Empower the Business for a Better SAP S/4HANA Migration

Digital transformation requires companies to reinvent their business models and processes. To take advantage of this trend, organizations need to maintain high data quality and accuracy. This is imperative for organizations that are migrating to SAP S/4HANA, which is becoming the core for all data-driven processes in SAP environments. If an organization’s data is not clean, accurate, and high quality, then these data-driven initiatives are set up to fail before they even begin.

With many organizations actively involved in migrations to SAP S/4HANA, the need to move large volumes of data from legacy systems in a simple but effective way has never been greater. Yet most of these organizations are ignoring a critical factor in ensuring the accuracy and quality of this data: their users.

The Importance of User Input

Many SAP customers identify business engagement as the most critical success factor of their migration projects. However, in a traditional migration, the business is only involved at the very beginning and the very end of a project. Users are consulted in the planning phase and then don’t re-engage with the project until close to go-live to aid with testing and resolve data-related issues. Frequently, these data issues aren’t identified until the end of the project because users closest to the data aren’t invited to the conversation early enough. They aren’t around to tell IT what data is mission-critical and exactly how it’s being used. This can lead to poor data quality, a lack of visibility into the data, and other issues that can cause cost and time overruns.

These are some of the consequences of an IT-centric approach to data migration. Yet standard migration solutions are designed for technical users with very specific skills, not business users. They come at a high cost but often don’t do anything to ensure that the data migrated is accurate or complies with the business rules of the new system.

This concern is important in any technological migration and is even more so in an SAP S/4HANA migration. SAP S/4HANA simplifies and standardizes many business processes, and data must be cleaned and organized to reflect how the business will use it within the new system.

Empower Business Teams to Get Data Right

It’s critical to empower business teams to transform and validate data to comply with new rules. For these reasons, Winshuttle (now Precisely) offers a business-led approach to automate data uploading and extraction in SAP systems using Microsoft Excel, allowing the business to stay engaged throughout the migration. This enables business users to maintain ownership of data and become familiar with the new system so they can move straight into continuous improvement and process optimization when the migration project comes to an end. At the same time, it does not lessen the technical speed and accuracy that would otherwise be the focus of the migration.

Companies like Precisely are paving the way to offer application data management (ADM) solutions that empower business teams to maintain and govern high-quality data within SAP S/4HANA, freeing up IT resources while ensuring that data meets the business’s needs. By empowering users to improve data quality during a migration to SAP S/4HANA and then maintain that quality throughout its use, organizations can have greater confidence in their data and thrive in the digital economy. To learn more, visit precisely.com.