My new book is now available to buy here in print version, and in the Kindle eBook version. As with my earlier books, I am excerpting roughly 10% of the 400 page book in a series of posts on my two blogs.
In this chapter, I profile what I call Modernizers in my classification of customers for the book
'Migrations from ECC to S/4 are reviving the old Miller Lite “Tastes great! Less filling!” debate. Michael Broberg of Bluefin Solutions describes what he calls a “stark choice.”
“When they eventually implement SAP S/4, do they treat their prior investment as a sunk cost and re-implement their business model on S/4 (greenfield), or do they largely ignore the market-leading business capabilities S/4 offers and do a technical conversion of their present ECC system (brownfield) — and then he asks, “or is there a (third) alternative?”
SNP Schneider-Neureither & Partner SE calls their third alternative “bluefield.” What color is your migration from ECC to S/4?
It doesn’t matter — you qualify as a Modernizer by this book’s grouping of SAP customers. Other modernizers are moving from legacy, on-prem to SAP cloud solutions like SuccessFactors and hybris. In the migrations to S/4, most customers are being cautious — deploying S/4 on-prem or in private cloud, sticking with the SAP GUI, using traditional SIs like Deloitte and mostly implementing accounting and inventory functionality. They are minimizing change and risk.'
Here are excerpts from 4 out of the 10 case studies in the chapter
Ron Gilson, CIO at Johnsonville Sausage ran a tight ECC shop so his move to S/4 was very disciplined
'Overall, I think SAP has done a good job. The move to HANA simplified the database, but they left compatibility views in place. So, even though they eliminated tables, they left a logical view of the data that looked just like the old physical table so it helped mitigate the code remediation. SAP doesn’t want to position the move to S/4 as an upgrade. They really focus on making folks aware that this is a different code-line, it’s a different SKU and it’s a different product. So it’s a migration to a different product. However, we treated it like an upgrade; our environment was suitable for that approach. We were current on ECC, we were on Enhancement Pack 7, and we had consistently done upgrades. We had minimal custom code concerns, a single global instance and we were already Unicode compliant. .... While I wouldn’t say our go-live was 100% issue free, we had zero major issues. The technology works — HANA and the S/4 code line have proven stable. I think there’s a lot of concern that S/4 is still new and there’s going to be immaturity or bugs in the code. We’ve had a rock-solid experience with the S/4 code line and HANA as the database.'
Sharon Kaiser, CIO at New England Labs faced very different issues in her migration to S/4 and her use of hybris
'Over the last couple of years, I’ve been working with our executive director of production to determine how we can digitize this product knowledge. We had to get the information out of the heads of the scientists, out of their paper notebooks and into the system. This would allow us to provide full batch traceability for our products, a better understanding of what it takes to make our product and the costs involved. We needed inventory management across our components and raw materials, and not just for our finished products. Once all the data is accurately in the system, our MRP runs would be usable... A different use case took us to SAP Hybris, now part of the C/4 product line. We were looking for a PIM [Product Information Management] solution because we have hundreds of products each with very specific, scientific metadata that requires strict management. If you go to the NEB.com website, it is chock-full of charts, diagrams, scientific information, protocols, tools and videos. The NEB website is a reference library for scientists on how to find and use our products. All of the information about that product has to be stored somewhere. We needed a PIM. As we started looking, one of the solutions that popped up was the Hybris Product Content Management solution.'
Christine Reynolds at Terumo BCT describes their global SuccessFactors project
'We used a maturity model to create a business case for our executive team. When it came time to look at other solutions, we did a gap analysis based on our requirements. SuccessFactors came out at the top of the list. We had 365 requirements and, when compared to SuccessFactors, there were only 30 gaps, so it was a 91% fit....We were already using components of SuccessFactors, including the LMS on-premise, the Performance & Goals module and the Compensation module. In addition, outside of the U.S., we were using EC as the HRIS. We were pretty well committed to SuccessFactors at the time that we did this analysis. We had also implemented SAP’s ECC ERP, a couple of years prior.... I would fall into the category of people saying quarterly SuccessFactors releases are too frequent. We have a core number of settings that we test before it hits production, and that’s about all that we can handle. We haven’t had too many things break. But, it’s a constant worry. And we’re regulated so, fortu- nately, the LMS upgrade cycle is annual. But even so, it means we spend about half the year preparing and testing for that annual upgrade, and that’s just for the universal features.'
James Johnson, CIO at Carpenter Technology describes their S/4 and C/4 experience
' In my past, I’ve also implemented and run Salesforce at Honeywell and other companies. Here, in the last year, we have deployed SAP’s Cloud for Customer, C4C — but only the salesforce automation functionality. I have to think hard about how much I would extend it based on the user experience. The integration piece should continue to improve to my back end. With Salesforce, that integration was not out of the box...On the C4C side, I could see doing more. Carpenter’s value is that we are a solutions provider. It’s nice to be able to understand customer issues and route them back to our quality, technical or R&D groups. How could I leverage technology to be able to get to that solution faster, get it to our R&D people quicker and allow them to turn it around?'
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