Come 2027, SAP will no longer offer mainstream support SAP ERP. While SAP will offer support for the product, it will come at a premium and even this will end come 2030.
As such, the migration to SAP S/4 HANA is a necessity but according to Deutsche SAP Anwender-Gruppe only 40 percent of SAP ERP customers say they will plan to migrate in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
This is a problem because by all accounts, a migration to SAP S/4 HANA could lead to entire processes being upended, in need of redesign, or scrapped altogether.
The deadline of 2027 then is seen as something of a myth. Why? The complexities of migration to a new platform can lead to delays more often than not. In the face of paying a premium for a service while also incurring the cost of migration and handling the complexities that come with it, that’s going to be a headache your business doesn’t need.
Recently CoCre8 and SUSE hosted a roundtable discussion in which senior solutions engineer at CoCre8 Technology Solutions, Shawn Hubber and engineer open source specialist at SUSE, Johann Els shared insight into how to migrate to S/4 HANA efficiently and properly.
The bad news right off of the bat is that if you haven’t started your migration yet, you may be playing with fire. To be clear, there isn’t much of a choice here and SAP has extended the deadline for the end of life of SAP ERP a few times already.
The reason a delayed start isn’t good is because S/4 HANA could be an entirely alien platform for your organisation. For one it’s a LInux based platform and that adds the complexity and benefits of open-source along with it. S/4 HANA may also be a completely new programming platform for your team and decisions need to be made that account for this shift.
Migration to a new platform isn’t terribly a bad thing nor is it a wonderfully great thing either. What a migration does however is it presents an opportunity to adopt new processes or change existing ones.
On that, it’s important to understand that changing systems will mean that old processes need to be changed and while that might be intimidating, it’s a part of the process.
What is perhaps most important however is having a clear understanding of how you envision the migration process going forward and that is where partners such as CoCre8 can assist. CoCre8 assists its customers in developing solutions that meet their specific needs. Through its multitude of partners it is able to guide customers through the process of identifying how a business’ vision becomes a reality.
When it comes to creating solutions, SUSE has worked with SAP for over 20 years to deploy and manage complex IT infrastructure. Through its Run SAP solution SUSE can help improve business productivity while also managing the complexities of your environment such as security and monitoring.
Partners such as CoCre8 and SUSE are vital to the success of migration to SAP S/4 HANA and indeed other migration needs. It’s not viable for everybody within a mining enterprise to know what the best solution for high availability services are. Partners such as CoCre8 and SUSE however, entrench themselves in these solutions and are able to offer guidance and assistance where needed.
When selecting a partner it’s important that their values and goals align with yours. It’s highly encouraged that you meet with potential partners before starting your journey and find one that is able to meet your needs from a technical and aspirational perspective.
The journey to SAP S/4 HANA is fraught with complexities but selecting the right partner can help to make the journey a bit easier and you just might come out the other side with better processes, a more efficient process and a level of agility your business has never seen before.
To learn more about how SUSE can help with your migration to SAP S/4 HANA head to this website.
