks also gets reduced.
Besides, S/4HANA cloud gives you the flexibility of a SaaS subscription, so you can pay as you go and only implement the modules you need. S/4HANA can be deployed on-premise or on-cloud, with various choices offered by industry leaders such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud. The convenience of choosing a private cloud hosting service further helps you rule out your dependency on expensive, in-house infrastructure, which has become a thing of the past.
What are the challenges in migrating to S/4HANA
The migration journey to S/4 HANA is not simple, as it demands collaboration between different stakeholders and seamless integration of diverse custom-built business processes that suit your organizational needs. What makes a successful transition even more challenging is that every line of business using SAP would have its unique requirements. Therefore, it is essential to create a robust transformation plan, considering the reengineering of several business processes for smooth system migration.
Accounting for each step of the user journey, and creating and evaluating 1000s of test cases for every business scenario that exists, can go a long way in making your migration less disruptive and stressful. Partnering with domain experts while migrating to S/4HANA can ease bottlenecks. And where there can be challenges along the way, here are some ways to embrace the power of automation to simplify your journey.
Owing to the challenges, an ASUG research shows that a major chunk (56%) of organizations are still in the process of planning the migration while only 16% have already migrated to S/4HANA.
How to Embrace automation for a smoother S/4HANA Migration
1. Evaluate and document existing processes
One of the vital steps for businesses considering a transition to S/4HANA is creating thorough documentation around existing processes before migration. According to Gartner, 80% of the companies still depend on manual process documentation. However, manual documentation requires time and money. Not to mention is the effort needed in reworks owing to manual errors.
Using automation capabilities for process discovery helps you quickly capture, document, modify, and prioritize end-to-end business processes. With a smart and no code process discovery solution like Avo Discover, you can instantly document processes with a few clicks of buttons within any application across diverse business processes. You can also stitch together individual tasks into end-to-end processes. What took days and weeks can now be done within a few hours or even minutes. It also rules out the manual errors and reworks, saving effort – ultimately helping your team stay on track.
You can utilize the documented processes to identify the most common and critical processes. This further enables your team to manually build a roadmap of which business processes need to be transitioned first.
2. Implement automated testing
Quality assuring S/4HANA functionality minimizes business disruptions. However, given that most of the QA process in organizations is still manual, it takes weeks or months to ensure your applications are migration-ready. What follows are delays, defects, and rework. Embracing test automation saves you from all these. Here’s how
a. No-code test automation enables teams to focus on delivering higher quality
A no-code test automation solution like Avo Assure enables you to test applications without writing a single line of code. This reduces the burden of creating test scripts on the QA teams, allowing them to focus only on delivering high-quality applications during migration.
b. Heterogenous test automation gives confidence
Since Avo Assure works seamlessly across heterogeneous applications, it helps you cover the entire expanse of end-to-end business processes. You can build and execute test cases for web, windows, mobile platforms (Android and IOS), non-UI (web services, batch jobs), ERPs, Mainframe systems, and associated emulators through a single solution. Thus, giving you the confidence that the functionalities work smoothly across the business even after migration.
c. Test case reusability saves effort and time
Have you imagined the amount of effort you could save if you could reuse your test cases? Avo Assure helps you reuse existing test constructs to build new individual scenarios, or end-to-end business process flows. This is done through a unique extension called Mindmaps. The mindmaps enable you to visualize your entire test plan and stitch one or more test scenarios with easy drag and drop ability.
d. Higher quality reduces cost
With test automation, you can test the migration with agility and accuracy. It reduces cost since you do twice as much with lesser efforts and time without disrupting existing workflows within your organization. You also save the cost involved in bug-fixing and the business interruptions that come along with it.
Why Avo?
Avo Automation empowers the largest Fortune 500 companies with its technology agnostic and no-code automation solutions – Avo Discover and Avo Assure.
With Avo Discover, you can quickly capture, document, modify, and prioritize end-to-end business processes. Avo Assure enables you to automatically create and deploy test cases faster, at no additional cost, without writing a single line of code. Being cross-platform compatible and intuitive, it enables continuous testing and makes SAP upgrades and migrations easier. The best thing – they work in unison or individually to help you get the most out of your applications.
With us, our customers have achieved significant business benefits. You too can:
- Expand test automation coverage up to 90% by executing end-to-end SAP and non-SAP applications repeatedly.
- Accelerate SAP releases 85% faster than manual testing.
- Achieve over 40% cost savings and increaset employee capacity for innovation.
- Be 2x more productive.
- Leverage 100’s of pre-built test cases specific to SAP and reduce testing time by over
- 75% with the SAP Test accelerator.
- Save more than 30% of SAP automation effort with uber-cool features like accessibility testing, intelligent reporting, smart scheduling and execution, advanced dashboard, and more.
We are SAP Certified for Integrations with S/4HANA and SAP NetWeaver. Scan the QR code in the logo below to see us on the SAP Store.
References
https://ecosio.com/en/blog/migration-to-sap-s4hana-5-key-considerations/
https://blog.asug.com/hubfs/ASUG84466%20-%20SAP%20S4HANA%20High-Level%20Insights%20from%20ASUG.pdf
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