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With a wide variety of SAP core offerings and a consistently evolving SAP landscape, it can be difficult to gain a comprehensive understanding of the processes necessary to streamline business processes with SAP. However, as a business, it is crucial to make these necessary transformations to ensure your organization is functional, efficient, and can keep up with or surpass competitors. If you’re like many businesses, SAP ECC is a crucial aspect of your day-to-day functions as a business, but more recent additions like S/4HANA open doors for business productivity that otherwise were not previously possible. How can you as a business, though, make this SAP landscape transformation as seamless as possible? The Experts of SAP Philadelphia at Enowa are here to break down your biggest question regarding an SAP Landscape Transformation from ECC to S/4HANA.
SAP ECC (ERP Central Component) is the core ERP product of SAP’s legacy suite of enterprise applications. ECC is designed to run on a third-party database within your business and carry out enterprise functions like accounting, manufacturing processes, supply chain logistic, payroll, and other tasks within human resources and beyond. With the ability to aid in data communication and migration, SAP ECC allows businesses to function on a national and global scale with streamlines business processes. Over time, ECC has evolved to no longer require a mainframe and is now compatible with a variety of operating systems and database formats.
While SAP ECC streamlines business processes in a variety of ways, it - like most software - has its limitations. SAP by nature is designed to build upon itself and be customized to the specific needs of each business, and leaders in SAP Philadelphia recommend using S/4HANA as an extension of your existing SAP ECC landscape.
SAP S/4HANA is an in-memory database design to accelerate SAP applications and the business processes they support. This in-memory database speeds up operations through the creation of a simplified data storage structure that permits easier data access and recall. As an end result, this simplified data structure improves performance across sectors of your business, leading to higher productivity, real-time visibility, and more valuable insight into analytics and processes.
This in-memory database isn’t the only benefit that S/4HANA brings to the table, though. S/4 HANA has the capability to:
Think of it this way; your business is reliant on processes scattered across a relatively large space. From your headquarters to product manufacturing, distribution center, to regional branches, to your payroll team, different parts of your business need access to information that allows your business to function as a baseline level. These basic functions exist on ECC but have limitations in the amount of time it takes to receive relevant information that keeps a business running. S/4HANA creates a centralized data memory so that different areas of the business can access and recall information faster, speeding up the rate in which work can be done via SAP on all levels of your business.
Ensuring your SAP landscape transition is carried out properly from ECC and S/4HANA means that you’ll need comprehensive insight into your processes themselves. This is done with process mining, which allows you to visualize your day-to-day processes as they occur. SAP process mining can be completed with Celonis to help you see variances and identify the root causes and impacts that deviations cause in your business. This allows you to optimize your SAP landscape transformation to S/4HANA and ensure the best framework design possible.
Celonis doesn’t stop at the transition to S/4HANA, though. Celonis offers an end-to-end process improvement platform that allows you to continuously analyze your process redesign with real-time monitoring. In other words, Celonis can help you make changes to your SAP landscape more efficiently during your initial transformation and well into the future.
The team at Celonis illustrates this best through an analogy on moving homes:
When a family moves houses, they are wise to declutter rather than bring useless or unwanted items with them. Following an inventory, they can decide what they need for the new place and get rid of the rest to ensure a fresh start. In this sense, moving day is only one day, but they need to prepare for the move and for how they will inhabit their new surroundings. To take the analogy a step further, that busy family will benefit from periodic decluttering to ensure they are maximizing their new environment.
Celonis allows your SAP landscape transition to run smoothly because it helps you cut out the clutter, diagnose issues, and create clear pathways in your transition. S/4HANA, with its fast data communication and recall capabilities, should always be implemented to make the most of these streamlines processes, which is exactly what process mining with Celonis brings to the table.
Think it’s time to tackle your SAP landscape transition from ECC to S/4HANA? Get in touch with the leaders of SAP Philadelphia at Enowa and learn how we can make this process seamless, agile, and running faster than you thought possible.
