So what are the key reasons you should invest in SAP S/4HANA?

First you need to assess whether it is really worth extending your current ERP system. If your organisation is looking to expand its business or enter new markets, then you’ll need a system that can grow and adapt with you.

While SAP will continue to support legacy systems until 2027 – and they are likely to extend this - by continuing to upgrade your legacy system, you are potentially making future migration more complex. The more customisation and development you undertake in your existing system, the more there will be to migrate when you do move to S/4HANA.

As the deadline for migration gets ever nearer, you will also increasingly miss out on machine learning, the new users experience and all the other technologies that will be pushed towards SAP S/4HANA.

By migrating to S/4HANA, you will benefit from far greater ease-of-use through a simpler and more intuitive front-end. You will also get increased performance, enabling planning, execution and analytics on live data. You will also benefit from real-time operational reporting through S/4HANA’s embedded analytics.

S/4HANA boasts inherent artificial intelligence, providing users with conversational UI, predicted delivery delay and predictive accounting. It also offers native integration, so you can easily leverage other SAP tools, such as SAP Analytics Cloud.
So, once you decided to take the leap and migrate to S/4HANA, what do you need to next?

First, you need to put together the business case to get everyone else in the organisation behind the migration. S/4HANA is a significant investment, so you need to assess all the ways it will help standardise and automate the business in the long run. It’s vital to explore how your organisation could use most - if not all - processes that S/4HANA supports, and then to map your transformation roadmap around these.

You then need to choose the right architecture. For many businesses, the best and easiest way forward is a single instance of SAP. However, a two-tier or hybrid ERP might be an option, if across your organisation you want to accommodate a mixture of on-premises and Cloud SAP.

You then need to get your data in order. While legacy data cleansing might be a high investment, it’s essential to really unlock the potential of your data and to leverage all the business insight opportunities S/4HANA offers.

Finally, it’s important to remember that S/4HANA implementation is best approached as a transformation driven by people and business change. It’s about bringing in new ways of working and company culture to embed the technology and get the most from it.