SAP S/4HANA Migration Tips
Interview with SAP Expert, Tammy Powlas
Companies are migrating to SAP S/4HANA because of SAP’s 2027 deadline for ending SAP ECC support and because they want easier reporting, workforce mobility, and digital transformation, observes Tammy Powlas, Senior Business Analyst, Fairfax Water.
Powlas says that having the time and expertise to pull off the SAP S/4HANA migration can be challenging. You need to decide whether you do everything in-house or get help from outside consultants.
She recommends that companies considering a migration attend SAP enterprise support workshops for guided implementations, which discuss the readiness check report, the custom code migration, and how to migrate to SAP S/4HANA Finance.
Powlas stresses that testing is an integral part of the SAP S/4HANA migration. This includes unit testing, integration testing, regression testing, and authorization testing.
“The biggest lesson I learned is to get in there and just do it,” she concludes.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
- Clean up your data before you move your vendors and customers to SAP S/4HANA’s business partner model. SAP provides a checklist to ensure that you take the proper steps for this process. In addition, authorization testing is important because authorization objects change due to the customer and vendor classification changes, Powlas notes.
- Make sure your third-party tools are SAP S/4HANA compliant. “They always say prior planning prevents poor performance. One of the things you want to plan for is your third-party tools and see if they’re SAP S/4HANA compliant early in the process,” advises Powlas.
- Do at least two sandbox migrations of SAP S/4HANA. SAP recommends this, and Fairfax Water found it helpful to work out problems before go-live.
To learn more, watch SAPinsiders’ brief video interview with Powlas:
