How to accelerate your journey to SAP S/4HANA with IBM Rapid Move

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Mainstream maintenance for SAP ERP 6.0 will end on December 31, 2025.[1] The clock is ticking for businesses to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA. But how can they make the move without incurring huge costs or business disruption?

AI-ready, cloud-native and driven by powerful in-memory computing, SAP S/4HANA offers businesses a comprehensive solution for supporting enterprise-wide digital transformation. But some organizations may be putting off the move to the next-generation platform because they fear that upgrading will be too expensive or disruptive.

In this article, we’ll demystify these misplaced assumptions and explain how you really can move to SAP S/4HANA quickly, cost-effectively and while reaping significant rewards.

Challenging established perceptions

In 2015, when SAP S/4HANA was first released, there were two prevailing approaches to implementation: greenfield and brownfield. Greenfield implementations involve an organization completely reengineering their entire SAP processes and workflows. While this approach helps organizations ensure that every aspect of their SAP estate is perfectly optimized, it can be complex, time-consuming and expensive.

For many organizations, the greenfield approach is excessive in its scope. In these instances, companies usually go for a brownfield approach to SAP conversion, transitioning existing data, processes and customizations into the new SAP S/4HANA platform and completing a technical conversion.

Brownfield conversions are quicker and less disruptive; however, they also provide limited opportunities for process improvements. Lifting and shifting data preserves inefficiencies in legacy processes, and existing code may not be compatible with AI and machine learning use cases supported by SAP S/4HANA. While the brownfield approach reduces the upfront cost and disruption of converting to SAP S/4HANA, it can limit future innovation and, ultimately, hold companies back from harnessing the full potential of the solution.

In boardrooms and technology offices around the world, greenfield implementations and brownfield conversions are often discussed as mutually exclusive options. But, due to advances in cloud computing and automation, this isn’t the case anymore. You can have the best of both worlds with a software-accelerated selective transformation, also known as a “hybrid migration” or a “Selective Data Transformation.”

Transformation-driven upgrades

With a hybrid migration, all of the data is stripped out of legacy SAP ECC and SAP ERP environments and a new modularized SAP S/4HANA instance is built around a company’s existing data and processes. Organizations retain all their base code, configurations, and authorizations, but they can also rework complex code and target specific processes for redesign.

Any enhancements are carried out following SAP’s “clean core” principles, whereby modifications and customizations are built adjacent to their SAP S/4HANA core—supporting cloud compliance, optimizing data quality and simplifying the governance of redesigned processes.

Through IBM Rapid Move for SAP S/4HANA, business leaders can enable a hybrid migration approach with purpose-built software to leverage existing SAP investments and move to SAP S/4HANA in one easy step. They can use the built-in automation to configure the new SAP instance, remediate code issues and check data accuracy and consistency.

With the IBM approach businesses can also tailor process standardization to their needs and enjoy the consistency of a familiar ERP environment while still benefiting from the latest features. IBM Rapid Move can also cut deployment times compared to brownfield and greenfield methodologies. Some data migrations can even be completed over a couple of days—dramatically reducing disruption to business-as-usual activities.

Supporting seamless change management

One of the many advantages of the hybrid migration approach is that companies only need to change a subset of processes for compatibility reasons. In turn, this reduces the scale of change management activities required to support user adoption significantly—reducing  the cost and resources required for training and user support. Moreover, the approach enables leaders to show their people how a system upgrade will benefit them on a daily basis to make them more likely to support the change.

IBM has already helped many companies successfully upgrade to SAP S/4HANA with IBM Rapid Move. For instance, we enabled one leading European bank to move from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA with near zero downtime. In addition to streamlining the bank’s cloud-first digital transformation program, IBM Rapid Move also helped the company to reduce maintenance activities and lower its total cost of ownership.

Similarly, we helped a world-leading international airline implement SAP S/4HANA in a private cloud environment with IBM Rapid Move. Using this solution, we were able to enhance efficiency, ensure best practice and prepare for the closure of its physical data center. As a result, the company is now ready to consolidate all of its applications in a cloud environment and take major steps towards enhancing its profitability analysis activities.

These are just two examples of how IBM Rapid Move can make the transfer to SAP S/4 HANA much smoother. Click here to find out more about IBM Rapid Move.

[1] This will impact customers using SAP ERP 6.0 EHP1-5