Simplify Your Migration to S/4HANA

If you are already an SAP Customer you should be aware of the push towards S/4HANA. While SAP has extended the support for ECC platforms the company has published their intent to only support S/4 going forward. There are plenty of resources by both SAP and SAP partners explaining why customers should make this move. Most commonly cited are: take advantage of the business value, run on the most current technology; a little harder to find are the resources explaining how to make the move and how to break the plan down into bite sized pieces. After all, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

At DataXstream we have been fortunate to be able to claim our first S/4 customer, a large company in the Building Supply sector. We first engaged with this customer while they were using SAP ECC 6 and installed OMS+ to help them prepare for their migration to S/4. Why?

OMS+ offers a solution to the challenge of upgrading the custom code around SAP SD. We’ve found that for many of our customers to get the most out of their SAP instance they have made many customizations to SAP SD. Finding and mitigating each customization is time consuming and cost intensive work. However, by “de-coupling sales” as our CEO likes to say, customers can transition the organization to a new tool set like OMS+ that is compatible with both ECC to S/4. This removes sales processes from the scope of the upgrade to S/4 and offers a smooth transition for users. Customers keep their sales processes engaged while the company upgrades to S/4 reducing risk and cost.

OMS+ is a certified SAP Cloud Platform Application. It is sold through the SAP App Center. If you are new to the App Center, the concept is similar to any “app store” and it is a collection of Applications designed for SAP users. OMS+ in particular is designed to eliminate the need for integration, it sits within SAP and interacts directly with your SAP data. This allows for rapid implementation and makes it easy to grow and maintain. It is also designed for flexible use and can be deployed via any web enabled device. If your sales team operates on site they can take it with them and transact in real time. If you sales team is working from home, they can transact with real time data offering better customer service.

For the customer in question OMS+ was a mere 3% of their total upgrade but it saved them from migrating their home-grown SAP SD solution. If they had opted to mitigate the SAP SD customizations they estimated that option would have been 40% of the project. Choosing OMS+ resulted in significant time savings, risk reduction and cost savings. This is no surprise, good research on moving to S/4 recommends minimizing customizations and prioritizing standardization. By using OMS+ customers avoid customizing SAP SD to meet their sales needs and take advantage of OMS+ development which runs all code through S/4 testing to verify compatibility.

In addition to moving the customer to OMS+ to pre-game the upgrade, DataXstream provided upgrade support in strategy planning and execution, technical architecture support, functional architecture support, and code migration.

Our customer claims ROI in improved margin, reduced inventory, reduced transaction labor, increased sales, expanding building model. The customer calculates that the ROI for the subscription is achieved in less than 15 days each calendar year.

If your sales processes are an obstacle to upgrading your ERP instance you may want to consider “de-coupling” sales and using an SAP solution like OMS+ to move your company forward and take full advantage of the technology available.