“It’s no longer a question of whether to migrate but rather when to migrate to SAP S/4HANA”

-Frank Densborn, Senior Director for Cloud Transformation

Whether your change management process includes staying on-premise, moving to the cloud, or consolidating multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP), one thing is clear, transitioning to SAP S/4HANA is inevitable if you want your business to gain greater speed and agility, better drive innovation, scale quickly and thrive in an ever-changing digital environment.

Transitioning to SAP S/4HANA provides numerous benefits:

• efficiently manage current and future data transformation
• simplifying process and improving efficiencies by enabling the centralizing of hardware and network resources
• ability to harness a single view of your business’ analytical and transactional capabilities for a better decision-making process
• over-all improved performance and speed

It’s true though that migrating to S/4HANA is not a simple upgrade. Managing parallel SAP environments is crucial. Ensuring your organization runs without interruption during the S/4HANA migration and after go-live is front-and-center of organizations’ concerns.

This is where most organizations get stuck—the complexity of starting the SAP change management process. For most medium to large enterprises this process normally includes the following steps:

• Track 12 months’ worth of custom code and SAP standard code to see the extent of the transition effort required with SCMON/SUSG or UPL.
• Find out what code to keep and what to discard.
• Verify transitioning code for compatibility.
• Resolve incompatible custom code.
• Fine-tune compatible code performance.

However, relying on mostly manual processes to manage dual SAP environments can result in overblown budgets and project delays. The ability to successfully manage SAP change across your landscape is crucial. Automation and working with the right partner is therefore key for a successful and rapid S/4HANA migration.

How then do you select the right automated SAP change management tool and partner? Here are some factors to consider according to Rev-Trac:

First, keep in mind that SAP change processes have to be consistent and managed proactively. Find a partner that can align their development and configuration resources to your organization’s change control requirements.

Second, make sure that your selected partner has an automated record-keeping system to document all technical and functional changes to your SAP systems, and that critical compliance regulations are adhered to.

Third, the right partner must be able to incorporate functionalities specifically developed to ensure that SAP changes made in the primary landscape will be re-applied if relevant to the new landscape—working with a partner that can overcome the unique challenge of managing complex dual SAP environments is crucial.

Fourth, your SAP change management tool must be able to control and align SAP changes across multiple phased environments to avoid conflict and sequencing issues.

Finally, avoid sequencing and dependency errors by choosing a partner that can ensure your business’ requirements are consistently adhered to.

With SAP S/4HANA migration, automation is critical to ensuring your organization’s significant volumes of code are managed efficiently and that the change management process is streamlined and accelerated.

Several Rev-Trac customers have simplified and managed the process with the automated change management platform, Rev-Trac Platinum. Additionally SAP IT teams can quickly support business objectives while maintaining production system stability with the newly launched Rev-Trac ONE.

Find out more

Download this comprehensive whitepaper – Managing an S/4HANA migration with Rev-Trac – to discover:

• Why automating your SAP change management processes is crucial
• How Rev-Trac Platinum can help you to successfully manage dual SAP environments
• What key Rev-Trac Platinum features help to minimize unscheduled downtime

This article is sponsored by RSC Group

The post The Steps to a Successful SAP S/4HANA Change Management Process appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Businesses around the world are facing unprecedented levels of disruption and change spurred by globalisation, increasing business complexity, and the so-called digital economy. Tectonic shifts in the geo-political environment and the uncertainty in its wake are having a profound impact on consumer and business behaviour. How can businesses improve their decision-making and hold a steady course when everything is in a constant state of flux?

FSN’s 2016 The Future of the Finance Function Survey, sponsored by BlackLine, shines a light on how companies can make better decisions and improve responsiveness to market change while trading conditions are in constant turmoil.

The report finds that process standardisation is the starting point. Fully standardised organisations spend less time on transaction processing, forecast more accurately, are less likely to rely on gut-feel for decision-making, make quicker decisions and as a result, are able to spend more time on strategy development, innovation, and process improvement.

The act of standardisation is initially more impactful than automation for its own sake, and it links front office ecommerce systems to back-office accounting and financial applications. It acts as a springboard to automation and process innovation – crucially releasing time that can be devoted to business partnering, nurturing finance talent, and strategic development.

However, standardisation has remained stubbornly elusive for many organisations, especially multinational businesses with distributed operations. So how can businesses break out of the fractured, diverse, and expensive multi-vendor environments that have beset them for decades, and steer toward a more standardised approach?

FSN Research finds that the best way to mobilise change is through the cloud.  CFOs recognise the advantages of the cloud in regard to cost, agility, and ease of implementation. Now they have to act to bring them to fruition. The cloud enables standardisation across multiple geographies without costly regional implementation. It allows new and standardised processes to be deployed rapidly, transcending the time-consuming and disruptive demands of acquisitions, mergers, re-organisations, and forays into new markets.

The immediacy and scalability of the cloud allow organisations to draw a line under legacy systems and take advantage of a new generation of innovative applications specifically developed for the cloud. The scalability of the cloud ensures that more individuals from within the organisation and in different functional areas can collaborate, enabling a new level of knowledge sharing, decision-making, and strategic alignment.

In order to thrive, companies must keep pace with the changes around them. CFOs must take this opportunity to lead their organisation towards standardised, efficient, cloud-based technology that will oil the wheels of the strategy they have helped to develop.

Mario Spanicciati is chief strategy officer, BlackLine, a financial automation software provider.

The post CFOs accelerate process automation through the cloud appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.